• A piece of lost media has just been found, as the unaired pilot episode of The Boondocks has emerged online.
• The episode was apparently rejected by Fox when it was first pitched by creator Aaron McGruder. The show was then reworked and picked up by Adult Swim.
• The uploader of the pilot Kal_Eastwood has no other uploads and does not indicate how they came across the six-minute long episode.

As the story goes, when creator of The Boondocks Aaron McGruder approached Fox with the pilot episode of the new animation show he was working on, executives of the TV network outright rejected it in 2003. It was later picked up by Adult Swim and would become one of its most popular series, seeing four seasons before being wound down.

While fans have been clamouring for something new from The Boondocks for some time, a potential reboot of the show was sadly cancelled by HBO Max. The pilot episode that initially got the comic strip-turned-TV show famous was lost to time as it went unaired.

Then randomly on 17th February 2024, the previously never-before-seen pilot was uploaded to Internet Archive by a user called Kal_Eastwood. It is the user’s only upload.

You can immediately see why the likes of Fox did not pick up the show, as while the main beats from the later series are included, such as the personalities of the main characters Huey and Riley Freeman, as well as Grandad and Uncle Ruckus are all present, the animation itself is still quite raw as well as the design of the characters.

The pilot is just over six minutes long and starts with Huey berating Riley for liking mass-produced black reality TV. The two then get into a fight when Huey scuffs Riley’s Nike shoes. You can also see a glimpse of a very early designs of Tom DuBois, his daughter Jasmine and wife Sarah. The characters look quite different to the final set that made it into the series, especially Sarah.

Finally, the pilot ends with Uncle Ruckus, introduced as a “self-hating black man,” in his home, where you get to see his problematic collection of memorabilia and his preference for music records. The pilot carries the spirit of the series, and some ideas are reused in the main show, like Grandad performing aerobics completely in the buff.

As to why the pilot has suddenly emerged, it could be anyone’s guess. But in the past, when leaked footage of shows or films drops online seemingly from random accounts they have the potential to affect the final product. For example, the leaking of test footage for the proposed first Deadpool film saw a massive upswell in interest, which directly led to the movie being funded and released by 20th Century Fox.

It is possible that the reveal of the unaired Boondocks pilot was done with similar intentions. It will depend on how much interest the video generates online. You can watch a reupload of the full pilot below. Video discretion is advised as the language may be not safe for work.