AI-Generated '80s Family Sitcoms

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Part of a series on Midjourney. [View Related Entries]

About

AI-Generated '80s Family Sitcoms refers to a series of images created with the artificial intelligence model Midjourney that imagine various films and franchises in the style of the live-action sitcoms from the 1980s. The trend achieved virality online in mid-January 2023 with the video compilations often set to "As Days Go By" (the theme song from Family Matters) and edited in a similar style to intros from '80s-era sitcoms.

Origin

On January 16th, 2023, the YouTube^[1] channel Lyrical Realms uploaded a video titled, "Family Guy as an '80s live action family sitcom," which imagined the animated sitcom Family Guy as a live-action comedy series filmed in the 1980s. The video is a slideshow of images generated by the AI model Midjourney, set to the theme song from Family Matters. The upload garnered over 4.6 million views in 10 days (shown below).

Spread

The upload by Lyrical Realms inspired more similar AI-generated video slideshows to be created in the following days. For example, on January 18th, 2023, YouTuber^[2] yo chill bruh posted a video titled, "Breaking Bad as an '80s family sitcom" that received over 290,000 views in nine days (shown below, left). On January 19th, the YouTube^[3] channel Suburban Garden then posted a Futurama edit that accumulated over 690,000 views in eight days (shown below, right).

On January 20th, 2023, Twitter^[4] user @doegens reuploaded the Family Guy version to Twitter, where it received over 5.7 million views, 10,400 retweets and 86,900 likes in one week.

In the following days, more notable AI-generated sitcoms were posted online, including South Park, The Simpsons and Dragon Ball versions, among others.