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Billy West Says Futurama Might Return To Fox For 6th Season
MajikJon writes "After strong sales of the straight-to-DVD Futurama movies, Fox is reportedly considering bringing back Futurama for a 6th season. This according to Billy West in a recent statement at the Anime Supercon in Florida. Here's me with my fingers crossed."
I was a huge Futurama fan when it was on TV, so it pains me greatly to say this. But if you can't do better than those terrible new DVD releases, please *DON'T* bring this show back. I don't know if they got different writers for those movies, or whether the writers they brought back just lost their edge, but those were just embarrassing. Each release has managed to be even worse than the previous one.
But if Matt Groening has proven nothing else with The Simpsons, it's that he has absolutely no understanding of the phrase "finishing while you're on top" and all-too-much understanding of "run it into the ground until it's a pathetic shadow of its former greatness."
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We're the executives who took the show off the air ground up into a fine powder?
Seriously, screw 'em. They've wrecked one good show after another. I hope another network - any network - picks it up rather than them.
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After seeing how Fox can absolutely murder excellent shows with their weekly schedule ramdomizing game (Futurama, Firefly, etc), I'd MUCH rather see Futurama get picked up by Comedy Central, or Cartoon Network than back on Fox. Screw you Fox, you blew it.
I never really understood how Faux not only greenlit so many wonderful shows but also murdered them in the cradle after barely a season. It seems too much to be coincidence, I think it must be some sort of pathology amongst their programming directors. Keen Eddie, Futurama, Firefly, Dollhouse, all axed. (Ok, might be jumping the gun on Dollhouse by a few weeks.)
There's usually a political explanation for this kind of illogical behavior where Exec #1 gets to feel like he has a bigger penis for sabotaging Exec #2's pet project. It ultimately costs the company more money than it makes but ego is served so nobody cares. It just makes me wish the inevitable decline and destruction of the company would happen sooner before they tease me with any more shows I might like.
Anyone remember that old animated show God, the Devil, and Bob? That fat fuck Jerry Falwell led a crusade against it as being blasphemous, the same way he did with the Last Temptation of Christ. Oddly enough, both examples here had a greater understanding of and sympathy for Christ's point of view than that bloviating, closet-case fucktard and all of his ass-hatted minions.
The Last Temptation one is particularly amusing because the basic premise is "How can Jesus make a sacrifice of rejecting a peaceful human life and accepting the cross if he had no desire for it? Sacrifice without desire is an empty gesture. Giving up brussel sprouts for Lent? Meaningless. Giving up chocolate? Meaningful." So the fundies all flipped out at the idea of Jesus having an erection, Jesus having amorous thoughts about women, about wanting to take a wife and raise a family. Do you idiots read your own fucking book? It says God was made flesh, he is the son of man! One follows the other! What, you gonna flip out if anyone implies Jesus must have had to take a dump or two during his time on Earth? No, Jebus can't poo! Our pitiful little minds cannot contemplate it! Blasphemy!
So the whole point of the movie was showing Jesus wanting that normal life, seeing how good it felt, knowing it could all be his, and sacrificing it for a greater purpose. And this was considered to be the most horrible cinematic sin committed since Ishtar. Stupid fucking fundies.
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Does Fox still have first-air rights? Fox loves to take the best stuff and strangle it to death. Out of order episodes, random slot times, and only a dozen episodes before cancellation is extremely common. They're the ADD child of networks.
Fox doesn't deserve Futurama; if they aren't contractually obligated to bring it back to Fox, West should sell the rights to Adult Swim or Comedy Central. Adult Swim loved showing five hours of Futurama at a time, and Comedy Central just wants more animated filler. They'll both be better homes (though my confidence in [AS] is basically nil now, they've wasted all the class and personality that once made me interested in them).
My other concern is Family Guy syndrome. Maybe it was because the show was off the air for some time, but Family Guy just isn't as good as it once was. Partly it's because they've completely changed the dynamic of every character (usually for the worst--Stewie is now more about "hiding in the closet" now than "take over the world and kill Lois"). Partly it's that the seem to rely more and more on the "like that time when" skits. While Futurama has always had a much different way to go about humor than that, it could still fall flat.
Also, I'm worried that we'll lose all the great "under the table" jokes that require at least some college education to get.
If they do decide to bring back Futurama, I hope they'll go back to standalone episodes rather than movies cut up into four episodes. I don't mind an occasional "to be continued", but I find Futurama works better in half-hour chunks.
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Cable channels dont typically have the budget for something like Futurama. Its one thing to licence reruns and produce low-quality stuff like Aqua Force and another run a show like Futurama. Right now, its Fox or nothing. Has any of the major players expressed interest? Everyone seems to shy from animation except for Fox.
Because nobody else has said it yet.
Honestly, my favorite episodes are the Zoidberg-centric. Or anything Zoidberg.
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Matt Groening has said before that Futurama is so budget-intensive that the smaller cable networks would not be able to financially support the show in its current state. I remember he went on to say that the kind of sacrifices that would have to be made to make the transtion from a broadcast to a cable network cut too deep and he was unwilling to make them.
I can't remember exactly where I read this, but it makes sense. It's very espensive to make an animated show of this nature while maintaining Futurama's standard of quality. Look at how Comedy Cental and Adult Swim save money on their animations. South Park is super cheap because there's no hand animation. Drawn Together has hand animation, but it's crude and ugly when you stand it next to Futurama. For years Adult Swim used stock character animations and used computers to manipulate them (e.g. Space Ghost, Sealab).
Futurama needs Fox's money. Kind of like how Mr. Bungle's California could have never been made without Warner Bros.'s money backing it up.
This is spot on. Cable networks like USA, TBS, TNT, FX, etc never come up with original programming series or movies.
They just don't have the budget for Monk, Psych, My Boys, 10 Items or Less, Closer, Saving Grace, Nip/Tuck, Sons of Anarchy, It's Always Sunny....
And that's just off the top of my head, I'm sure I omitted many and I seriously doubt their production costs are less than that of animation.
Fox's good series but low ratings failures were due to giving the network over to sports instead of recorded programs.
Fridays during the late 90s and early 2000s, many affiliates carried local baseball games during primetime and they ran the Fox Friday lineup in late night after the local news. So, any series schedule for Friday would get weak rating numbers, and therefore be canceled as a flop.
Sundays were troubled by NFL runovers and the fact that The Simpsons had to start on time at 8pm or not at all, meaning that in many cities the 7:00 and 7:30 programs would be pre-empted by the game being shown in the late afternoon slot. This doomed Futurama because it couldn't be found in a consistent slot.
Another strike against Futurama is that it had to run with an alternate opening due to a showing the Planet Express ship crashing into a large screen, which was considered too close to a reminder of 9/11/01.
However, Fox has fixed all of these problems. Time has passed so the opening is more acceptable. The Friday baseball pre-emptions are now a thing of the past, Fox has let baseball move to regional cable channels, some of which it controls. The Sunday problem has been solved by a postgame show called "The OT" that stations join in progress as the game ends, and runs until 8pm. So, the only thing that can be pre-empted by football is football talk.
Fox is now no longer killing good shows because they're not getting the numbers due to Fox's own mistakes. They've solved that problem.
Bad examples:
FX - Owned by Fox
USA - owned by NBC/Universal
TNT and TBS - Owned by Turner Broadcasting/Time Warner
These channels certainly have the cash behind them if they need to take a risk on a new show (and for some of these, I have to believe the station is taking a loss in order to gain market share for other shows), although I suppose the same could be said for Comedy Central (part of Viacom). The problem is getting the show approved and getting a budget to do it from the higher ups...