I honestly can’t remember when I first started watching The Simpsons. The first season I know I watched most of when it originally aired was season 11, which started in the fall of 1999. But I know I had to have seen and enjoyed watching reruns for at least a few years before that, because, as a ten-year-old, I was absolutely fucking stoked for the premiere of Futurama in March of 1999. I’m sure it must have been even more exciting for those in their teens and twenties, a brand-new show from the creator of one of the greatest and most influential comedies of all time. It especially felt pretty big from the standpoint of animation, as we had just left the vacuous doldrums of toy commercial cartoons of the 80s into the creator-driven shows of the 90s, and now we’d gone long enough that a famed creator of one show could go off and make a new one. The only other big example I can think of is Mike Judge going from Beavis and Butt-head to King of the Hill two years prior, but that feels much different since the format and style of the two shows is quite different, as well as Judge jumping from MTV to FOX. Futurama premiered after a decade of The Simpsons on the same network, with the same distinct Matt Groening art style, so it was a mystery on how similar this new show would be compared to its predecessor. “Space Pilot 3000” has a lot of heavy lifting to do, since not only do we need to introduce the new cast, but also the future setting, and tell an actual story on top of that, all in just twenty-two minutes. As a pilot, it’s honestly still one of the most effective and successful first episodes I’ve ever seen in terms of what it sets out to do. Continue reading “Past-o-Rama: Space Pilot 3000 / The Series Has Landed” →

A few years after I originally concluded Me Blog Write Good in 2013, I started a “sequel” blog that I intended to be a more general review space, where I could just talk about whatever movie or show I was watching and cared enough to write down my thoughts about. It was also to be the home of my follow-up to my Simpsons series, covering every episode of Futurama, a show that meant just as much to me growing up as The Simpsons, if not a little more so in some ways, since I’d been watching it from the very beginning. I reviewed the first two episodes, and then shut down the blog forever. I had started it mere months before starting a new career that took up a lot of my time, so I decided just to pull the plug on it. A bit later, when I had a little more time on my hands, I decided to resurrect Me Blog Write Good instead, to cover all the remaining Simpsons episodes I hadn’t talked about up until the present, and have continued my endless journey ever since. I don’t really consider myself a writer, and my impulses to actually write have been very sporadic and fickle. I broadened my scope for this blog in covering Kevin Smith movies last fall, thinking I could cover more non-Simpsons content in the future, but my interest in doing so has pretty much completely diminished. But with Futurama returning yet again for a new run of episodes on Hulu, I feel somewhat compelled to cover it. It’s a show that’s still very near and dear to me, and having survived over so many years and given life in so many new outlets, I feel like there’ll definitely be a lot to say about this new Hulu incarnation. So when Futurama returns this summer (maybe? The series was rumored to drop in July, and I was hoping there would be a trailer or some kind of official announcement by now, but alas, there has not been one), I will be covering those new episodes in similar fashion to my Simpsons reviews. But what about the existing 140 episodes? Well, since I definitely don’t want to cover every single one, I decided to just do a mini-series going over nine highlighted episodes over Futurama‘s run, from the pilot to its (former) series finale. I’ll discuss the episodes specifically, but also talk more broadly about the show itself and how it grew and changed over time. The first review will most likely be up next Thursday following the Simpsons season finale review, and one or two more per week will follow after that (spaced out more depending on when the new Futurama season actually finally premieres). Get ready for a summer filled with actual updates, meatbags, because Futurama‘s back, baby! Again! Again again again!

EDIT: LOL of course the morning this post went up, it’s confirmed Futurama will return on July 24th, so full steam ahead, I guess!