I don`t expect people to agree with my unpopular opinions, and I revealed them anticipating the backlash. But totalnerduk, you are a new parasitic strain of bacteria who thrives off of convincing yourself and the Internet that you`re smarter than everyone else and the penulnimate authority on the definition of artistry, even while you live in squalid and lonely obscurity.
Firstly, if you anticipated "the backlash", why do you feel the need to try and respond with such scornful (and frankly, stale) derision? If you'd truly anticipated that people would both disagree with you and find your position difficult to actually believe, then why bother being so overtly antagonistic?
Secondly, I am well aware that there are many people who are far smarter than I. You, I am not convinced are one of them. I know I'm no authority on the definition of artistry, but I do know what's great about
Futurama, and what makes for a truly stunning episode. TLPJF had it in spades. I'm hardly alone in that opinion either. I may be arrogant, but I'm not unrealistic.
Thirdly, I do not live in squalor. I live somewhere in between squalor and opulent splendour. I do, however, live in obscurity. I am thankful for this. I shall remain behind the scenes and unobserved, if given any choice in the matter. Even when my glorious and impregnable castle is erected on the lunar surface, few people will know who actually lives there, and holds their lives in the palm of his black-gloved giant-orbital-laser-caressing hand.
Fourthly, I believe you've used the wrong word there. "Penultimate" refers to something that's
one step removed from final. The penultimate authority would be one step below the ultimate authority. Have you pegged me as somebody who would defer to the opinions of none save for one other, or did you simply fuck up there?
Your belief that anyone who doesn`t completely agree with you is ignorant and hasn`t thought about their decision is demonstrative of your failure to complete kindergarten ethics lessons.
Please tell me exactly where I stated this belief. Link to it, or else post a retraction of that statement. Whilst I realise that people will occasionally disagree with me, I'm entirely aware that this is not always due to being ignorant or unthinking. Sometimes it's due to a valid point of view. Sometimes another person will even manage to convince me of the validity of their own point of view over mine, and the disagreement will be resolved. Sometimes, though, a person's point of view will just be completely and totally indefensible. Like yours.
That isn`t my rebuttal, just stating facts while remaining the only rational one between the two of us.
I think what you mean there is that you thought you'd take the opportunity to throw around a few words and to try to antagonise me. I hope you enjoyed it, kid. You've actually
not stated a single fact there. Well done. It takes a certain type of dedication to be that comprehensively devoted to failure.
Have a cookie. Have a glass of warm milk. Don't take it badly, but you're not very good at this. I'll go through the parts of your post where you actually tried to
say something now, shall I?
Humour is a definite fact now? I wasn`t aware you were the Supreme Overlord of Laughter now.
You will be aware of this from now on, I trust. But seriously, I never claimed to be the Supreme Overlord of Laughter. That sounds like some sort of demonic clown. What I said was that there were tons of jokes, and that the episode was very funny. Those can be independantly verified.
Go check
the infosphere and
the review thread here if you don't believe me. There's a high joke-density throughout, and most of them are mentioned either in the review thread or the article. There are in fact, more than I care to enumerate, because it would take far too long. This post would end up the length of a diplodocus' tail (they're long).
Perhaps you didn't
get many of the jokes. That is not a failing on the part of the episode.
I lightly laughed maybe twice throught the course of the whole episode. I didn`t find the episode that funny. Get the fck over that.
Well, I'm not going to lose sleep over you not laughing. I find the idea that you
hate the episode to be completely fucking absurd though. It's funny, it's touching, it's epic in scope, and it's a masterpiece.
Saying this...
I like Lobstertainment and hate TLPJF and Luck.
... was just baffling. I'll ignore you hating TLOTF. I mean, I love it. But I'm focusing on the
most baffling part of that post for now.
And as for why I joined the forum? Well, I joined because I LOVE FUTURAMA. I love Futurama because most of the other episodes I enjoyed considerably more than this one. Whod`ve thought?
That's the part I don't get. I don't see how you can love
Futurama and hate TLPJF. It's everything that
Futurama has always set out to be. Episodes such as TLPJF, TKOS, RTEW, MTS, AFTR, and TFP are very much the jewels in
Futurama's crown, for the simple reason that they tell a great story with both humour and heart. The episodes such as TPOB, Reincarnation, AOI, and AWITM that are mainly played for laughs and wacky hijinks are fine, but they're just not quite on the same level as the episodes that have it
all.
Wow, really? It`s 22 minutes long? I`m well aware of the limitations of the format; I wasn`t blaming the writers for its length.
Yet you complain. You specifically complain that there wasn't enough time for us to "appreciate [the] plight" of the heroes. They've (seemingly) got no way back to their "home" timeframe and we're treated to a series of scenes that adequately establish this. What did you want? More scenes of Fry wandering the wasteland at the end of the world and moping like some emo kid? Go watch
I am Legend if you want to watch something about a guy wandering around the end of the world and "appreciating [his] plight".
I don`t know that throwing more time at the story would have necessarily helped, but I just know somehting with the pacing seemed off.
As I've mentioned, it's less than half an hour long. Anything that's as epic in scale as traversing the lifetime of the universe is going to feel a little rushed.
Your next argument is one sentence that helps you in no way (repetition of plots is what sitcoms thrive on? Have they changed the meaning of the word thrive?) followed by four sentences of tired straw men about reality shows.
Pick a sitcom. Pick any. Let's use
Friends as an example. Oh, no. Wait. Let's use
Frasier. No, wait. Let's use
Cheers. Or how about
Seinfeld. No, let's use all of them. Pick any four episodes of any one of those shows at random, and one or more will conform to this outline:
There will be, I predict, some sort of misunderstanding. Somebody will be to blame, and the situation will anger another party. It might not be the
fault of the person who is to blame, but the other party will still be angry at them. Adventures will occur over the length of the episode. One party will come to a realisation, and the other party will end up doing something that either fixes the original situation or eradicates the results. At the end of the episode, the situation reverts to the default dynamic. Comedy and wacky hijinks will have ensued along the way.
Sitcoms thrive on the replication of this formula, because it is proven to provide the impetus for an entire plot to move along and conclude within the space of half an hour
and allow the audience to laugh along the way. Assuming that the jokes aren't going over their heads, that is.
If the shippy elements of TLPJF felt like a replication of earlier Fry/Leela shippy plots, that's because most of those will
also conform to the outline above. A less generic, more specifically
Futurama outline of a Fry/Leela plot would be:
Fry is thoughtless. Leela is either not attracted to Fry, or angry at him. Fry has no way to stop Leela from being angry with him initially, but after/during some sort of crisis or minor inconvenience, ends up doing or saying something that makes Leela realise he was either thoughtless by accident, or the initial set of circumstances were not his fault. One or both of them may have been presumed dead by the other at some point. Leela then either regrets her anger, or forgives Fry. Fry and Leela are re-united as friends by the end of the episode.
The meaning of the word "thrive" remains unchanged. Why don't you look it up? It should give you something to do.
I have never watched more than five seconds of any of those shows and as I`ve stated before, I LOVE FUTURAMA.
You especially love the parts that aren't very good, and dislike the better ones, it would appear.
Despite its fans. Really the whole paragraph ignored my main point, which was that the romantic story was sub-par at best in comparison to the Fryla plots of eps like Parasites Lost, Devil`s Hands, Wild Green. Rebirth etc.
Your original post said...
Late had VERY little humour and is just depressing the way it jumps through dystopic futures (the song doesn't help) and there wasnt' enough time to properly appreciate their plight, plus the emotional plot seemed like a poor forced attempt at replicating other better Fry and Leela stories. LotF was very fabricated/manatee`d- I mean, "7 leaf clover?" "brother stealing name?" So random.
That doesn't seem like a "main point" to me. Especially since you then used so many more words on the subject of beatboxing.
I guess the part of jokes I don`t get are the parts were pulled out of thin air.
Congratulations. You've managed to make no sense at all there. Well done. Have another cookie.
(Btw, "brother" is the subject, "stealing" the verb, and "name" the object.)
Oh, I see, you were using as few words as possible and hoping that people would divine the intent behind their apparantly random ordering. Kudos, that's a pretty inventive mistake there. I'll bear it in mind next time.
Obviously the themes behind it fit with the episode`s message; it was the action itself (why his name? why would Fry think that? Why is Yancy`s problem stealing?), plus the logistics problems (why did no one ever say "hey, the first Martian had the same name as you"? why couldn`t Fry recognize that it was not his own brother?) that was contrived.
The entire story tells us why Fry would think that Yancy had stolen his name.
As for the first man on mars, think about this: how often do you talk about the first man on the moon?
Armstrong and Aldrin landed forty years ago, and they're hardly the topic of everyday conversation at delivery companies right now. Philip J. Fry II landed much longer ago than that compared to the "present" in Futurama. Longer ago than Columbus landed in America compared to today, in fact. Heh. How often in a year do you talk about Columbus? We're expected to make these mental allowances because the fact that nobody has commented on it until it comes up
serves the plot. There are plenty of plot elements that are guilty of this in
Futurama. For example, in Lobstertainment, howcome we've never heard of Harold Zoid, Zoidberg's famous uncle until that point?
"Seven-leaf clover" is not a joke. At least not the kind you`re supposed to find humourous.
It's a joke. A four-leaf clover is something that's real and crops up occasionally as a symbol of good luck. Seven is a lucky number, whereas four is not. So it stands to reason (or at least the same kind of reason employed in troll science) that a seven-leaf clover would be even luckier. Of course, they don't actually
exist, but that's a part of the joke. It's
funny, and you're supposed to find it funny. Assuming you're not a completely humourless dumbass, of course.
As for your comments about b-boying, it`d be a waste of time to argue with someone who clearly has no idea what they`re talking about; their only source of knowledge on the subject having come from that very scene in the episode.
Initially, I thought you were using some obscure slang to refer to the beatboxing itself. I had no idea you were referring to the breakdancing.
Now that I'm better informed, everything I said
goes double.
So I`ll just leave you with instructions to Youtube Bboy`s Kujo, Cloud, and/or Ken Swift (esp Cloud), which I know you won`t do since you have a very busy schedule of posting FIRST! on the comment section of articles and writing death threats to George Lucas.
I took a look. Whilst I'm sure that his abilities are very impressive to a certain subset of people, the average breakdancer is clearly an insane individual who places way too much focus and importance on rolling around the floor whilst maintaining a fanatical obsession with letting as little of his body as possible
contact said floor.
I should also probably point out that I have never posted "FIRST" on
anything, but have been known to tell the people who
do exactly how obnoxious and irritating I find them.
My busy schedule right now is split fairly equally between university, caring for my terminally ill cat, and trying to make sure my girlfriend understands that it's
not okay to murder her family just because she find them somewhat annoying. Commenting on
anything on the internet is a distant fourth in terms of priorities.
Oh, and that I've never written a death threat to George Lucas. Obviously, I wish he'd stop dicking around with
Star Wars, but I don't wish him death. If I cared enough about killing somebody I would not waste my time with warning them of my intentions anyway.
I'd just
kill them. No warning. No incriminating letters. No evidence. No arrest, no prison sentence, no chance of being raped in the showers.
Now I'll let you get back to loving the worst parts of
Futurama. I'll be over here, loving the better ones.
Author
