A Hong Kong Airline Had to Apologize for Streaming ‘Family Guy’s Tiananmen Square Joke In-Flight
Hong Kong’s flagship airline Cathay Pacific has a serious problem with a pilot — specifically, the Family Guy pilot.
In the opening episode of Family Guy on January 31, 1999, “Death Has a Shadow,” protagonist Peter Griffin loses his job at a toy factory after a long night of drinking and can’t bring himself to face his wife Lois with his failure. After Peter attempts a series of increasingly silly career turns in the soon-to-be typical Family Guy fashion of a cutaway montage, he tells his best friend Brian that he doesn’t think he can tell Lois “that I can’t provide for my family, that she’s always right, that I didn’t really stand up to that tank in Tiananmen square” — and, just like that, the tracks were laid for the funniest in-flight entertainment scandal in Cathay Pacific history.
Apparently, those responsible for maintaining the library of TV shows and movies that can be streamed on personal entertainment devices aboard Cathay Pacific flights aren’t big Family Guy fans, and they didn’t do their due diligence when randomly selecting which episodes from the American animated sitcom would make it into the catalog, thus allowing “Death Has a Shadow” to slip into flights over a country famous for suppressing references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.
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Either that, or they decided that Tank Man needed air support.
When Chinese social media outrage over Family Guy’s admittedly tame Tiananmen Square joke caught the attention of Cathay Pacific, they quickly went to the South China Morning Post to plead for mercy ahead of inevitable backlash of the Chinese Communist Party. In a statement translated by The Guardian, the airline professed, “We emphasise that the programme’s content does not represent Cathay Pacific’s standpoint and have immediately arranged to have the programme removed as soon as possible.”
The Cathay Pacific spokesperson further claimed that a third-party provider manages their in-flight entertainment options, and that the airline has ordered this mysterious, censorship-bucking cartoon company to thoroughly investigate the oversight and strengthen their surveillance of not-CCP-friendly comedy that could corrupt countless Chinese minds at 35,000 feet.
The student-led demonstrations against the corruption, nepotism and oppression of the communist Chinese government and the CCP’s subsequent murder of anywhere between a few hundred and several thousand protesters in the late spring of 1989 is still one of the most highly sensitive and censored topics in mainland China. After the CCP expanded its draconian influence in Hong Kong following the pro-democracy protests of 2019, the Tiananmen Square Massacre became an even more taboo topic in the special administrative region, and Hong Kong police have forcefully shut down several attempts to organize public vigils commemorating the censored event.
Any pro-democracy travelers in Hong Kong who were hoping to honor the event with a quick continental flight on Cathay Pacific will be dismayed to learn that the airline has robbed them of such a powerful tool of anti-propaganda in “Death Has a Shadow,” but I’m sure there are plenty of Family Guy Season One bootleg DVDs floating around the continent available to anyone interested in some comedic resistance.
