“Boondocks” creator Aaron McGruder is pitching a live action film titled “The Uncle Ruckus Movie,” which will feature America’s favorite racist Uncle Ruckus, and will follow the lines of the Adult Swim cartoon, but will be solely based on Ruckus and his family, and no other characters from The Boondocks.
For the uninitiated, “The Boondocks” is an animated series created by Aaron McGruder and is based on his comic strip of the same name.
The cartoon is about an African-American family, the Freemans, who move away from the South Side of Chicago to the fictional, peaceful and mostly white suburb of Woodcrest. The perspective offered by this mixture of cultures, lifestyles, and races provides for much of the comedy in this series, a Wikipedia article about the show notes.
And with his outlook on life and his views towards people of color, him being an ugly dark-skinned black man himself, Uncle Ruckus is a big highlight of the show. Says Comics Alliance:
“Uncle Ruckus – no relation — is one of the funniest parts of Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks cartoon. He’s the ultimate black white supremacist, as eager to appease every Caucasian he ever met as he is to denigrate any non-white who steps within an eighty-eight mile radius of him. He’s thrown a brick at Martin Luther King Jr., tried to exorcise a black ghost with tactics straight out of 1955, and starred in his own reality show.”
To gauge public interest in the flick, Aaron McGruder launched a Kickstarter crowd founding project earlier this month with a fundraising goal of $200,000. McGruder explains Kickstarter.com:
“There’s always been interest in a live-action Boondocks movie, which to me was out of the question considering Huey and Riley are essentially impossible to cast. The animated feature would cost around 20 million, but a live action Uncle Ruckus movie could cost a fraction of that. So just for the hell of it we had the costume made and it was pretty amazing. To see Gary actually transform into Uncle Ruckus… it’s quite the surreal experience. I never expected the transition to be so completely seamless.”
WHY KICKSTARTER?
First, because SONY (who produces THE BOONDOCKS animated series) is not involved with this project in any way. In fact, there are no investors, corporate or otherwise, involved with the movie as of this moment. This whole thing is kind of an odd idea, so we’re starting with Kickstarter on this one and we’ll just see what happens.
Crowd funding, however, is a big deal. It represents an entirely new relationship between fan and creator. It also represents a new financial model for making stuff, and that’s exciting.
Uncle Ruckus has a lot of supporters out there. If they want this to happen, they can make it happen.
As of February 28th 2013, the crowd funding project has raised a little over $115K from over 2,500 backers … which is about $85K shy of its $200K goal, and there’s only 24 hours left until it closes.
“This project will only be funded if at least $200,000 is pledged by Friday Mar 1, 7:00pm EST,” a message on the page reads, which means that Boondocks fans have about 24 hours left to make this happen!
WATCH SOME HILARIOUS UNCLE RUCKUS VIDEOS HERE:
