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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."
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Cuz the actors never get it wrong.
P.S. I feel like it's some futurama reference that my CAPTCHA was "breeder." Is Slashdot trying to say something about the human race?
I think the issue is exactly that they don't have to worry about what happened last week if the writers don't want to. That the characters don't have to age. I live in the real world. When I watch TV I don't want reality. I want something different. Something to tickle my imagination. And the surreal world of many cartoons is great for that. A show like Doctor Who doesn't appeal to me as much, because I would much rather pick up a book and supply a much cooler image of a sci-fi world in my own head.
That being said, Futurama isn't the best example to be picking on for nothing ever changing. The series did have an advancing plot and the important events of previous episodes did matter in future ones. Individual events didn't matter as much, but the evolution of the character's relationships to each other definitely progressed based on the events of the show. I also felt it was much better written then other popular cartoons and didn't rely as much on mind-numbing pop-culture references.
If you listened to the DVD commentaries, you'd know that they actually had much more planned in the underlying plot of the series, but it got cut short. The final episodes were in no way a conclusion to the series.
Dude - It's just a cartoon.
Noone's really saying that Futurama is better than Dr Who, but that doesn't mean it's not enjoyable. Plot? No way. Funny? Absolutely! More importantly, it's just entertaining.
That's something I love about these kind of shows. You don't need to make the investment to watch them. I hate it that I can't watch a lot of "running plot" shows because I know I'm going to miss a bunch of them. With Futurama/Simpsons, I can just watch them if I'm free.
It's funny simply becuase it is. I enjoy the more scientific humour of the show. Things like winning by a quantum difference (I know I'm misquoting this) being responded with things like: "No fair! You changed the result by measuring it" It adds a humour for the physicist in me. Regards, Alunduil
In a nutshell, shows like Simpsons, Family Guy, The Critic, and Futurama make me laugh, and greatly entertain me for their 30 minute duration. Okay, there's a dud episode every now and then, but for the most part they're really fun. And funny. There have been a few scenes from these that would just make me laugh a few days later when I would think about it, for instance.
The fact that it bothers you that Lisa's mental acuity isn't entirely consistent from one episode to the next sort of implies you're greatly outside the demographic they're looking for, in which case I'd suggest stick with the shows that really make you happy. I watch these shows for their comedic value, not for a consistent basis upon which to do a comparative literary analysis.
Similarly, there are shows that other people love that I can't stand at all (eg Everybody Loves Raymond). it's all your own personal tastes. Regarding not liking the Simpsons, my Mom cannot get into the Simpsons either. She's tried and either doesn't get the jokes or just doesn't think they're funny whatsoever.
That said, at the end of your post you mention other shows that are 'really funny'. Can you give an example? I'm not trolling you either, just curious what you find funny.
You apparently didn't watch much of Futurama, in that case. Time actually did advance over the course of the show, starting in 3000 and ending in 3004. Relationships between characters also changed over time.
As for why Futurama is popular.. you may not find it funny, but a lot of people do. I, for one, like that there's a lot of geek jokes in there. One that I can think of off the top of my head was that there were a pair of books in the background of one scene labeled P and NP.
Ok that's indeed great news... the sad news is Futurama is still dependent on Comedy Central. Why do shows still need this kind of deals? 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.
That's really what the RIAA really is affraid of. Artists now have a way to have vertical control, marketting, distribution etc. They claim to fight piracy but really want to make this come as late as they can. Once the artists realize they can actually make more money by short circuiting the distribution cartels
a) price will also fall for the consummer
b) more competition of works, more quality
\u262D = \u5350
...DRM'ed. "Geeks don't want DRM, geeks want Futurama (just see @ the Internet) so we will release new episodes of Futurama to sell DRM to those bloody nerds..."
This is the only reason for Fox to start it again.
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This is not a flamebait... this is bloody serious... Just wait'n'see.
Stirring defence of Futurama and the Simpsons there. But I think you're pretty much wrong in everything you say. To respond to your three main points:
1. The characters in the Simpsons are surprisingly consistent; the clearly distinct characters and their traits are one of the shows great strengths. Lisa is BOTH intelligent AND a member of the archetypal working class family; these are not mutually exclusive, and the show is subtle enough to deal with this.
2. Futurama IS better than Dr Who whichever way you spin it (allowing for taste), and its PLOTS are amongst its great strengths. When you compare the Simpsons to Futurama, one thing that is very apparent is that Futurama has much more comprehensive, less formulaic, better written storylines. The episodes, and the series, feature an internal logic which is stronger than the Simpsons, or indeed almost any other comedy other than Seinfeld or Arrested Development.
In many cases the humour is directly derived from the strength of the plot. For example, Fry travels back in time and becomes his own grandfather. As a result, he is unique in the universe, and his uniqueness ties in to the whole Nibblonian vs Brains subplot. Similarly, Leela's origins story is tightly woven throughout the various episodes and across the series. I know for a fact that Groening, Cohen and co set out to write lengthy thematic arcs which in some cases spanned series 1-4 inclusive.
If you think it's a plot-less cartoon with jokes, you're not really watching it.
3. Well, this basically explains why you think what you think. I agree to the extent that each episode of Futurama is self-contained. However, they are also intricately linked with other episodes, and you miss a lot of important context and detail from some episodes if you treat them as a one-off 'adventure'.
Try watching Futurama, in order, from start to finish. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Read Pynchon.
I'd have to say mostly - you can't compare Futurama to the Simpsons.
The second of the two jumped the shark a while ago - although it came back from the groaner pile a bit it never compared to Futurama which was just getting a decent groove when Fox pre-empted it into oblivion.
After Futurama came out - the Simpsons seemed just wholesale tame by comparrison and even in some of the comentator tracks on the DVDs you could see where Matt G.'s passion was going (or at least more of it). It's not just the geek factor - it's the ubber geek factor that made it great among other things. Plus not having to be tied down to earth led to a much broader swath of possiblities - continuity be damned. Or at least horribly twisted if one recalls brain-burners like the Farnsworth parallel universe boxes. That was a particularly fun episode.
I don't really know where I'm going with this so I'll just stop now.
I don't think Futurama actually even tries to have a real continuity. In the beginning of the series, they make references to Star Trek all the time, but later on the name becomes a "forbidden word."
I just think of it like I did the Simpsons in some jokes. Lisa once stated the Springfield Oil Field is 3 times the size of Texas. This means either they live in Alaska (possibly, I need to consult a map for scale) or it's a joke because it's too ridiculous to be true.
Actually, Family Guy humor comes from their making jokes which are so repetitious that they aren't funny any more, but annoying, and then taking it a step further until it becomes funny that they're dragging the joke out, then they drag it out just a little more to make it that much more annoying.
Futurama humor and plot development is actually quite clever, especially since (like Arrested Development) some of the jokes and plot twists aren't revealed until later episodes (e.g., Nibbler's being present but unseen in the first episode but upon subsequent viewings after seeing "The Why of Fry" (4ACV10) it becomes obvious Nibbler was there and that plot line was planned from the beginning).
Oh, and the Dave Matthews Band does not rock.
Anyway, if this is actually true, I shall no longer refer to Fox as Faux and I shall no longer say that Faux can bite my shiny metal ass. Furthermore, I shall have to now watch Fox's crap reality shows because I've repeatedly sent them emails promising to watch their crap reality shows and buy from their crappy sponsors if they bring Futurama back as a series. I wonder if watching just one episode of American Idol or whatever crap they're airing now will fulfill that obligation, or is that like making a deal with the devil?
Anyway, here is what I really posted to say:
<Amy>Yay!</Amy>
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
But I still get a huge kick out of Log (tm), Powdered Toast Man, Lummox herds, lambasting the materialism and exposing the fetishism in western society, and the fact that the show could ever have been marketed as a kid's cartoon to start with.
Thank you. The thing a later half generation doesn't seem to get is this was fairly cutting edge, underground stuff. Why Nick even picked it up is beyond me, it should have played late evening on Viacom's other network MTV, as Beavis and Butthead did. RnS (as it was referred to back in the day) was a huge hit with the college age group. Little kids could laugh at the nose-goblins or Mr. Horse sniffing a pan of Gritty Kitty, but the content wasn't really intended for them. John K. waged epic battles with Vanessa Coffey, who would eventually get him the sack, which dramatically altered many finished cartoons, which then went back to the shop for some modification and as John once said, just to mock Coffey, they'd make no sense, like the butchered PC Looney Tunes of the 70's.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar