149. The Prince and the Product

Original release date: September 18, 2023

The premise: A storyline about Leela mysteriously falling in love with an alien prince repeatedly gets interrupted by “commercials,” giving us three vignettes of the Planet Express crew re-invented as different kinds of toys.

The reaction: I’ve talked several times over how I don’t really care for the anthology episodes of The Simpsons (excluding Treehouse of Horror), but at least in that show, I can kind of understand the appeal of taking the typically grounded-in-reality residents of Springfield and putting them in some kind of fantasy setting. Meanwhile, this format is a little odd to utilize in Futurama, a wacky science fiction show where impossible things happen on the regular; why would you feel the need to do something fantastical when the actual series is literally that? The best of the show’s format-breaking episodes have some kind of added layer to them. The two “Anthology of Interest” episodes in the FOX run posited fun “What If?” scenarios for the characters, like what if Fry were never frozen or what if Bender were human. The season 6 finale “Reincarnation,” with the show in risk of another cancellation, re-imagines the series in different animation styles. On the other hand, you have “Naturama,” one of my least favorite episodes of the entire series, which is content with telling three stories where the characters are randomly animals for some reason. I tuned into Futurama to watch Bender the wacky robot, why should I care about what he was like as an big fat elephant seal? “The Prince and the Product” is more in line with that episode, where we see our favorite crew mates as wind-up toys, toy cars, and rubber duckies and eggs? Who came up with this premise? With previous anthology episodes, regardless of quality, I can understand someone coming up with an idea to make fun of nature documentaries or old Saturday morning cartoons, but what was the impulse to take the piss out of Hot Wheels? The framing story involves Leela instantly falling for an alien prince during a delivery, much to Fry’s shock, but seeing how happy his beloved is, he challenges the King to a joust to allow him to let them be wed. This plot is so crunched for time that there’s barely even time to understand what’s happening. Even though it’s clear that some kind of weird magic is responsible to this instant attraction, Leela making lovey eyes at the prince didn’t feel that strange to me at first, since we’ve already seen her getting cozy with the Borox Kid this season, despite her and Fry still being in a relationship. Then in the joust, Leela subs in for Fry and seemingly murders her opponent, the King, but then it’s revealed the King swapped himself for the Prince, his son, as a diabolical switch-a-roo. But why would he condemn his own son to death? Oh, who gives a shit. Then with mere minutes left on the clock, Leela tells Fry she was under some kind of spell and the episode is over. It’s like they didn’t even want to bother writing anything.

The three toy segments are all very weird, and not in a good way. In Windo World, Fry is slowly dying thanks to his wind-up pin slowing down, but he’s saved when Bender supercharges him, but at the expense of himself, leading to his grisly death, then reincarnation, then death again. At this point, I thought there’d be some kind of reincarnation theme where the toys get melted down and recreated as new novelties. I guess death and rebirth is kind of the only thing connecting these stories. In Round Wheels World, the toy car crew sets off to deliver a new track piece to Saturn, then comes home to live in a parody of The Ring, where they’re lured to an abandoned warehouse and killed one by one. I couldn’t believe it when the parody of the death tape started, like we’re seriously doing this? A recent “Treehouse of Horror” did a Ring parody and I was surprised they were tackling something so dated and overdone, but at least that version didn’t also have the characters as fucking talking cars. Zoidberg reveals himself the culprit, sick of being mistreated by everyone, taking parts from all the other crew members and grafting them onto himself. Then he swaps his face off by accident and the others, still merged into one, go off and have fun or whatever. The third story has half the crew as rubber duckies and the other half as wobble eggs, two different societies who eventually wage all-out war on each other. Amidst this is a romance between duckie Fry and egg Leela, who die like the rest of them, but are reborn as each others’ species. This final story at least has a Fry/Leela element in it to match the framing device, but the first two don’t correlate whatsoever. This really might be the most baffling episode of the whole series, and definitely one of the worst. Even though I got a few scattered laughs, I was just left wondering what the hell was the point of all this. The framing story has Fry crying about losing Leela, then putting her before himself, wanting her to be happy, even with another man… this is like the twentieth time we’re doing this story. They’re supposed to be an official couple for realsies, we just saw them move in together, but now we’re backpedaling to the same shit we saw twenty years ago? And yeah, I get it’s just a thin framing device, but it might as well not even be there, given how it doesn’t connect whatsoever to the three toy stories. What a waste of time. This show was resurrected after ten years, with the implied notion that there were more stories to tell within the Futurama universe, and now by episode nine, we get the writers thinking, “Hey, what if they were wind-up toys? Is that an idea?” This season has definitely gotten better than it started, but an episode like this hints that there might not be much juice left in this orange.

Random thoughts and tidbits:
– This episode was written by longtime series writer Eric Kaplan and his son Ari. Boy, that’s a coincidence. I wonder how he got the gig? It’s kind of funny to compare this to a recent episode of The Simpsons “Portrait of a Lackey on Fire,” also written by a longtime writer and their son. That episode actually utilized Johnny LaZebnik’s personal experiences as a gay man to create a surprisingly compelling Smithers story. What does “The Prince and the Product” tell us about Ari Kaplan? He loved playing with Hot Wheels as a kid?
– The wind-up toy crew reminded me of the robot crew in one of the alternate universes in “The Farnsworth Parabox,” a fifteen second sequence with greater worth than this entire episode. The Bender toy also made me think of the actual real-life Bender wind-up toy that I used to have as a young fan, one of the very few pieces of Futurama merchandise made during the FOX era.
– The sequence of wind-up Fry being unfrozen from the cryogenic tube was pretty cute, with the animation mimicking the pilot with Fry stumbling out all woozy, but now in toy form.
– I never really registered it before, but it seems like the show has adopted the new Simpsons format of having four acts, as these episodes all feature three cuts to black. It’s really strange when streaming shows do this. I assume they format it this way in advance so they can be better optimized to be rerun on regular TV, but it’s still a little jarring to see. It’s especially weird with this episode, as they all happen in the middle of one of the toy stories. I guess the idea is that these are commercial breaks to the “main story,” but then on broadcast TV, there would be commercials within a commercial? Trippy.
– The Fortune Teller Robot appears again at the end of the wind-up toy segment. In the entire 140-episode original run of the series, she only made three appearances. Nine episodes into the reboot, we’ve seen her twice. I think there’s some support to the argument that this show is just recycling the same thirty or so supporting characters a little too much.
– Thankfully, the toy car segment steered clear of any sort of car puns or vehicular humor, the kind of stuff that the Cars movies beat into the ground already. I guess that’s why we got that incredible Ring parody instead! I still can’t believe they did that…
– Weirdly, the final segment with the ducks and eggs had some pretty neat animated sequences. The CG water as the ducks travel the ocean looked pretty damn good, as did the 2D water in the overhead shot of the characters all dead, the tide coming in and shifting egg Hermes’s dead deceased corpse. But that only made me a little bummed out, that such incredible effort was being put into such a boring, confused script.