Slashdot Mirror
Futurama Returns
GrumpySimon writes "Good news everyone!
Straight from a one-eyed alien's mouth - 13 new episodes of Futurama have been confirmed by Katey Sagal on Craig Ferguson's Late Late Show. All the original actors have signed up too."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Phil Hartman was never in Futurama. He died in 1998. Futurama started in 1999.
Actually... I find the container labelled "Condensed Milt" much more interesting, and very disturbing.
Milt, for the non-biologists, is the sperm and seminal fluid of fish.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
My reply was in response to the GP's post suggesting Phil Hartman was one of the actors who worked on Futurama. He wasn't.
The character Zapp Branigan was written for him, but he died before they started production, so Billy West took the part instead and happen to play the character in a similar way to Phil Hartman's audition.
Futurama does indeed have long-term plot elements, more so than most live action television shows (and at least comparable with Doctor Who and its Daleks and Cybermen). Generally the plot centers around Fry.
- Fry and the Brains (and the Nibblonians)
During the series it transpires that Fry is the only human being capable of resisting the psionic attacks of the Brains, a group of free-flying brain beings that want to take over/destroy the universe. Fry's brain waves are different from other peoples because Fry, as a result of events in the episode "Roswell that Ends Well", is his own grandfather.
In the first encounter with the Brains Fry is abducted by Nibbler, who is not only Leela's pet, but also an agent of the ancient and stupendously powerful Nibblonians (which explains why he was the only one of his kind on the planet where he was found). Nibbler explains Fry's abnormality and assists him in fending off the Brains' attack on earth. After Fry succeeds Nibbler wipes Fry's memory (everyone else was too stupefied by the Brains to remember what happened) and resumes his life as Leela's pet.
Later, in The Why of Fry, we learn that Fry was not frozen by accident. In fact Fry was brought into the future by Nibbler, whose much younger self was present on New Years' Eve '99, and who gave Fry the nudge that tipped him backwards into the cryogenic chamber. In this episode Fry is press ganged into service to destroy the Brains' ultimate project, a device that will acquire all knowledge in the universe and then destroy the universe to prevent its knowledge from becoming outdated.
Once Fry is inside the Mega-Brain and has activated the bomb with which he is to destroy it, the Brains reveal what Nibbler did to Fry and offer Fry a choice - he can stay there, blow up the Mega Brain and vanish along with it due to the failure of his escape scooter, or he can let the Mega Brain catapult him back in time to the space-time nexus centred on his own fall into the cryochamber.
Fry elects to travel back, and in fact initially prevents Nibbler from knocking him into the tube, until Nibbler persuades him that he should sacrifice himself and fulfill his predestined mission, because...
- Fry Loves Leela
Fry has an unrequited passion for Leela throughout most of the series. In a sense there is a lack of follow through here, because they do pull kind of a "will they/won't they?" thing, but Fry does succeed in communicating the depth of his feelings at times, and when he wins the devil's hands and uses them to make a holophoner opera in Leela's honour Leela realises that Fry has a depth of character and feeling that is concealed by his physical and social clumsiness.
- Leela and Her Parents
As someone else mentioned here, Leela's parent enter the series late in the piece and stick around. In fact I was surprised that nobody responded to the "straight from the alien's mouth" in the article by pointing out that Leela, as we discover when her parents emerge, is not an alien but a mutant, whose xenolinguist parents left her at an orphanage with a note in an invented alien script, so that she would be taken for an alien and avoid the apartheid-style restrictions places on mutants. This is a major shift for Leela both in the sense that earlier episodes made much of her search for her species and homeworld, and in that at least two episodes towards the end of the series are heavily concerned with her relationship with her newfound parents.
- Amy and Kif
Amy, the engineering student from Mars, and Kif, Zapp Brannigan's XO, fall in love early in the series and their developing romance is the subject of multiple episodes throughout subsequent seasons.
i'm sure there are other examples of long-term continuity that have slipped my mind, but really nobody could accuse Futurama of forgeting its past.
Idealy this would happen: There is an official Futurama web-site, they say they want a new season, they need US $ X to produce it. They sell shares on their website or through ebay using a dutch auction in order to finance the project. Geeks buy them. They make the episodes. They realase them on the internet in a non DRM format and using bittorrent so they don't have to pay for bandwith. People pay a small amount of money to download the .torrent file. If they want to pirate it anyway nothing will stop them so why bother with protection. Many people download that great show, the benefits are given to the shareholders. Everyone is happy.
You bitch needlessly. All the tools you need are but a few hundred dollars away!
1) Registering a domain name and getting cheap-ass hosting costs less than a few hundred dollars per year.
2) You can put a link to your project on your slashdot sig and get surprising amounts of attention that way.
3) You only need to come up with an idea for a show, and recruit some star talent. Really, you're on your way already, since you have a business plan that's pretty detailed!
Unless you aren't serious about your business plan. Maybe you wouldn't know a real business plan if it kicked you in the nards. Maybe the idea of actually doing anything outside your mother's basement scares you. In which case, your post is just so much whining and incoherent noise on a populate public blog. There's lots of that already.
The proof of whether or not you have a good idea is in your ability to make it reality. Otherwise, it's just so much hot air, and thanks to global warming, we have more than enough of that.
But, I suggest you give it a try. You'll either succeed, or learn lots about how the world around you works - either way, you win, and win BIG.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's now posted on Reuters and confirmed by Comedy Central, if it makes you feel any better.
Most shows have some kind of continuity and Futurama does. Sure they'll be a bit random and break rules at times (take that Bender is made of 40% of Zinc, 40% of Titanium and 40% of Dolomite- 120% for those of you who are reading this early in the morning), but in general unlike the Simpsons, the show progresses. The characters age, have different birthdays, refer to events in the past. You'll also notice the love between Fry and Leela developing. Take the later episodes like 'The Sting' where Fry takes a giant bee for Leela, and the many loving things they do that continues to bring them closer, as well as the same thing on the Amy side.
PS: best episode ever: Jurassic Bark.... poor Seymour the dog.
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Actually.. when Fry falls out of his chair and into the pod, it briefly cuts to a view of the bottom of the chair with his noisemaker falling to the floor. You can see Nibbler's shadow on the left side of that shot.