It’s (former) series finale time, and now it’s finally time to talk about Fry and Leela. The seeds of their romantic future were planted way back in the pilot, with Leela being inspired to quit her miserable job thanks to this free-thinking wildcard of a man from the past. But the ship teasing didn’t really seem to kick into gear until season 3, where we got multiple episodes devoted to Fry’s hopeless romantic attempts to win the heart of his beloved cyclops. It became such a revisited topic that the show quickly started to make fun of itself for stretching out the “will they/won’t they” for so very, very long. The DVD movies would continue this even further, but at last, they seemed to cut the bullshit once and for all with “Into the Wild Green Yonder” ending with Fry confessing his love to Leela and them kissing. But the revival premiere “Rebirth” seemed to hit the reset button AGAIN thanks to a robot duplicate Leela, with the real Leela pumping the brakes on things with Fry for the time being. Then, at long last, almost unceremoniously, the two were made a canonical couple by the seventh and (formerly) final season, where we saw bits and pieces of them actually as partners. The Fry/Leela saga was thought of as so important to the series that it was a major component, if not the main component, of all four series “finales” we’ve had so far. But here’s the thing: I never really got Fry and Leela. I’m not quite on board with their relationship, but at the same time, I am. Continue reading “Past-o-Rama: Meanwhile” →

Great science fiction has always held a mirror up to our modern world, but making the analogues too specific to a moment in our present runs the risk of becoming dated. This especially becomes the case when your 31st century series gets rebooted nearly a decade after its original run, and the futuristic setting ironically has to re-adjust itself to the advancement of our new present day. Rewatching the original four seasons, one of the big things that made it feel locked in time was its mocking of how dumb cell phones are, which was definitely in vogue in early 2000s comedies. Fast forward ten years and smartphones have become an unavoidably vital presence in society now. Having “Attack of the Killer App” be one of the first new episodes feels like a rectification for this, giving our characters access to a whole world of iProducts, with the futuristic bent being that the phone gets installed directly in their eyes. Sure, it was trendy to riff on Apple at the time, but people’s crippling addictions to their devices and social media, and companies using personal data to exploit is still incredibly relevant today. Leela’s mutant boil being a Susan Boyle parody? Not as relevant, but I’m not as bothered by it as some fans are. The following episode “Proposition Infinity” was also ripped from the headlines, based off the then-current raging debate about gay marriage, and named after Proposition 8, the 2008 California legislation to ban it in the state. But societal prejudice is always going to be present in some form, and the demonization of new kinds of groups will probably become even more arbitrary, as pointed out by Bender in that episode: a union between a ghost and a horse is okay, but between a human and a robot is not? The issues are pulled from today, but they are smartly adapted to fit the world of the show. There seems like there’s some apprehension about the new Hulu reboot that the show might feel too locked in the current moment, and with upcoming episodes titled “Rage Against the Vaccine” and “Zapp Gets Cancelled,” I can definitely see the worry. But the series has had a very good track record with these kinds of episodes at being able to toe the line between being relevant but not too specifically relevant that I’m hopeful they can hit that sweet spot once again. “Decision 3012” is a great example of this, taking a then-very current political story and putting a clever sci-fi spin on it that works to a really satisfying pay-off that feels very true to this show. Continue reading “Past-o-Rama: Decision 3012” →

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” →