One Last New Episode of Futurama

Ant writes "Futurama's last new episode airs tonight at 7:00 PM on Fox." If you're missing your fix, there's a Futurama website with entirely too much Futurama info.

Comments

X-Bender

[joe_bruin]

fox can bite my shiny metal ass

sad but

[freedommatters]

i can't say it ever gripped me. i enjoy it. watch it now and again when tivo records it for me and generally find it very funny but for some reason it never had that "must see the next episode now" magic.

Re:sad but

[Hogwash McFly]

It's always been living in the shadow of the Simpsons which is quite unfortunate because it is actually a very funny show IMHO. I have both seasons on DVD and they're great, and sure while it might not be a laugh a minute like the Simpsons, there is some very clever, dry humour in there.

I dunno what it is but I prefer the characters of Futurama, maybe because they are newer but they still each have their own zing about them - Fry, Leela, Bender, Amy, Prof F., Hermes and Zoidberg (the funniest cartoon character ever). Is it me or is Homer's stupidity getting a little tiresome?

Add to that some great sci-fi - cool gadgets, more zany storylines, AND EXCELLENT COMPUTER JOKES! Some of the ones I can remember

Sign in a Robot Church:
"10 Sin
20 Goto Hell"

Wall plaque:
"10 Home
20 Sweet
30 Goto 10"

Bender: "I had a crazy dream, all ones and zeros, and I think I saw a 2 in there too!"

And of course the episode in the haunted house with the flying Windows logo and eery startup sound.

Re:sad but

[Alaska Jack]

I know the whole "Jump the Shark" thing is overdone, but with the Simpsons, I can point to exactly the moment when the show jumped for me.

It was when the doctors found Homer was stupid because he had a crayon jammed in his brain. Removing it made him smart, but there was a difficult period of adjustment, so at the end of the episode, he put the crayon back.

That's not funny. That's f*&cking tragic and depressing.

Zap Branagan and Kif rule

[Anonymous Coward]

While I thought Matt played it a little too cute with the Fry-Leela connection and almost all the subplots involving Bender, any episodes with Zap Branagan and Kif were works of pure genius that rivaled even The Simpsons.

Sad..

[OmniVector]

Futurama (made by Matt Groening) was a lot better than Simpsons ever was. Though i'm sure that will start a holy war.

The simspsons was geared a lot towards children usually, where I always felt Futurama was more for adults (Any one remember the death by snu-snu joke in the amazon woman episode?)

Oh well, just another shining example of how Fox knows how to cancel the best shows: Now i've lost my family guy AND futurama fix :(

Re:Sad..

[Chairboy]

Oh geez....

There are a bunch of things wrong with your post, but I'll stick to one that you should understand. Here's what you wrote:

"Oh well, just another shining example of how Fox knows how to cancel the best shows: Now i've lost my family guy AND futurama fix :("

The thing about this is that Fox actually approved/funded/aired these shows in the first place. Fox is far from perfect, I'm no fanboy, but the other big networks don't tolerate stuff like Family Guy and Futurama. Fox stuck with the show through four years of poor ratings, and with Family Guy through three years or so of dismal ratings.

Fox is a business. They need to maximize profits. That aside, the fact that they take risks on shows like these is good for us, because occasionally, the quirky show turns out to be a money maker.

Re:Sad..

[rbullo]

Actually, according to www.familyguyfiles.com,

Despite the huge fan base, the show's edgy content and brash humor (remember when The Simpsons used to be that way?) doesn't sit well with the advertisers. Of course, it doesn't help when a network moves a show every week to a new time slot. How was anyone expected to watch it?

So, apparently the "dismal ratings" were Fox's own damn fault.

Re:Sad..

[barzok]

Fox is far from perfect, I'm no fanboy, but the other big networks don't tolerate stuff like Family Guy and Futurama. Fox stuck with the show through four years of poor ratings, and with Family Guy through three years or so of dismal ratings.

Both of which Fox sabotaged. Futurama moreso than Family Guy. Futurama was put in a timeslot where at least 10 weeks a year (7 PM Sunday - NFL games run to 7:30 regularly), it would be pre-empted, and Fox knew that when they put it in that timeslot.

Family Guy - when it was on Fox, I never knew when it was airing. Sunday? Monday? Tuesday? Friday? They kept moving it, so they were never able to snare a viewer base.

Re:Sad..

[Karl Cocknozzle]

The thing about this is that Fox actually approved/funded/aired these shows in the first place. Fox is far from perfect, I'm no fanboy, but the other big networks don't tolerate stuff like Family Guy and Futurama.

Fox certainly is willing to take risks other networks don't... That is how it works if you want people to watch your fourth banana network. Imagine how hard it is to get good shows if you're a fifth or sixth banana, like UPN/WB are? However, part of taking risks is knowing that you sometimes have to STICK WITH IT for a while, and not just by not cancelling it.

Fox stuck with the show through four years of poor ratings, and with Family Guy through three years or so of dismal ratings.

Fox did more to sabotage that show than they did to help it. (Many television networks are guilty of this, not just Fox. See also "Ed" on NBC.) First, they changed timeslots over and over and over again so that even people who already KNEW the show was good never knew when to tune in. Frequent timeslot changes had more to do with Family Guy not finding a big audience in first run. The show should be on where "Malcolm in the Middle" is now, and Malcolm should be slinging shakes at Mc Donald's.

Contrast this with Cartoon Network, where Family Guy beat Jay Leno AND David Letterman COMBINED in the 18-34 demographic several evenings in July. How did this happen? They picked a good time, put it on, left it there, and promoted it. Amazingly enough people watch.

This is both extraordinary and revolutionary... [/sarcasm]

Re:Sad..

[ctr2sprt]

My impression of the Futurama situation is that the show wasn't canceled because of lack of money or viewers, but instead because of politics. Apparently Groening got a much better contract this time around, which allowed him not just to keep greater control of the show, but also take home more of the profits from it. Groening, at least, believes that Fox are resentful of that and so have tried to keep the show moderately, but not highly, successful. So they keep stuffing it into timeslots where they know it will be preempted, not advertising it at all, and so on. Keep in mind that despite this screwing the show's ratings were pretty much in line with King of the Hill, a more mainstream show in a better timeslot. I have no idea if this is still the case, but it was back when Fox made the decision not to get any more Futurama episodes.

I don't have a problem with Fox canceling shows that nobody watches. (I don't like it, but hey, it happens.) My problem is that they didn't seem to give Futurama a chance after the first season. It's honestly like they were trying to kill it, and many people close to the situation say that's exactly what was happening.

Sigh...

[rbullo]

Why is it that the good shows never last? For example, Family Guy was hilarious, but Fox cancelled it because advertisers were reluctant to run ads on such an edgy show. Now they are taking down Futurama, which is consistently funnier than this newest season of The Simpsons. And shows like King of the Hill, of which only the first season was funny to me, is still going strong. And don't get me started on that prime-time soap opera known as Friends.

Re:Sigh...

[utd-blaze]

I can respect that you dont think king of the hill is funny. Different people have different tastes in comedy, but understand that king of the hill is a quality show. I have never seen a tv show capture the look, feel, and soul of a community the way that king of the hill portrays alren (arlen is a psuedonym for garland, a dallas suburb). Anyone from the area will tell you that king of the hill is not a comedy, its a documentary.

Indeed a sad, sad day.

[rvcrazy]

Unfortunately, this was my first thought when I awoke this morning. I suppose we can all only be thankful that Fox now has more room in their schedule for "reality" shows, When Car Chasing High-Speed Animals are Attacked by Couples Married by America, and some other nonsense about objects removed from people in emergency rooms.

I truly am disgusted with television, and really only look forward to The Simpsons and B5 reruns. I can't see anything coming up that remotely appeals to me.

One thing I must know...

[phillymjs]

...will the DVDs of later season Futurama episodes have the last 20 minutes of a football game, followed by the last 10 minutes of the episode?

Futurama HTTP headers

[RonnyJ]

Slashdot's server admins seem to like Futurama quite a lot, the server sends out an extra HTTP header with each query. e.g. X-Bender: Well I don't have anything else planned for today, let's get drunk! X-Fry: They're great! They're like sex except I'm having them.

A Testament to Groening

[KU_Fletch]

It's going to be sad that I won't have Futurama on my Sunday nights any more (at least I won't have to suffer through King of the Hill afterwards). But thank god for Matt Groening and his DVD producion staff at Fox. The Simpsons and Futurama DVDs are some of he best released and reflective of how much Groening likes his fans.

If you look at other TV show DVD sets, Groening's collections can beat just about anyone out there. They are reasonabley priced (around 30-40 bucks at most stores) compared to some TV shows selling their sets at $80-100. The production quality is great, so you don't have to suffer through bad transfers (although there was an initial pressing problem with Simpsons S1 that was fixed). And probably the reason I love them the most is the fact that Groening and his boys sit down and do commentaries on all their episodes. They know that you can watch all the episodes and get a laugh out of them, but the thing that keeps you coming baack is hearing them shred their episodes to pieces. We've all seen Simpsons and Futurama on synidcation long enough to know a lot of the old episodes by heart, but the commentaries are pure genious. So it might be sad that the TV shows are leaving us, but props to Matt for a dedication to kick ass DVDs