Overall, I’m a fan of the Comedy Central era of the show, but I admit, it ain’t perfect. Hell, the series as a whole isn’t perfect. I consider myself a relatively objective viewer; if I’m watching something I loved as a kid, or something I’ve seen a billion times, I feel like I can see through my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses to see if something isn’t quite working. And rewatching the series, I did notice a handful of things that bugged me, or stuff that didn’t quite hold up so well. I love Futurama dearly, but it definitely has its fair share of dud jokes and uninspired writing. As such, I thought I would highlight an episode I dislike, probably my least favorite episode of the entire series, and dig into some things I don’t quite care for about the show. I feel like a primary criticism I could make on the whole is the show can feel overly written at times, with characters reciting dialogue that doesn’t feel natural or is transparently structured to be a joke line. Sometimes those kind of unnatural-sounding conversations work, sometimes they don’t. For as smart as so much of the writing on this show can be, it’s almost surprising when a joke falls completely flat, or they present material that feels incredibly trite and outdated. Case-in-point, the treatment of men and women on the show sometimes seems very antiquated. Episodes like “Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?” and “Bend Her” portray women as vapid, nagging harpies, and the emotion-suppressing men who put up with them so they can have sex (“Tell her about your feelings in an open and honest way.” “Yeah. Either that, or be a man.”) I’m willing to brush stuff like this off given “men act like this, but women act like this” comedy was still par for the course in most network shows of the late 90s/early 2000s, but I was very surprised to see it still pop up several times in the Comedy Central seasons. The biggest offender of all this outdated, uncreative material is “Neutopia,” a greatest hits collection of the best gender politics jokes written in 1954. I’m honestly shocked every time I watch it that such an intensely intelligent show could have spit out something so aggressively lazy and unfunny. Continue reading “Past-o-Rama: Neutopia” →

Not too long after the release of “Into the Wild Green Yonder,” we got the confirmation we had been hoping for: Comedy Central was ponying up the dough for two brand new seasons of Futurama. The direct-to-DVD movies were a wonderful treat, but this was the real shit: the show was coming back for realsies! Seven years after the series ended its FOX run, we would finally be able to tune in to new episodes again. Now that we’re a decade removed from these revival seasons, it seems like the common consensus on the Comedy Central years are relatively mixed. Some fans thought the show was as good as ever, while some feel that even at their best, they just failed to live up to the quality of the original four seasons. As for me, I honestly think the show remained very strong in seasons 6 and 7. Sure, parts of the show felt “different,” but no revival is ever going to feel exactly the same as it once was. But this new show wasn’t a shambling corpse like its seemingly immortal zombie sister show, it came back with renewed life, and in its 52-episode run, the majority of them are quite good, if not excellent, with more than a handful of episodes I would consider to be all-timers. Of the first 13 new episodes, “The Late Philip J. Fry” is the clear standout, a very affecting story wrapped up in a silly time travel story, but I decided to highlight the episode before it, “Lethal Inspection,” which has an emotional core of its own, but as the payoff to a fun buddy adventure between two very unlikely buddies: Bender and Hermes, a pair who shared very little dialogue in the show’s original run. Continue reading “Past-o-Rama: Lethal Inspection” →

Since it started running on the block in 2003, Futurama became a pivotal piece of Adult Swim’s programming for the next several years. To a diehard fan like myself, it was certainly bittersweet. Sure, it was nice to have the series still on the air, becoming a decent hit in syndication, but I never really watched it that much, since I already had the season DVD boxsets and had completely worn them out. I feel like the number of times I’ve watched the original four seasons of Futurama has to come close to my rewatches of classic-era Simpsons, if not even exceeding it. Between initially obtaining poor-quality TV rips of the show via file sharing sites as a wee pre-teen, ordering a mysterious “VCD” of the first season online as I waiting for the official DVDs to end up stateside, and poring through all 72 original episodes on DVD with and without commentary over and over again, I felt like I knew the series backward and forward. But we all had to just accept the series was over. Even when Family Guy got its 2005 revival, it just didn’t look like it was going to be in the cards for Futurama. But then, a miracle happened. In early 2007, we heard rumblings about a potential DVD movie, and then by Comic-Con, it was confirmed that four DVD movies were in the works. My mind was blown. Sure, it wasn’t a new season, but this was still incredible news. Some fans had hoped for a revival in the form of a Futurama movie, and now we were getting four of them? Incredible! In deciding which of the movies to cover, there’s really only one option. “Bender’s Big Score” came out of the gate swinging, giving the fans everything they missed about the series and then some, an epic time-bending adventure starring our favorite space pals.
Continue reading “Past-o-Rama: Bender’s Big Score” →

Back when syndication was king, the appeal of episodic television was that you can run episodes in any order, and anyone tuning in to one of them could instantly get up to speed, and for animated sitcoms or cable cartoons, there was very little, if any, direct connection of any plot threads or world-changing events from episode to episode. But in the last decade or so, we’ve seen a shift in animated shows starting to embrace continuity, partially assisted by the rise of streaming, where not only is it easier than ever to watch an entire series in the order it aired, new shows can have their whole seasons dropped all at once. Futurama was never really interested in that sort of storytelling (and even if they had been, the network would have definitely discouraged them from doing it,) but in building the world of the show, they were definitely interested in laying down track early for future reveals and plot lines. From the inception of the series, Matt Groening, David X. Cohen and the rest of the writers intended to hide clues and Easter eggs hinting at greater mysteries behind the characters and the world of the future, things that might not pay off for entire seasons. It almost feels like the evolution of the mindset of early Simpsons, rewarding the audience for paying attention with quick sight gags and the incredible joke density of the scripts that rewards you from re-watching to see what you might have missed. Written by David X. Cohen, in one of the only episodes he has a solo credit on, this episode feels like the culmination of a lot of breadcrumbs placed over the past few seasons regarding Fry’s role in the world of Futurama. Continue reading “Past-o-Rama: The Why of Fry” →

Look up any list of the best Futurama episodes ever, and amongst the top rankings are probably the really emotional ones. The series had heart from the very beginning, but it really started to plumb the depths of feelings as it went along, as the characters became greater established. Leela’s loneliness thinking she’s the last of her species, Bender’s snarky facade briefly dropping to display actual emotion, these moments only work because we’ve grown to love these guys. Season 3 contains a fair share of powerful episodes that are incredibly memorable and feel emotionally resonant: Fry’s love note in space that won Leela’s heart being destroyed before anyone gets a chance to see it, Bender meeting “God” the space entity, even moments stuffed within crazier episodes like Bender’s yearning to be remembered or Fry’s realization that fear has brought his found family together during Xmas time. But to me, the granddaddy of them all in the original FOX run of the series is “Luck of the Fryrish,” the tale of two brothers who never saw eye to eye before it was too late. Yes, “Jurassic Bark” is the more famous example, but I think “Fryrish” is more successful at really getting to me. As much as I love dogs, and the ending to “Bark” is an absolute gut punch, it really is pretty depressing, and a dour note to end an episode on, versus the final reveal in “Fryrish” coming off as more uplifting and sweet. Continue reading “Past-o-Rama: Luck of the Fryrish” →