To the Year 3014 or Bust - General Futurama Discussion

[Reply #360 on:]

For those who are unaware, the PEELies are now in progress, an annual awards ceremony to give our fellow posters the recognition they deserve. Nominations are open until Sunday (tomorrow) evening at 11:59 PST. You don't have to nominate for all of them, but do be sure to send in your noms for Ontopic awards like "The David X. Cohen/Ken Keeler Award for Most Insightful Commentator" and "The Throbbing Sprunger Award for Best Detector of Futurama News and Information". You can find out how to nominate via email and see all the categories here. Thanks everyone! Looking forward to a great PEELie season

[Reply #361 on:]

Just saw this on the front page of Reddit. Thought I'd share it here. Pretty well done.



And if something like this was popular enough to be the top pic, hopefully this is evidence that Futurama still reigns as being popular enough to be renewed.

[Reply #362 on:]

Great find, Frida.  OK, you said that it was on the front page, but it's still damn cool!

I wonder how many people have downloaded the Futurama Head designer Android app.  I messed around with it for a few minutes last year then uninstalled it.

[Reply #363 on:]

Go On a Bender with Bender: Mom’s Robot Oil from Futurama

[Reply #364 on:]

Sweet! Too bad the cracks in my phone are only on the very top of the phone itself... 9gag was quite full of Futurama themed jokes yesterday as well('Battalion A, smash things! Battalion B, smash different things!' was my favorite )

That app is not available in my country yet:( I want it so much, dammit!

[Reply #365 on:]

I saw that the other day. I thought it was hilarious. :P

[Reply #366 on:]

Get me one of those!

[Reply #367 on:]

What is Fry looking at?

[Reply #368 on:]

Fry is cultured because he is looking at the V and A museum. 

[Reply #369 on:]

I like how they felt it was necessary to point what they are looking at.

[Reply #370 on:]

Is that the bit we cut out? That's what I've been trained to assume from dotted lines.

[Reply #371 on:]

I really am starting to doubt  the Simpsons will ever end. Don't get me wrong, I love it but it's been to long. Please cancel the Simpsons, then maybe futurama will get that kind of longlivity. 23 futurama seasons? YYEEEEESSSSSSS!!!!!! I would really hate futurama to end after season 8. So everyone buy 50 DVDs of seasons 1-7 and 30 cases of kidrobot figures. Also twenty destructors.

[Reply #372 on:]

I'd love to! If they were for sale here.... and if I had Bill Gate's bank account... plus the simspons doesn't air here anymore, ugh I hate this country

[Reply #373 on:]

Why don't we get futurama and the Simpsons to?
Where's da lovin?

[Reply #374 on:]

Hey, I just noticed that the stickied thread with all the episode review threads linked needs to be updated.

Fixitfixitfixitfixitfixitfixi t.

[Reply #375 on:]

So everyone buy 50 DVDs of seasons 1-7 and 30 cases of kidrobot figures. Also twenty destructors.

no

[Reply #376 on:]

So everyone buy 50 DVDs of seasons 1-7 and 30 cases of kidrobot figures. Also twenty destructors.

no

That's EXTREMELY valuable information, Unmentionable. Good job sharing it.

[Reply #377 on:]

I'd love to! If they were for sale here.... and if I had Bill Gate's bank account... plus the simspons doesn't air here anymore, ugh I hate this country

If I had Bill Gate's bank account, I would order more seasons of Futurama

[Reply #378 on:]

Or build the whole planet express building for myself to life in:3

Oh, and welcome Nantal!

[Reply #379 on:]

I'd love to! If they were for sale here.... and if I had Bill Gate's bank account... plus the simspons doesn't air here anymore, ugh I hate this country

If I had Bill Gate's bank account, I would order more seasons of Futurama

My mom has pipe dreams about winning the lottery. The lottery with the hundred-million dollar jackpot. She's asked me what would I spend the money on if she gave some of the money to me. I told her that I would produce more episodes of Futurama (with my own input, of course, I got storylines in mind). Then she said, "Well, you're not going to get any money if you spend it on something stupid like that." Yeah, well, your condominium's stupid, mom.

Actually the condo idea is pretty decent.

[Reply #380 on:]

I actually just posted a much shorter version of what I'm about to say in response to somebody in a completely unrelated thread in the TV subforum, but thought I might as well post it here too. Obviously this is only going to serve to bother people who still love the show currently and hope for it to go on as long as possible, but unfortunately I'm not one of those people.

I enjoyed the four movies. Bender's Big Score and Beast With A Billion Backs were my favorites, classics that I've gone back to and watched numerous times. I liked Into The Wild Green Yonder, although not as much as most other Futurama fans seemed to, at least on this board. And like a lot of people, I thought Bender's Game was fairly atrocious, although it still had enough going for it that I wasn't fully bothered.

For the most part I liked the first half of season 6. I definitely noticed a change in quality from the original run, but I found most of the episodes to still be enjoyable. There were a few phenomenal standouts for me (The Late Philip J. Fry, The Prisoner Of Benda, and Lethal Inspection), although there were also a couple episodes I despised (mainly The Futurama Holiday Spectacular).

I found the second half of season 6 to be more of a letdown. Most of the episodes to me were just disappointing, while the few episodes I did enjoy a decent amount (Mobius Dick, Law And Oracle) weren't as good as the best ones from the first half of the season. I also really hated the end of the season: Overclockwise was an unnecessarily overdramatic fanservice bonanza in my opinion, while Reincarnation was yet again another stupid three-parter like the holiday episode that did nothing for me. If they want to do three-parters, why don't they just bring back Anthology Of Interest? At least those were framed in the context of the real Futurama universe.

But the kicker for me was the first half of season 7. Not a single standout episode for me. In fact, for a lot of the episodes I found myself strained to even finish watching them, I had lost interest so much. I no longer even looked forward to the new episode each week...I just watched them out of some sense of commitment. And of course they ended on another three-parter, this time the ridiculously boring and idiotic Naturama. I stopped caring so much that I even stopped posting in any of the review threads here like I did for season 6.

So what I'm trying to get at here is I think I'm done. I'm done watching new episodes as they air or soon after they air. I'll probably at some point end up seeing most of them in the future, perhaps once they're put up on Netflix or something, but I'm done keeping up with the show the way I have been. I'm simply just not as interested anymore. To my sensibilities, there's been a distinct drop off in the quality of the writing and humor to the point that there are too many other comedies I follow now that I enjoy so much more and that make me laugh on a much more consistent basis (Community, Louie, Archer, Workaholics, Parks And Recreation, South Park, etc.), not to mention all the engaging dramatic shows I'm also wrapped up in. I always said I would follow the show as long as it continued to make me laugh enough, but that time has come to an end.

Obviously there are a lot of people here who still love the show in it's current state and still think it's hilarious and fantastic and should continue to go on and I have no qualm with any of you. If you continue to enjoy it, then great for you. The simple fact is that's just not the case for me anymore, so I thought I'd get all official and post something here, cause I can't sleep yet and have nothing better to do so why the fuck not.

[Reply #381 on:]

I almost completely agree with the above.

The only difference being that I think it will take a hell of a lot more to stop me keeping up with the show - just out of curiosity; I mean, hell, I still watch The Simpsons more or less as it airs.

But I certainly won't be feverishly anticipating each new run like I used to unless things change. I mean; I'd often stay up until a new episode would find itself online, which due to time-differences would be something like 4am, here.

Basically, I'm at a point where I don't care if the show doesn't come back at this point. I'd rather see them try to get a real movie off the ground and put all of their eggs into one final, glorious basket.

[Reply #382 on:]

Same thing happened for me with The Simpsons. Season 16 was where I really started growing weary of watching the show, and I fully stopped keeping up with it after season 18 ended. I guess curiosity only holds so much water for me with the amount of entertainment I consume on a regular basis.

I agree about having no problem if Futurama got cancelled tomorrow. As far as I'm concerned there's nothing more the show can do for me that it hasn't already, and I feel it's run its course. I'd hate to see what happened to The Simpsons fully happen to Futurama, which if it keeps getting renewed for more and more seasons seems to be the road it will go down. I definitely agree that they should try to get a movie into theaters as a last hurrah...if only The Simpsons had ended after their pretty decent movie, I would have ended up feeling so much better about the show's full run.

[Reply #383 on:]

I actually gave up on The Simpsons somewhere in the middle of season 13 - but then, sometime around season 21, I felt a weird compulsion to catch up with it.

I think I'd just revisited the classic episodes on my newly purchased DVD sets and had nothing better to do that Summer.

Now I've caught up, I feel the need to keep up to date. There's no point watching 500+ episodes of something where more than half of it is shite, only to not be able to say you've seen every episode.

[Reply #384 on:]

Shame about that, Josh. Ah well, I guess they're trying to make it appeal to a more modern/younger audience, and most of the die-hard fans are too old to give a shit about that stuff. Most of the fans grew up with the show during it's original run and they aren't compatible with all the new pop culture references and whatnot, so I blame that on the drop in viewers.

[Reply #385 on:]

I don't think that's necessarily true at all. In fact, due to our generation's almost global acceptance of the internet, I'm not sure that will ever be true again. Past generations have certainly had that issue with not keeping up with the most current pop culture references, especially if they didn't embrace the internet, but our generation doesn't have that problem...we've been connected since we were young, and continue to be technologically adept enough that we're fully aware of the newest trends, memes, and pop culture news immediately just as much as any younger generations are. I've been fully capable of catching almost all of the pop culture references in the most recent Futurama episodes, and that has absolutely nothing to do with why I've stopped enjoying it as much.

[Reply #386 on:]

I think Danny meant "compatible with" as a synonym for "amenable to"--because, like Josh, I understand the pop culture references fine; it's just that, for the most part, I do not appreciate them on an aesthetic level. They seem cheap and lazy and pandering and dumb. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule (I liked the Facebook reference in "Cold Warriors," for example), and it's not like the pop culture references alone are what make the new run of Futurama less appealing to me than the old run.

Honestly, I think my meh-ness with the new run has something to do with the fact that the first four seasons of the show felt like they were building up to something, what with the shadows in the cryogenics lab and Leela's unknown origin and all that fun myth arc sort of stuff; I always had this sense that the writers had some Grand Plan for how the show would pan out, and it was neat seeing them give us glimpses of that in episodes like "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" and "Leela's Homeworld" and "The Why of Fry."

But the new run really has not fulfilled that promise of Big Things Are Happening Behind the Scenes and One Day Our Characters Will Be Made Privy to Them. Take (what I see as) the bungling of the Nibbler thing: We learn in BBS that he can speak, and this fact plays a minor role in "Bender's Game" and "That Darn Katz!"--but, beyond that, what good does it do towards advancing the show as a whole? If anything, it retroactively makes less awesome all the secrecy and significance surrounding the Nibblonians in their original run appearances.

The old run was just more exciting to me, what with the slow trickle of information we got about the characters' difficult pasts and their secret messianic futures. That is not to say that the new run has been a complete disappointment on that front: I like what's been done--in theory, if not in actual practice--with the development of characters not part of the main trio (Hermes in "Lethal Inspection," Zoidberg in "The Tip of the Zoidberg," Farnsworth in "Near-Death Wish"); I like the advancements that have been made in the Fry/Leela relationship.

It's just that the new run, as a whole, seems far less well-thought-out to me, in the long term, than the original run was--and that just bugs me. I'm willing to admit that the old run may just seem well-thought-out in retrospect because it is self-contained and I know where all the story twists are; it is a far different experience to be watching the new run in real-time and not knowing how one episode may or may not connect to another one down the line. For all I know, maybe the second part of season seven will do wonders towards advancing the series's long-running story lines; maybe we'll have another episode featuring the Nibblonians and/or the Brain Spawn or some other kind of enemy. That could be awesome.

All that said, though, the fact remains that the old run, for various reasons--some of them that have nothing to do with the show's objective quality itself and everything to do with my having personally grown up with it--holds a special place in my heart. I still like the new run just fine, of course; it's just that the spot it holds in my heart is distinct from, and slightly less special than, the spot held by the old run. And I won't apologize for that, even if I am being irrational or allowing nostalgia to tinge my perceptions or whatever else.

[Reply #387 on:]

When you switch between episodes in the old run and the new run, you can notice a distinct difference between the voice acting and delivery of lines and pacing of jokes. It almost feels like they're just not trying as hard anymore, or they somehow just lost that spark. It's difficult to put a finger on.

For me it just comes down to whether or not it makes me laugh. Old Futurama gave and continues to give me belly laughs almost every other joke. New Futurama gives me maybe one joke to snicker at in each of the three acts of an episode. Of course it's completely subjective, but it can't be chalked up to nostalgia goggles...it's just too blatantly different now to ignore.

[Reply #388 on:]

I agree that there seems to be a different tone between old and new Futurama; but I honestly can't see any real difference between seasons 6 and 7 as far as writing and jokes go.

For me, the most notable change is there seems to be a greater frequency of bad episodes. In my opinion, there are a total of 6 bad episodes in the show. (A Leela of Her Own, Bender's Game, The Futurama Holiday Shitfest, Neutopia, Yo Leela Leela, and All the Presidents' Heads.)

All but one of those is from the new run. However, if they're taken out, it feels exactly like classic Futurama to me. A handful of great episodes and an occasional mehpisode (sorry, I just had to merge those words. )

As for season 7, it's hard to say what I think. There were a few episodes that I found to be really good, but none that I found to be amazing or bad. I have no strong feelings one way or the other.

[Reply #389 on:]

For me, the most notable change is there seems to be a greater frequency of bad episodes.

I definitely agree with this, but obviously to a much greater extent than you. I would consider many many more of the newer episodes to be bad by my standards.

To put what I said before more briefly, the way I see it, season 6A consisted of several "meh" episodes, a few great episodes, and a handful of terrible episodes. Season 6B consisted of several "meh" episodes, a couple good episodes, and even more terrible episodes. Whereas season 7A for me has consisted of about half "meh" episodes and half terrible episodes. It's gone gradually further downhill, similar to The Simpsons' demise.

[Reply #390 on:]

I completely agree about the sense of "building up to something".

But even then, I'd be content if the show stayed well written and funny, and I feel like season 7A really dropped the ball. Some good moments and gags aside, it wasn't up to previous efforts - at least not on the whole.

And without the sense of a grand story behind the scenes, it just felt like the show had started to coast.

[Reply #391 on:]

And without the sense of a grand story behind the scenes, it just felt like the show had started to coast.

^This.

I was reminded of "Prisoner of Benda". The character's actions -seen isolated- were basically just random shenanigans, not even brillant ones. Yet, the underlying "Body switch" theme effectively held the episode together, linking those single scenes, creating a whole that legitimatelly held it's ground as one of Futurama's most memorable and unique episodes.

[Reply #392 on:]

And without the sense of a grand story behind the scenes, it just felt like the show had started to coast.

Exactly. I'm not advocating for the show to become a serial, and I'm not denying the fact that it has always been, at its heart, an episodic sitcom without any real week-by-week arc to its stories. However, whereas the original run had episodes that were loose sequels of one another from season-to-season--"The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" and "The Why of Fry" being the most prominent example--the new run seems entirely opposed to the idea of loose plot threads from one episode being tied up in a subsequent episode.

The most prominent example of such crappy writing is, of course, the Whaddup-With-Mars thing in "A Farwell to Arms" and "Viva Mars Vegas." (Granted, I really like the former episode, but that's beside the point.) AFtA ends on an unanswered question that VMV could have so easily, you know, answered--but no dice.* To be fair, it is my understanding that the writers quasi-apologize for the inconsistency between those two episodes in the 7A commentaries (which I have not listened to), but still--to me, the whole thing is just downright lazy.

*I should be barred from making puns in the same way the native Martians were barred from their casino profits.

[Reply #393 on:]

Well... "Calculon 2.0" sounds sequelish.

[Reply #394 on:]

Well... "Calculon 2.0" sounds sequelish.

Or, there's a new version of Calculon who puts him out of a job and it's then put to the Planet Express crew (Bender) to go get rid of Calculon 2.0.

Also it is my belief that the show should have some sort of arc, even if they make mostly standalone episodes in a season. Wouldn't be great if they pulled an Ira Steven Behr?

[Reply #395 on:]

It could just be an episode where he changes his appearance as he tends to do every few decades, or that's what actually happened when he died. Who knows, I don't, quit asking me.

[Reply #396 on:]

As if they'll make a big(ish) change like that, I guarantee by the end of that episode he'll be back to his original self, same appearance and personality. Futurama isn't really one of those shows that makes big changes and sticks to them.

[Reply #397 on:]

Pretty nice continuity, though.

[Reply #398 on:]

Pretty nice continuity, though.

It sucks how they'll continue something like Calculon's death but not explain how Mars was restored to normality.

[Reply #399 on:]

I guess in the same way that they've never revisited robot party week from Crimes of the Hot. That was another "the whole planet goes awry" plotline that's never been revisited.