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Futurama May Strike Back (on DVD)
Nik writes "Hot on the heels of Family Guy's revival, Can't Get Enough Futurama is reporting that 'there is renewed talk at FOX about bringing fresh Futurama content directly to DVD.' While nothing is confirmed at this point, it is apparently the first time that a division of Fox has considered producing new episodes of the animated sci-fi series in some time."
WRONG! family guy is completely different, the whole comedy style is NOTHING like the simpsons. (family guy is freaking hilarious and senseless, while simpsons has an interesting plot/story every week).
as for futurama, it has a more sci-fi/geek based comedy style that you wont find in the others.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Last year Fox started airing "My big fat obnoxious boss" - a reality show, a blatant rip-off of NBC's The Apprentice, but with a bunch of humorous twists, and parts of it were pretty funny.
Well, they unexpectedly pulled the show after Episode 5, apparently could not compete with Desperate Housewives during the same time slot, so they figured some show about UFOs was worth it, while Obnoxious boss was not.
They posted the remaining episodes on www.fox.com/bigfat (the link doesn't work anymore) later, with a new episode published every Friday. I am not sure what their traffic numbers were, but a lot of fans of the Boss downloaded the complete episodes.
I'd assume Fox would be pretty open to the scheme where they charge $1 or so per download (the obnoxious boss ones were not-DRMed, just regular WMV files, as far as I can remember). Makes sense with the amount of shows they keep cancelling and each show having a "long tail" following of maybe tens of thousands fans, but not millions, to make it justifiable to air on primetime TV.
"That's not why people watch TV. Clever things make people feel stupid and unexpected things make them feel scared."
I'm not sure if anyone has noticed, but if you read slashdot's headers there'll be random futurama quotes on each server reply. eg:
X-Bender: Well I don't have anything else planned for today, let's get drunk!
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Every few months or so a "story" pops up that Fox is thinking about renewing Futurama or doing the straight to dvd thing. This is usually drummed up by some Futurama Fan site that is Jealous of Family Guy's success and thinks that because "crappy Family Guy" was renewed that Futurama should be renewed also. Discounting the fact that Family Guy is one of highest rated shows on Adult Swim and the second highest selling dvd-t.v. show of all time.
Problem is, Fox does NOT OWN FUTURAMA, Matt Groining does. The main reason Fox let Futurama die in the firtt place is because of that very reason. Dvd sales of Futurama have not been a barn burner and given the very high cost of producing a Futurama episode I doubt even if Cartoon Network picked up some of the bill it would even be profitable.
Everyone seems to forget that Fox was contractually obligated to the four seasons that aired, and sneakily pre-empted Futurama so that there would be a backlog of episodes so they could tell M.G. "Sorry Matt, there is a backlog of episodes, so we don't need a fifth season," without upsetting the Goose that laid the Golden egg (Simpsons being that egg).
The ONLY way Futurama would see the light of day is if M.G. paid for it himself. End of Story.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Futurama, like firefly, was scheduled during a "sport overtime" timeslot, i.e. it aired rarely, and sometimes only the confusing second half of the 24 minuttes would air, etc.
Your options are:
Mind bogging incompetance, or mean spirited abuse of power. I'm gonna go with mean spiritted: I don't think someone that incompetant would ever earn the right to make that decision, especially since it happened again to a similar show on the same network not long afterwards.
You can't take the sky from me...
Quoted from Billy West's Message Board:
Well, I spoke to David X.Cohen because we did promos for a new Futurama compilation and he said that they did have talks with the top guys at FOX and they were extremely impressed with the sales of the Futurama DVDs. The idea was to make a Futurama movie right to DVD and then a 2nd and a 3rd. That's what's being discussed. Fox is trying to figure out a budget for the whole project, and it sounded like David X. was very jazzed!
I would love more than anything to do that show again. I thought it was best experience on every level... creatively, voice-wise, writing, animation and the laughs. The laughs. Writers and performers that respected each other.
It's got a bit more effect when you have a quote from a voice-actor talking with a producer.
Futurama is a widely liked show, compared to much of the content available at any one time, yet it's still not cost effective to broadcast?
Futurama was also a very expensive show. There's a huge list of writers, producers and God-knows-what-they-do executives who are paid quite a bit of money per episode. That's the real problem with the networks-- it's not the actual cost of making a show, it's that every production is top-heavy with people in suits who are paid ghastly sum to give notes. I'm speaking from experience here-- the contact list for a typical network production (animated or live) has more executives than cast and crew. And with so many people with veto power, it's really difficult for something without a very broad appeal to survive.
Futurama is and was great, but it should have been a cable show. With a low overhead it would have found a comfortable audience and could have lasted for years. But at a network, the cost per episode was literally dozens of times what it costs to produce a cable show like Spongebob or Aqua Teen-- and since it wasn't a hit on the scale of The Simpsons, it had to go.