Family Guy goes Warcraft next Sunday

On Sunday, April 1st, Family Guy will air a new episode that includes some level of reference to Warcraft, the show announced on Twitter today. The promo image, pictured above, uses Peter as an Orc and Stewie as an Alliance fighter, mirroring the classic Warcraft Alliance v Horde standoff (as well as the new Battle for Azeroth box art).

This will not be the first time that WoW has been parodied in pop culture, nor the last. Most famously South Park did an episode in 2006 called “Make love, not Warcraft” which helped launch the game into the face of a new audience that many attribute to a rise in WoW’s popularity. The South Park episode went on to win an Emmy and is generally considered one of the better episodes of the series.

It’s unclear right now how big of a role WoW will play in the upcoming Family Guy episode. The title of the next episode, according to IMDB and Wikipedia, is “Veteran Guy” with the description of: “Peter and the guys get caught pretending to be military veterans and are sentenced to join the Coast Guard.” Given this episode description and the announcement tweet that says specifically “some Warcraft magic” it’s probably a safe assumption that the episode won’t be a full diversion of the setting like Family Guy has been doing lately (ie: last week’s episode set in late 1800’s London parodying Sherlock Holmes).

That said, we’ll have to wait and see if the Warcraft inclusion is anything more than a cutaway gag.