Thoughts on 6ACV14 - The Silence of the Clamps - SPOILERS

[Reply #160 on:]

i just noticed the 'colonel mustard gas' joke. heh.

Another joke that fell flat for me. Am I missing something here or is the only joke that you get mustard gas and there's a fictional character called Colonel Mustard? I mean... it's Futurama, these sorts of pop-culture jokes are meant to be sci-fi related. It didn't make any sense - especially given that it just appeared to be mustard gas in the pipe.

[Reply #161 on:]

It's a pun of sorts.  Colonel Mustard a character in the book Clue and mustard gas being lethal to humans.  The mustard gas is the science related part of that joke.  There's nothing else to get from it though... it was a simple background gag.

[Reply #162 on:]

So basically, like I thought, I got it and it isn't funny.


Has Futurama ever done a joke like this that wasn't sci-fi (or fantasy in Bender's Game) related before? If it isn't sci-fi related, it's not really even a joke, it's just weird.

[Reply #163 on:]

HG's fuel.

[Reply #164 on:]

Has Futurama ever done a joke like this that wasn't sci-fi (or fantasy in Bender's Game) related before? If it isn't sci-fi related, it's not really even a joke, it's just weird.

Admiral Crunch?  Archduke Chocula?

I am amused by your logic:

If it is not science-fiction-related then it is not 'really even' a joke, but just weird.

So basically, everything in Futurama has to be science-fiction-related for it to be a joke?

The popculture stuff doesn't bother me as much as other people around here.  It's hardly hardly at the level that Family Guy puts out.  Even the Jay Leno joke worked for me.  Because Fry could have been watching Leno during the 1990s before he came to the future.

To me, popculture jokes are those small 'rewards' in shows to the audience, which is they should be few and far apart.

The burning flag joke and the cord thing to me were just hit and miss jokes.  I hardly would say either of them made me cringe or bring out big words like 'hate'.

[Reply #165 on:]

Ok finally saw it so I can return back to Ontopic!

Pretty decent episode. Had some interesting callback characters, was a little surprised I didn't see Judge Whitey presiding over the trial (maybe I am overlooking something that happened in the movies), but still ok. When I saw the hillbilly moon Bender with Crushinator and the robot baby, I immediately thought that was gonna be a callback to The Series Has Landed, when Crushinator patted her front and said something like, "Pa, there's something I need to tell you". Don't know if that was supposed to be a red herring to make the viewer think that hillbilly WAS Bender or not. This episode was nowhere near the brilliance of last week's episode, but still made for a funny. As an overall rating, I give the episode...

8/10

Also, maybe it's just cuz of the airing order, but many of the episodes of this year are Bender heavy it seems. Waiting for that Leela heavy one we're all already griping about...it'll either be really great or really blah is my guess.

[Reply #166 on:]

Back to the word "bromance" ... I don't believe in a homosexual agenda, but that word makes me wonder.

"Bromance" isn't supposed to mean anything homosexual.

To me, it sounds like something the gay community would use. Or maybe the gay incest community.

bromance is a hollywood term for a recent genre of movie. in real life, only gay incestual folk use it.

[Reply #167 on:]

Also, maybe it's just cuz of the airing order, but many of the episodes of this year are Bender heavy it seems. Waiting for that Leela heavy one we're all already griping about...it'll either be really great or really blah is my guess.

Yeah, that's the feel I am getting too.  But looking at the other episodes coming up, it seems to be over soon-ish.  Just a weird choice to make; to burn off all the Bender episodes so fast.

[Reply #168 on:]

I don't know... how many more episodes are left?

I have a problem with more of the pop culture references that keep up with our current time period.  If they're subtle satirical references, I don't have a problem (proposition infinity happens to have a similarity to something else)... but more blatent things defy the Universe's logic.  Fry wouldn't have known about them, and most everyone else in Futurama has demonstrated a lack of knowledge about the 20th, and I'm assuming early 21st, centuries.  I know that Futurama has always technically had a problem with this.... what with heads from our time period being prominent characters for an episode or what not... and to be honest it's always mostly bothered me.  Nixon is an obvious exception as he's a character in the 31st century as well.

[Reply #169 on:]

When I saw the hillbilly moon Bender with Crushinator and the robot baby, I immediately thought that was gonna be a callback to The Series Has Landed, when Crushinator patted her front and said something like, "Pa, there's something I need to tell you".

Wasn't that a deleted scene? Funny that they would sort of go back to that idea, though.

[Reply #170 on:]

I'm in the minority it seems, as I really enjoyed this episode. It has to be my second favourite of this new series after Law And Oracle. I know some of the plot was weak and unexplained (like how they didn't recognise clamps etc), and I know the swearing was mostly out of place and over the top, but still, overall I was highly entertained and had many laughs throughout this episode - and isn't that what really matters?

[Reply #171 on:]

I disagree.  The only weak part about the plot was whether Bender would squeal on the robot mafia or not.... and he would, as much as I hate to admit it.  The swearing wasn't out of place or over the top.... it was the reaction of Clamps having to put up with the crap he had to through out the episode that caused him to start dropping the f-word and consequently Zoidberg dropping it as well.  It was a well thought out episode.

[Reply #172 on:]

Given what happened to Bender after his affair with Fanny coupled with what we learned about robot's back-up units in Lethal Inspection why would any robot actually be afraid of the robot mafia?

[Reply #173 on:]

1 - The bleeped cursing. This was a joke in itself, not Futurama's new trend of suddenly flinging the F-bomb around all the time. For one mobster-featuring episode, it was funny. If it turned out to be a new trend, I'd be surprised and disappointed.

2 - The courtroom didn't do it for me. There were some fun jokes, but it felt like it could have been tightened up, had some fat trimmed.

3 - The western-style showdown with Zoidberg and Clamps made me laugh. The camera angles, the music, the dialogue... maybe some viewers didn't get it because they're not familiar with the genre that was being spoofed? And the professy staring at a wall was great because everyone else was acting out the Western movie bystanders' role, huddled behind scenery, attention riveted to the action.

4 - Billy West's name being ridiculed was a little nod to the fans who actually know who voices the characters. This was a joke that would make no sense to the casual channel-surfer who watched an episode of Futurama that one time. Just chuckle and move on.

5 - "Bromance" is a word that is engineered to make fun of heterosexual male friends by implying some sort of romantic aspect also exists. Men can't have an satisfying, enriching, important life-long friendship with other men unless they also want to perform sexual acts with them, is the implication behind the word "bromance". Just to be clear here - I do not like the word. It is stupid, and it perverts the idea of real friendship.

6 - edited in to answer hobbitboy, who posted while I typed this post - Robots might want to avoid pissing off the robot mafia because it hurts to get mangled, and repairs or replacements are presumably pricey. And suppose the robot mafia intentionally went for your backup unit? We can also assume that they have other ways of making life miserable for those who upset them.

re-edit - I'm giving this episode 6 out of 10. It bugged me to see Fry so quickly latch onto Clamps. He's stupid but I didn't think he was so needy that he'd cling to anyone who would let him. That's Zoidberg behavior!

Edit 3: electric beegalee! The characters don't seem to age along with the show, to address the issue from a few pages ago. If they did, Cubert and Dwight would be adults by now.

[Reply #174 on:]

I think the Kardashians joke would make more sense if we found out the entire family had evolved into some sort of virulent plague of space cockroaches.

[Reply #175 on:]

How does TheMadCapper's paragraphs rotate about the page?  Anyways.... I think that I secretly think that the robot society operates on a slightly different level than human society.   The robots just do things... like be afraid of the robot mafia and pay them when they need to... kind of like role playing, but they're robots.  Does anybody else's words round across a sphere like mine?

[Reply #176 on:]

I think the Kardashians joke would make more sense if we found out the entire family had evolved into some sort of virulent plague of space cockroaches.

But that was a different episode.

[Reply #177 on:]

Speaking of baseball, I got a birdie on the 15th hole at Giants Stadium last week in greco-roman pie-eating!

[Reply #178 on:]

I think you'd make a mighty fine captain.

[Reply #179 on:]

I think the Kardashians joke would make more sense if we found out the entire family had evolved into some sort of virulent plague of space cockroaches.

But that was a different episode.

It was mentioned earlier, when someone was talking about how they hated all the pop culture references to our era.   I'm just suggesting its fine if they do that sort of thing, just if they make it fit into Futurama.  Its especially jarring when its to things that happened a decade after Fry's freezing.   Saying like... I dunno... Bed, Bath and Betelguise feels less jarring then say Bed Bath and Beyond.  Or Wal Mars.   I love Futurama's goofy sci fi puns. 

[Reply #180 on:]

Context is key.

[Reply #181 on:]

Contezt the Conquistador was a key de madre es.

[Reply #182 on:]

One thing thats kinda buggin me about this one is the amount of character recycling.

I believe character recycling is a major aspect of Futurama, as a series. The same can obviously be said about The  Simpsons; the writers of these shows are excellent at what they do, but they heavily rely on the characters that are available to them because they are all perfect. Every stereotype is represented through hilarious... Anything. I believe we all love Futurama because it can be in-you-face-weird-batsh*t-crazyness and relative to present humanity at the same time. They achieve this by pulling everything out of there asses, which makes sense for a few episodes to travel all over the place. I will concede that the plot movement of this episode stretched that a little, but only by radically jumping focus from person to person. My thought on the jump to Zoidberg is because the episodes where all the focus is on Zoidberg get sort of tiring by the end, but by having his character really only surface in the last act allows the audience perfect Zoidberg time. The episode didn't need a full Zoidberg character arc because everyone knows his character, he can be picked up halfway into an episode with the same gags, then surprise us at the end with an enraged, yet controlled and natural (the fight scene was so well choreographed, in early episodes you think Zoidberg would have found a way to get himself incapacitated), f*cking awesome lobster.

The new gag of killing Bender or someone off every episode is new, and somewhat foreign to classic Futurama, but it's just another chance for the writers to surprise you with wittiness. For instance, in Neutopia when it seems Bender is melted, only to reconfigure himself in the next scene, he claims he "learned it from a movie;" a killer Terminator reference that made me laugh hard. Furthermore, Bella only shot pseudoBender twice, but made three bullet holes. Haha! However, since the writing in this episode isn't superb - although I think Bender hooking up with the Crushinator again is way too happenstance to be real, so I would call it foreshadowing -  I give this episode a solid 7.5 for season 6B, and an 8.4 all across the board.

[Reply #183 on:]

Has Futurama ever done a joke like this that wasn't sci-fi (or fantasy in Bender's Game) related before? If it isn't sci-fi related, it's not really even a joke, it's just weird.

Admiral Crunch?  Archduke Chocula?

The joke there wasn't that these cereals were based on ours, it was that Fry thought the future was completely different because of such a small thing as the ever so slightly different cereals.
If there was some sort of mustard gas has become colonel mustard gas due to some even that happened in the future-angle, it might've worked as a joke. As it stood, it didn't work.

[Reply #184 on:]

I chuckled at it because the cereal mascots had been promoted. Possibly in a race to keep up with each other. And the angle that Fry would think of breakfast cereal name changes as signs the world was completely different. One thing we've learned is that this show has jokes that work on more than one level.

Jokes that are not sci-fi related?

Some of us are white. Some are black. You're brown.

Hermes' Manwich

Finally, war has made me into a man. Whee!

Good news! It's a suppository!

Come on freedom cage! Roll me to safety!

Monkey Fracas Jr

All the things Seymour can do at the same time

Quit pickin' yer nose and knead that dough!

They said I was stupid, but I proved them!

I can recite line after line having nothing to do with sci-fi, all day long.

[Reply #185 on:]

When I saw the hillbilly moon Bender with Crushinator and the robot baby, I immediately thought that was gonna be a callback to The Series Has Landed, when Crushinator patted her front and said something like, "Pa, there's something I need to tell you".

Wasn't that a deleted scene? Funny that they would sort of go back to that idea, though.

You know, I think you're right. Ha, now I am wondering if that was intentional or not...I'd like to think it was for the uber geeky fans

[Reply #186 on:]

The ep was alright, perhaps a little better than I expected. Nothing truly horrible, although wasn't a fan of the bleeped swearing, especially on Zoidberg's part. Some funny moments, but Clamps isn't a main character to me and he doesn't really do that well trying to carry the episode. The Robot Mafia when together were great as usual. Not a fave of mine, but not bad either...

6/10

[Reply #187 on:]

5 - "Bromance" is a word that is engineered to make fun of heterosexual male friends by implying some sort of romantic aspect also exists. Men can't have an satisfying, enriching, important life-long friendship with other men unless they also want to perform sexual acts with them, is the implication behind the word "bromance". Just to be clear here - I do not like the word. It is stupid, and it perverts the idea of real friendship.

I know you probably weren't targeting me specifically with this, but since I was the one who introduced the heinous term to this thread: I wasn't attempting to trivialize, criticize, or otherwise pervert Fry and Bender's friendship. Like I said, part of what saves Bender from being a completely irredeemable asshole is his deep affection for, and devotion to, Fry. Their friendship, when it is portrayed using a light touch, makes for compelling television (I'm thinking of "Godfellas" specifically, but "Jurassic Bark" has touches of this, too, as does "The Honking"). I guess I'm just getting a bit burned out on stories that play up Fry and Bender's relationship to the point where it becomes mock-able and impossible to take seriously. Every relationship on this show works best when it is written with grace and subtlety, and I guess I just feel like we've been hit over the head with this whole Fry/Bender BFF thing recently.

[Reply #188 on:]

This episodes was better than I expected. I give it a 7/10.
Pretty standard Futurama episode.

[Reply #189 on:]

First post here... Have to admit, I am baffled by some of the criticism this episode has received here. I absolutely loved it, brimming with great, if subtle jokes ("No, Clamps. No clamps." - "Reckon I was born a farmer... Folks say my mama was a hoe"). Pacing was perfect and in felt like a properly long episode. One of the best episodes this season, or pretty much since the original series.

[Reply #190 on:]

brimming with great, if subtle jokes ("Reckon I was born a farmer... Folks say my mama was a hoe").

*Spit Take* That's a subtle joke!?

[Reply #191 on:]

Homophonic humor is always subtle.

[Reply #192 on:]

And, if it hasn't been mentioned before, executive delivery boy is the job title Morgan gave Fry over 12 years ago that set off an uproar at Planet Express.

[Reply #193 on:]

I don't agree that Fry was any more childish in this particular episode than in previous episodes. And I don't think that Fry's childishness negatively impacted the episode. I think the montage of Fry playing with Francis effectively and succinctly showed how they became friends (so quickly).

That raises an interesting question: Have the characters aged since the start of the series?

Because the show has acknowledged that over a decade has passed since Fry was unfrozen in the future; last season the show took place in 3010, and this season it's 3011. The Professor mentioned that Amy had completed the necessary work to earn her Ph.D years ago. And I recall Professor Farnsworth mentioning that he's now older than 160 years-old in an episode from Season 6 "...I in my seventeen decades..." And I recall reading a character bio of Fry that counted the years since he was unfrozen (as well as a second age that counted years and millennia he was frozen after "Bender's Big Score"; Lars Filmore had something similar, which counted the years he spent in the past) -- but I don't think that website was "official".

I'm just wondering if Futurama is like The Simpsons, wherein the characters do not age despite the acknowledged passage of years. Or have the characters aged at least a few years since the show began?

I'd prefer an "official" answer about this, and not just conjecture -- I haven't been able to find it, but maybe someone else knows.

[Reply #194 on:]

Here's a quote from a recent DXC interview where he explains how the writers try to reconcile the passage of time with the aging of the characters...

Let me ask you a Futurama universe question that's bugged me in the past. How do you see Futurama's timeline working? I know cartoons, especially the Simpsons, they always have the floating timeline to keep the characters younger. Futurama does something unique. They sort of address it, they keep it grounded that started in the year 3000, and it's now 3011. So is Fry technically 36 but just looks 25?

David X. Cohen: This is a question which we do debate here periodically, and the practical solution is we now attempt to never refer to how old the characters are, and just act like they're the same age they've always been. So the approach we take is the year is changing, so we always keep it exactly 1,000 years ahead, so each episode we write the plan is happening 1,000 years from now. So we're now writing the year 3012 for next summer's episodes.

So that's clearly set in there; we're even going to say the 3012 presidential election as a perfect example of that. But at the same time we will not refer to Fry's age increasing. We're in some kind of a surrealism of the show that they're apparently not getting older but the year is advancing, and if you ask me to explain it more than that, my tongue will literally turn into a square knot, so I will leave it at that.

I've always figured, you know, the professor lives to be 170 or so, so people just live longer.  36 is the new 26, so it's not really a problem.

David X. Cohen: Right, well Slurm has certain preservatives in it that give your skin a youthful, plastic-y glow.

[Reply #195 on:]

A "bromance" is relationship between two heterosexual men that is so close that it could be mistaken for an actual romance if you squint.

[Reply #196 on:]

I'm so sick of the term "bromance".

It was kinda clever and funny YEARS ago when it was first coined (I recall first hearing it in the second season of "The Big Bang Theory"), but since then it's been used to death to poke fun at any friendship between two dudes -- and this pointless debate is a perfect example.

[Reply #197 on:]

For me, Bromance is a friendship between two males, that comes across as homoerotic at time (sleeping in the same bed perhaps, cuddling, ect) but probably isn't sexual.  Probably.

I used to have a gay friend and a straight friend, and the gay friend used to refer to the straight one as "his straight boyfriend" which was before bromance came along.  The straight one thought it was cute, and they were pretty good friends.  It was really quite sweet seeing them together!   Then the straight friend turned into a massive jerk, and now they hate eachother.    Sniff.

Anyway...
I really dont get why they bother give the characters chronological ages, if they remain at the same physical and mental ages as when they started.  Its basically the Simpsons floating timeline, but with a fixed age that everyone, including the writers mostly ignore.   The only way you would know it if you looked it up on Wikipedia.   Seriously why bother?  Characters age in floating timelines.  Linus, Lucy and Schroder started off as being born/babies in Peanuts, then aged to the a certain point, and stopped.  Monjula had her octoplets, they turned from babies to toddlers (and passed Maggie in age) and stopped there.  

I mean just about everyone ignores the characters chronological ages, so whats the point?  Lisa and Bart were born in the eighties... and they are still ten and eight.  

Sorry, I just dont get why they dont just go with a floating timeline, since they have one in every other respect.

[Reply #198 on:]

I think the Kardashians joke would make more sense if we found out the entire family had evolved into some sort of virulent plague of space cockroaches.

In real life, or on the show?

Maybe the show could talk about them mutating into a new species called Gluteus gigantus.

[Reply #199 on:]

I think bromance was even before Big Bang Theory, it's been going around a while.

Anywho...watched this episode again. I disliked Clamps more the second viewing. I mean, I didn't love him the first time, but upon watching it again he became more jerk and less funny guy. But I still enjoyed the episode. Thought it was odd you couldn't hear that bell robot chick as she was walking up with the gun to shoot Bender.