Original air date: 7/19/2000
Production code: 2ACX-14
Meg joins the school newspaper after a college admissions officer for Brown University notices she needs more extracurricular activities, but her entire reputation ends up on the line when Peter switches out Meg's article about Mayor West wasting the town's budget with an article about Luke Perry being a closet homosexual. Meanwhile, Stewie uses a mind-control device on Chris so he can have height.
This episode contains examples of:
- Adam Westing: While he had been kind of odd earlier, this episode truly established Mayor Adam West as the Cloud Cuckoo Lander he would be during the rest of the time on the show.
- Alleged Lookalikes: Peter thinks that Luke Perry, and not Tom Cruise, starred in Rain Man.
- All Girls Like Ponies: Peter bought Meg a pony a long time ago and was keeping it as a surprise for her. Unfortunately, he forgot to feed it, and by the time he shows Meg the pony, it has been reduced to a skeleton.
- As Himself: Luke Perry
- Attractive Bent-Gender: A cutaway shows Ricky Martin dressing up as a woman after a concert and performing under the name Jewel.
- Bait-and-Switch: Peter cites Ricky Martin as proof of celebrities leading double lives. The cutaway shows Ricky dressing up as a woman, but then it reveals he's Jewel.
- There's also Stewie thinking aloud of what he would do if he was larger. We're expecting a sci-fi fantasy...but instead it's a lengthy Imagine Spot of a tall, fat Stewie opening "Stewie's Big and Tall Man Shop" for plus-sized gentlemen to find well-fitting, tasteful clothes.
- Brick Joke: Meg's original article exposes Mayor West's attempts to solve the "mystery" of who is stealing the town's water (it's actually just going down the drain of the sink). At the end of the episode, when Luke Perry gets into bed with West, he reminds Luke that he promised to return his water if they have sex.
- Chocolate Baby: The scene in which Thomas Jefferson’s family is shown as mostly black children is a nod to evidence that he fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings.
- Comically Small Bribe: When the Griffins meet the college dean's secretary, Peter slyly says that Meg really wants to get into the school and slides her...a single dollar bill. It's especially egregious because the secretary wouldn't have anything to do with admissions decisions.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Peter insists that the Vietnam War never actually happened.
- Contrived Coincidence: Parodied. Luke Perry finds out about the altered story because he reads every high school newspaper in America every day just to see if he's mentioned.
- Also parodied after the Mugged for Disguise entry below: just after Peter realizes he needs his usual outfit back, a fat man wearing the exact same clothes wanders by, and Peter mugs him too.
- Delicious Distraction: After Chris helps Stewie get some Fig Newtons down from the counter, the baby begins to rhapsodize about using his older brother to solve his problem while eating the cookies, and...Stewie: If I could build a device to harness the size of that leviathan, there'd be no limit to what I could—oh my GOD, there's an ORGY in my MOUTH!
- Didn't Think This Through: Stewie mind controls Chris and tries to get him to buy tools. It doesn't occur to him that Chris is a teenager and therefore unable to purchase tools.
- Dressing as the Enemy: Parodied. To get close to Luke Perry, Peter beats up a bellhop and puts on his uniform. Brian points out that's pointless, since Luke Perry has no idea who they are. At that moment, a man wearing Peter's usual outfit walks by, so Peter ambushes him and puts on his clothes.
- Disguised in Drag: A cutaway gag shows Ricky Martin dressed up as singer Jewel in a double life.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: In his own warped way, Peter tries to do right by Meg, even saying he'd take a bullet for her. In later episodes, Meg is the Butt-Monkey of the family, with everyone abusing her in some way (especially Peter).
- Fan Disservice: To get proof Luke Perry really is gay, Peter dons a thong, slathers his body with oil, and uses his nipple to juice an orange. All he manages to do is make Luke Perry vomit.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: The TV Guide Peter sees, featuring Luke Perry on the cover, reads "If you can read this, Family Guy is on the air".
- Funny Background Event: Lois and Meg talk about the trouble with Luke Perry, while Stewie struggles to evade an out-of-control Chris.
- Going for the Big Scoop: Neil Goldman tells Meg that if she wants to join the school paper, she has to get an exclusive interview with Mayor West. She does so and manages to expose his ridiculous embezzlement of the town's budget while she's at it.
- Imagine Spot: Stewie has a fantasy about opening "Stewie's Big and Tall Man Shop," a clothing store that caters to "portly or tall" gentlemen.
- Insane Troll Logic: Peter tries to prove the altered story is true by getting a compromising picture of himself with Luke Perry.
- There's also Mayor Adam West, who is convinced that there are thieves "stealing" water from the town when he's actually just pouring it down a drain and into the potted plants in his office. He's even spent $100,000 of Quahog's budget on the investigation, which Meg uses as the focal point of her newspaper article.
- Is This Thing Still On?: Stewie sends a mind-controlled Chris into a hardware store and controls what he says. However, he gets distracted by a hobo asking him for money and talks to him at length before realizing the mic is still on.
- Ivy League for Everyone: Averted—Meg wants to get into Brown, an Ivy League school, but she's told that she doesn't have enough extracurricular activities to justify admission.
- Mind-Control Device: Stewie sticks one on Chris.
- Mistaken for Gay: Peter replaces Meg's story with one saying Luke Perry is gay. Peter thought it was true, but Luke and others denied it repeatedly. Of course, the last scene shows Luke in bed with Mayor West.
- Mugged for Disguise: Peter beats up a hotel bellhop and steals his uniform, which fits very poorly since Peter is much fatter than the bellhop. Brian then tells Peter that Luke has never seen them before and has no idea who they are, so they don't need disguises in the first place. Instead of changing back into his own clothes, Peter beats up and steals the clothes of another man who just so happened to be wearing an exact copy of Peter's normal outfit while being just as fat as him.
- Real After All: The end of the episode shows Luke Perry getting into bed with Mayor West, meaning that he is gay (or at the very least bisexual, given that his wife also appears in the episode).
- Shout-Out:
- The flashback showing Brian's college years, during which he was harassed for being a dog, parodies the film School Ties, in which David Greene is harassed for being Jewish, although in the movie the message on the wall read "Go Home, Jew!" instead of "Go Home, Dog!".
- The guard at the Dean's office shouts, "Nobody sees the Dean, not nobody, not no how,” a reference to the Wizard’s guards in The Wizard of Oz.
- Lois says that, when she was in college, the National Guard shot some of her friends, referencing Kent State during the 1970 shootings on the campus.
- Peter says that he wanted to name Meg after Twiki, a robot from the 1970s television show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, but didn't, because no one would understand the reference.
- When Meg goes to interview Mayor West, he asks her if she is Sarah Connor, a character from The Terminator.
- When Peter's typing on the typewriter, the camera pans around him, then he tosses the paper from the typewriter, where it then forms the logo for Stephen J. Cannell Productions.
- After holding an exploding bomb from Mayor West, Meg has Daffy Duck’s bill on the wrong side of her head, and then states, "Of course, you realize, this means war," parodying a frequent gag on Looney Tunes.
- Stewie uses his mind control device to force Chris to sing “Puttin' on the Ritz” by Irving Berlin. This refers to a scene in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein where the monster performs the same song.
- After his mind control device short-circuits and Stewie is chased by Chris, he eludes him by disguising himself in a trenchcoat and sunglasses resembling Ferris from the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
- A scene from Big is parodied when Stewie walks up to a Zoltar machine and says "I wish I was big".
- In the scene where Luke Perry is reading "every high school newspaper", his "wife" calls from off-screen "Luke! Luke, time for dinner!", quoting Aunt Beru from Star Wars: A New Hope when she calls him to dinner after he finds Leia’s message in R2.
- In his interview with Meg, Adam West says "Got Milk?" and "I Gotcha, diagonally! Pretty sneaky, sis!" The first quote is the tagline of an ad campaign for milk. The second is from a commercial for the checkers game "Connect 4" by Milton Bradley.
- A cutaway to Meg’s probable future without a college education show her modeling in a bikini at a "bum fight", an event in which homeless people fight one another in exchange for food, alcohol or some other incentive. These events were captured in the 2002 documentary Bumfights.
- Peter tells Luke that The Dark Side of the Moon synchs up with The Wizard of Oz. Perry mentions that he heard the same from Beverly Hills, 90210 co-star Shannon Doherty but thought that she was "just being a bitch", a popular tabloid portrayal of the actress.
- There is a scene where Peter in a flashback is a Ghostbuster and interrupts the potter wheel scene in the film Ghost (1990) and sucks up Sam Wheat.
- Show Some Leg: Meg needs to find an extracurricular activity to add to her college application and chooses the school newspaper. Neil Goldman, her Abhorrent Admirer, is the editor, and she resorts to flirting with him ("I never noticed how smooth the skin is between your acne") to get a chance at joining.
- Shown Their Work: Sherry and the Anus ending credits list real-life Family Guy writers and directors as producers of the show-within-a-show.
- Spanner in the Works: Under Stewie's control, Chris was about to kill Lois. Then the microwave went off and fried the mind-control device, causing him to go after Stewie instead.
- Spoof Aesop: "See, Meg? Things always work out if you just do whatever you want without worrying about the consequences."
- Sting: Peter does this himself as he's sneaking around the school and later when Luke Perry sees the article.
- Sweet Polly Oliver: Ricky Martin is shown just having escaped a horde of fans. He puts on makeup and a wig and proceeds out another door as Jewel.
- Take That!: To singer Ricky Martin for "living a double life" (being closeted at the time).
- Vocal Dissonance: Neil Goldman has a more manly voice (provided by Seth MacFarlane) when he takes his retainer out of his mouth.
- Vomit Discretion Shot: Luke Perry vomits after Peter attempts to seduce him with a thong.
- Waiting Skeleton: Peter tries to give Meg the pony she wished for when she was six. However, they end up discovering a horse skeleton in the closet.Peter: Oh... oh God, that's right. Ponies... p-ponies like food, don't they?
