Watch the full Family Guy pilot, online after 27 years

With a show as big and relatively recent as Family Guy, it can be hard to imagine anything attached to it being lost – but by the same token, its massive real estate in the pop culture landscape means there's plenty of ephemera to fall through the cracks. Case in point: the show's original pilot, produced in 1998 as a proof of concept for Fox, who commissioned the series to begin with. It's been considered lost since then, but through miraculous happenstance, has finally surfaced on the Internet. While the modern show has a reputation being crude and over-the-top even at the best of times, it's interesting to revisit Seth MacFarlane's original vision from nearly three decades ago.

Snippets of this pilot snuck out in some early box sets, but the full thing had never been seen until now. Robert Paulson, an animator for the show, simply happened to post it on his website apparently on a whim – and although it has since been removed, it's already been reuploaded countless times. Rightly so, too – whatever you may think of the show in its current incarnation, these sixteen minutes are a piece of animation history.

Previously:
• Family Guy tribute to Adam West
• On this day in 1960, The Flinstones premiered
• Seth MacFarlane on Wired's autocomplete