Thoughts on Episode 8ACV09 – The Prince and the Product - (SPOILERS)

[on:]

Release Date: September 18th, 2023.

The crew members are reborn as toys.

Discuss.

[Reply #1 on:]

4/10, and I'm being generous.

Probably the worst episode ever (so far?), beating out "The Futurama Holiday Spectacular". Nothing particularly worth a snort of a chuckle, nothing clever, nothing interesting or even cute. It was a waste of an episode. Now I'm willing to say Futurama should never do a noncanonical trilogy episode ever again. And can they please stop with Leela falling for other guys? For duck's sake, just get Fry and Leela hitched already.

[Reply #2 on:]

The "old man Fry" jokes at the start didn't land the way they expected it to, lol. Bit awkward.. 

This episode really sums up how tired some aspects of Futurama are. Leela is immediately after another man despite her and Fry moving in together like, what, 3 episodes ago? I really don't expect a deeply compelling relationship from them in each and every appearance, I've never been too into the on-again-off-again ship through the series' later seasons, but still - why? Fry "dies" a "dramatic" "death", repeatedly, which gets resolved immediately, repeatedly. Even the whole wacky anthology thing itself is played out. Couple random lines got a smile, but I don't know man, as much as I want to stay on Futurama's team I really feel this season dragging. There's almost no spark.

I liked the framing device of "commercials" between a normal episode, but I definitely think the main story could've fit the concept a lot better. Why not do a parody of your average Futurama episode? Hit all the usual notes in a real exaggurated, blatant way, like the commercials have become more interesting than the show. Unless that... is what they were going for?

I sort of think all three segments could've just been normal episodes if you stripped away the main toy gags. Kinda dug Zoidberg making himself a frankensteined abomination out of the PE crew, could've had more story potential. The gimmick visuals didn't do anything for me. Hate to nitpick, but it usually looked pretty wonky. Good Heavens, those designs, especially the cars.

I will say I kind of liked that the wind-ups were an (almost absolutely accidental) reference to the old Bender, Nibbler and Url wind-ups, though. Somewhere I've still got the Gender Bender variant.

All in all, Bad. Mucho Baddo. Again, I really want to be championing this new season, but so far only two or three have really felt worth seeing. I'm quickly forgetting there are new episodes going on at all. But, we got one more for this half of the season, and I've read it's a much more lofty style episode - I'm honestly not that hyped at this point, but eh, made it this far, I'll see where it goes. Maybe the worst this season?

[Reply #3 on:]

Well, it's obvious that they PURPOSELY wanted to rile up F/L shippers and they got this. At least from me. I don't buy into it's totally non-canon, because Leela did sell a castle to the King of Space in 6ACV25. At least partially it's real. Enough said. 1/10. Well deserved.

[Reply #4 on:]

Worst episode of Futurama ever made!

[Reply #5 on:]

Agreed homerjay. This episode unlike the rest of the non-canon episodes had no cohesive narrative whatsoever....! It's kind of like Naturama but without all those neat facts about animals. Except the execution was even worse than that! I don't give a damn about the Fry and Leela crap at this point. That subplot or whatever it was is the worst thing the series came up with, it felt like pure fan-fiction. The jokes felt like something straight out of family guy save the first act. This entire episode kinda felt like a bunch of new writers attempting to write 3 or 4 different Futurama shorts that just failed miserably. It used the same old "oh no our favorite character is dying" trope during the first act. That right there is a sign of a bad Futurama episode. They ought to know we're tired of that by now. Especially with the CC run's excessive use of that trope. Unlike Saturday Morning Fun Pit or Reincarnation, I cannot help but wonder why this was made? For the sake of meta? The amount of meta stuff made this entire episode seem so unnecessary. And it brought down it's quality excessively. Literally nobody asked for this and while I get the whole point of making these non-canon episodes is to spread their creative wings somehow, this failed to amuse me in any way, shape, or form which cannot be said for the rest of the non-canon episodes we saw during the CC run.

I have no idea if I ever gave an episode this rating, but this is a pure 2/10. Yep this is easily the worst episode of the series for me. I'd rather watch literally any CC-era episode than this mess. Hopefully the subplot that's probably meant to be canon isn't canon to the show. Because it was just.... dumb. Episodes like these make me wish the series had stayed dead with the Comedy Central run. At least the last episode is in sight, which was written by David X Cohen himself. Hoping that episode will be good enough to forget this mess ever existed, although I ain't holding my breath. Since, you know, there's another half season coming next year or so.

[Reply #6 on:]

At least Naturama and Saturday Morning Fun Pit had some cohesion between its three segments. I could say their redesigns of the characters were creative and fun, and I understood what they were each about.

None of the redesigns here felt like they took much thought to make. The designs and backgrounds looked cheaper than the normal series and led to zero interesting visuals.

Whereas Naturama and Fun Pit had a narrator and Nixon to comment on the segments, this one just threw them in between a “standard” Futurama episode, which made them feel more pointless. Didn’t help how pathetic the stories were, how little the toy aspects really mattered to them, or led to many decent jokes. The Duck/Egg one was okayish, but the wind up and car segments were nothing.

I was bothered the entire episode from Leela instantly falling in love with the Prince. They should’ve made it clear from the start she was under a spell, because after the Borax Kid plot from the western episode, I completely bought the writers would make her do that on her own.

It felt like I was watching an entire episode of those long couch gags/shorts The Simpsons sometimes does. Just throw characters into random situations for some unfunny time filler, while I keep asking myself “what am I watching? Who thought of this idea and why was it green lit? You’ve been off the air for 10 years and couldn’t think of anything better than this?”.

This was crap. Parasites Regained and Vaccine were harder to watch, but this felt like such a waste of time and resources.

3/10

[Reply #7 on:]

They should’ve made it clear from the start she was under a spell, because after the Borax Kid plot from the western episode, I completely bought the writers would make her do that on her own.

I'll bet money there's a deleted scene from this episode that was meant to portray how Leela might be under a spell but some dumb crap from the last act (or next act/segment) was more important to the writers than explaining a very simple plot element. It's happened before in the CC run. I remember "Fry Am The Eggman" having a much longer, sincere speech when Fry was holding mr. peppy's egg before it hatched than what we got in the final product thanks to the "Countdown to Futurama" thing CC did back in those days. It's just so lazy imo. The first act screamed the kind of quality you'd see from a CC-era episode but somehow made it worse than one can imagine Futurama going. I, unlike some, feel like this episode should have never been made, which I cannot say for Yo Leela Leela or The Holiday Special. At least they were attempting to portray some type of message no matter how poorly executed it was.

[Reply #8 on:]

It's kind of like Naturama

That's now my second worst episode, That was number one before this pile of crap. 

[Reply #9 on:]

It's the worst episode. Even IAGDL's first few minutes were good or Rage Aggainst the Vaccine had some cool scenes or ideas. Here's just some funny gags spread out through 25 minutes of runtime, and that's it. The swinging Egg-Moon cracked me up.

Hated the canon part (I mean, the ending suggests it's not canon I hope) with King of Space. Hated the designs of those aliens and Leela acting OOC, and Fry being weak winy wuss, and also old. It's lazy how Leela's actions were explained at the end.

The non-canon parts where... non-canon, lazy and didn't resemble Futurama so I don't see a point for a rewatch. It was so bad and felt like different thing.

The wind-up shit was bad and Fry dies for like 1212212 time. And Bender dies 01010101012100 time this time. Boring.

Everyone is a car shit - lazy. I mean there is no suspense, no twist, no creativity in any of the four stories. Everyone is answering the phone like idiot and dies. Oh, and forgot there is a twist at the end. Eh...

Dux shit - some characters are eggs now and some are ducks, and they hate each other. That's it. What else can I say? That it's shit probably.

So I have seen it once and that's enough, there is nothing more to unpack and it doesn't feel like Futurama, more like AI wrote this ep.

1/10. It's the worst.

[Reply #10 on:]

I struggle to bring to mind an episode that was a bigger waste of my time. They really hit a rich vein of boring nothingness with this episode.

[Reply #11 on:]

Not great. Better than "Saturday Morning Fun Pit", a bit worse than "Naturama".

There were some alright jokes here and there. The plain blue map was kind of amusing. But nothing about this episode was actually interesting. I kind of get what they were going for; the idea that there's a short, hyper-intense story that's constantly being interrupted by ads is something I can get behind. And for that reason I don't particularly mind Leela randomly falling head-over-heels for some stranger.

The bulk of the episode is just dumb.

Reincarnation was a fluke. Please stop making these anthologies.

[Reply #12 on:]

This revival was a mistake. 0/10

[Reply #13 on:]

I don't understand how they keep thinking these anthology episodes are a good idea. Post Fox run, they've all been pretty bad.

Unfortunately this season overall hasn't been great, aside from two really good episodes, it's shown that I was valid to be concerned when the revival was announced. Hopefully next week can end on a high, but I'm not too optimistic

3/10

[Reply #14 on:]

About three quarters of the way through this episode, around the time Weeble Bender and Duckie Farnsworth were quibbling over interspecies romance—I think it was at the line about peace-fighting—I said aloud, "This episode is fucking dumb but I am very amused." In some ways, that can suffice as my review: this was objectively a stupid episode, in concept and execution, but I was consistently entertained by it.

The only benefit of these anthology episodes, as I see it, is they embolden the writers to write the goofiest, most out-of-pocket dialogue. And, I cannot lie, a lot of that dialogue worked for me here. Whether it was the Windup Fortune Teller's line about a quarter buying enlightenment and a nickel buying a sticker that says you climbed the mountain, Car Hermes blithely carrying on after Car Farnsworth tells him to continue without him, or Duckie Fry thinking Weeble Leela's name was also Fry...look, guys, I laughed. These descriptive sentences I am writing are horrifically stupid, but I laughed, and I enjoyed myself, and I should probably apologize for that but I won't.

My main gripe with the episode has nothing to do with the frame story—which was annoying in a shippy sense, yes, but I understood they were going for a '50s-style soap opera level of melodrama, and I'm taking the whole thing as non-canon anyway—but with the second segment, which was the weakest of the three for me because it somehow managed to be highly derivative of "The Honking" not only in plot but also in some of the jokes. (Oh, also, the Fortune Teller's line about steaming loads was an irksome and needless rip-off of the excellent mumbo-jumbo joke from "The Honking.") The wind-up segment was kind of fun (it reminded me of "Reincarnation" conceptually, where you're using these ridiculous iterations of the characters to explore a philosophically meaty question) and the duckie/Weeble segment was kind of cute (I did go "awww" at the ending), and again I thought the frame story was knowingly/deliberately ridiculous so I was wiling to let it slide.

My other complaint about this episode is the four-act structure really doesn't work for a three-segment anthology—those act breaks mid-segment were jarring, and completely undermined the notion that these are interstitials/commercial breaks for the larger frame story—but I've had some version of that complaint for pretty much every episode this season so that's nothing new. It was especially egregious here, though, because of the overall conceit of the episode, and I'd be remiss not to briefly gripe about it. I'm not docking the episode points for it, though.

In summation: Did this episode need to exist? No. Am I glad they wasted one of the ten episodes this season on a non-canon bizarro script? Also no. But did I laugh harder and more consistently at this episode than at most others this season? It brings me no joy to admit it, but that's a resounding yes. I liked this one, think it's probably the second best anthology episode of the post-Fox run after "Reincarnation," and wouldn't even consider it the worst episode of this season. That all translates to a solid 7/10 for me, sorry-not-sorry.

[Reply #15 on:]

I said nothing could be worse than the Covid episode, but they proved me!

[Reply #16 on:]

1/10

One would think that after disaster of certain Principal Skinner storyline, Groening´s cartoons would learn and they would never reference Prince and the Pauper ever again. Unfortunately, "Principal and the Pauper" is a masterpiece in comparison.

I know that in theory this might have sounded as a funny parody/self-parody but in the end it looked as a drug-induced dream. You see, my father (before he changed his mind) once said that "Futurama is intended for merry oligophrenic who is too centered on sci-fi." Kinda, I start to see his point.

EDIT: Is it still worth mentioning that this show kinda peaked in 4ACV?

[Reply #17 on:]

Erm?

Erm.

I chortled a bit in one or two places.

There's other episodes that everyone hates but I found somewhat/somehow entertaining (and most of those have been this season), there's other episodes that people enjoy that I somewhat/somehow dislike - this is neither, I just leave going... erm?

Actually, if I stop still long enough for a veil of darkness to gently glide from above and delicately stroke my head and tinge my vision, I think on how certain aspects of this episode remind me of other episodes long past.

Leela suddenly falling in love: A Bicyclops Built for Two; Some horror thing involving cars: The Honking; the characters climbing mountains searching for divine wisdom: Godfellas, to name a few.

And those are some of my most-favourite episodes of Futurama, and this episode shits all over them, like a deliberately piss-poor mockery.

So yeah... basically what I felt during most of the episode... erm... the fuck...?

[Reply #18 on:]

Is it still worth mentioning that this show kinda peaked in 4ACV?

I certainly need no convincing on that front! (I've enjoyed this new season well enough, but it does not exist for me as a continuation of the beloved, short-lived sci-fi animated series Futurama that aired between 1999 and 2003 for a total of 72 episodes on the Fox network; rather, it is an assortment of adventures featuring those same characters but existing for me in a parallel universe. Compartmentalization is my best friend.)

Oh, also, one thing I will say about this episode: there was nothing distinctly Futurama-y about it. Like, besides the space-delivery premise of the frame story, the segments themselves were not unique to this show. Family Guy, the Simpsons, or any lesser animated series could have done this exact same anthology-style episode and it would've been about the same. Beyond taking advantage of some existing character dynamics—Bender's affection for Fry, Hermes's disdain for Zoidberg, Fry's love for Leela—this episode did nothing that only Futurama could do. So that's a knock against it, I suppose, though for me it was actually a plus because it allowed me to enjoy the episode on its own terms without being frustrated by how horrible it was in terms of Futurama's usual standard of quality.

[Reply #19 on:]

Good

• I appreciate the return of the anthology wraparound sequence
• I like that the wraparound is initially presented as being canon
• The utterly avante garde episode presentation of a "canon" story being interrupted for weird, non-canon toy commercials. I wish they'd done more with it
• The return of Bender dying in anthology episodes accompanied with a "Goodbye, sweet prince" reference.
• "I'm 40% aerodynamic", "That's not aerodynamic enough!"
• The running joke of the cat being chased by a dog was kinda neat
• Friction causing cars to generally slow down on the news
• I found the "Thanks, that was really good" from the Lamassu after Fry gives it a carrot really funny. All about the delivery.
• Amy's "haven't you ever seen a map?" line.
• The "Peck him until he falls down" bit was sort of amusing I guess
• The weeble moon was a nice touch
• I guess Fry and Leela being reborn as the opposite toys was a decent ending twist for the Eggulon sequence
• "A science spell" is a good joke. Shame about every other aspect of that plot detail

Bad

• I don't like that the wraparound is actually just non-canon but it's not clear that that's the case until the end
• The character design of The King of Space and everyone else in his species sucks
• I don't really mind about the writers screwing us about when it comes to Fry and Leela's relationship, but this just came out of absolutely fucking nowhere. And the revelation that it was a magic spell is so poorly handled and thrown away that it's just bizarre
• Hideous character designs for the Windo versions of the characters
• I don't get the "I eated, I prayed, I loveded" joke. Surely it should be "I ated, I prayeded, I loveded" or "I ate, I prayed, I loved"? I dunno. Just seems like dumb for the sake of dumb.
• The way reincarnation is handled / depicted in the Windows episode is totally nonsensical too. There are plastic moulds waiting melted plastic beneath the Earth? And
• "Heaven's not an actual place the way Hell is" would be a good joke, except it's a reference to Robot Hell, right? And we've seen Robot Heaven on the show.
• The art-design in general in the Windos section was completely lacking
• Bender tries to wind Fry back up (no one even thought to try it earlier?) and can't do it, but then he sticks himself in the wall and he suddenly can? I thought they were at least going to try something along the lines of all the characters had been trying to turn the key the wrong way and then realised it went the other way
• The physics generally seemed way off for most of the Round Wheels animation
• They set up a Ring curse, but it's revealed to be Zoidberg? So did Zoidberg make that art-film they showed on the news? Did Zoidberg make those warranty calls that were seemingly able to brainwash Amy, Fry, Leela and Bender? How did the curse get started and take on a reputation to the point that they were showing it on the news?
  
• The cars don't even behave like toy cars; they just behave like actual cars. When Hermes crashes into The Professor, it's not like crashing a couple of Hot Wheels cars into one another. It's like an actual car crash. It felt, at times, like they didn't want to commit to a toy car thing and they just wanted to do the characters as cars.
• The magic spell thing is so badly handled. It seems like when Leela realises she's killed the prince would have been a perfect place to handle the spell wearing off, etc
• The animation in the Rubber Ducks sequence sucked too. Something about the vast, bland water just looked super crappy.
• Wasted opportunity with the whole Fry and Leela falling in love as duck and eggs thing. The toy ads should have had thematic relevance to the wraparound story, showing that Fry and Leela actually do love each other or something
• The random ending of them being in a Bender toy ship that crashes into Earth. Dumb
• The wraparound sequence has absolutely NOTHING to do with toys or anything happening in the bulk of the episode
• Not especially funny

Weakest episode of the season for me. Definitely not the worst episode ever, though, so that's something. I've got it ranked as the 7th worst episode of all time on my current overall rankings list.

6/10

[Reply #20 on:]

That was pretty good television. By which I mean, it was terrible Futurama.

I like the idea of a fake Futurama episode as a framing device, but that space prince stuff was dull. Even a recent Simpsons episode, Lisa the Boy Scout, did a much better job with the "interrupted episode" premise. And Fry's voice was pretty hard to ignore this week, with all due respect to Billy West. He sounds way older than he did just 5 years ago in the Worlds of Tomorrow promos.

[Reply #21 on:]

I giggled a couple of times, so I'll give it a couple of points.

But OMFG, was that just mindlessly and aggressively stupid.

[Reply #22 on:]

Well, it's obvious that they PURPOSELY wanted to rile up F/L shippers and they got this. At least from me. I don't buy into it's totally non-canon, because Leela did sell a castle to the King of Space in 6ACV25. At least partially it's real. Enough said. 1/10. Well deserved.

Just because they've established that The King of Space is part of Futurama canon doesn't mean anything we see in this episode is.

That's like saying Fry never coming to the future in "Anthology of Interest I" is canon because Al Gore is a character on the show.

I mean, I suspect this is what his home is like and that The Prince of Space and so on are all "real" characters in the world of Futurama. But this particular delivery with the macaroni and Leela falling in love with the Prince? None of that ever "happened".

[Reply #23 on:]

One would think that after disaster of certain Principal Skinner storyline, Groening´s cartoons would learn and they would never reference Prince and the Pauper ever again.

They had pretty good results doing it in "The Prisoner of Benda".

[Reply #24 on:]

I'll bet money there's a deleted scene from this episode that was meant to portray how Leela might be under a spell but some dumb crap from the last act (or next act/segment) was more important to the writers than explaining a very simple plot element.

My theory is that the wraparound was originally canon, but they realised it was so terrible that they hastily added the final moment revealing them to be inside a Bender ship that crashes into Earth just to make sure no one thinks any of that actually counts.

[Reply #25 on:]

What the actual crap was that? Like I enjoyed Zoidberg killing everyone and honestly that should be the canon ultimate end of the show. Just Zoidberg snapping and murdering everyone finally. That was the only thing I really enjoyed, well also the duck eating eyeballs.

[Reply #26 on:]

I have no bloody idea what I just got done watching. No idea whatsoever. It took me a hot minute to realize they were shooting for an anthology episode, because usually they use the What If machine to go through the motions. I was probably a third ofthe way in before I realized I wasn't supposed to be taking this seriously. On that note, I was cringing at the commercial segments, and felt that the execution of ideas were not good. Furthermore, the 'main' story was supposed to be a dramatic soap, right? So why didn't Leela or the prince give dramatic exposition about her being under his spell? I'd completely expect that from a soap. Nice lightsaber lances though I guess?


3/10, and I feel that's being quite generous to this one.

[Reply #27 on:]

This wasn't a great episode, but it wasn't boring. Plus, I laughed at a lot of the jokes, many of which were science-y.

The tone of the series has become noticeably more cartoonish this season: in animation, attention to detail wrt the canon, and the logic of the physical universe. One nice thing about the anthology format is that all of those constraints are looser, which lets the other aspects of the episode stand on their own a little more.

The animation in the windup segment, the mechanical snowflake in particular, looked nice. I wonder if the work behind The Duh-Vinci Code was re-used. The other parts were mostly OK, though some were noticeably lacking in detail.

The characters seemed to fit the established personalities well, the outliers being Zoidberg with the car-crushing (though not /totally/ out of character), and Leela with the marriage (but, magic?). Hedonismbot had his best appearance so far this season, and Hermes' limbo-powers were put to good use.

The plots of the sub-episodes ultimately made no sense, but the first and third had the tone of the more lighthearted futurama episodes of old. The framing plot started off well, though it unfortunately got worse as the episode went on. The resolution, if it can be called that, was probably my least favourite part.

Overall, 7/10.

Episodes with a package delivery: 3/9! Better than I'd feared.

For the record, the half-asteroid-with-no-protective-dome-holds-a-house thing was distracting

[Reply #28 on:]

Episodes with a package delivery: 3/9! Better than I'd feared.

At one point while watching the episode I did think to myself, "Damn, there's a package delivery (onscreen or alluded to) in every segement—zappdingbat will be so pleased!"

I do wonder, though—and I'm sure this information is freely available somewhere, though I wouldn't know where to look for it—how many episodes in the original and CC runs included a package delivery? I'm just about through with season three in my (very slow) rewatch of the series, and there are a surprising number of episodes that contain no deliveries. I wonder if 33% or so is about average for all seasons, or if season eight has uniquely dropped the ball in terms of remembering that, you know, Planet Express is a package-delivery company.

[Reply #29 on:]

Apparently someone has already done the work (though some more need to be added, I think).

You're right, there aren't actually that many, even in the early seasons. For me, it's more of a proxy for how grounded the show is, and how much it's sticking to a realistic premise, in this case of average denizens in a delivery company. Episodes where that gets thrown out for some zany plot are almost always bad, in my opinion (The Inhuman Torch, for example). Episodes that stick to it elevate the show from just another cartoon to something which has a chance of giving worthwhile commentary on society (in exactly the same way that the classic Simpsons was great).

The premise is also constraint on the stories, in a good way; there are plenty of interesting plots that could be thought up within it. Going outside of it - making it about a group of people with no visible source of income and endless free time who just go off on adventures - seems likely to correspond to a lack of effort in framing the story in the first place.

[Reply #30 on:]

As much as I've been really enjoying the Hulu season so far, I found this episode to be a big dud for me.

One of my good friends said, "I'm just glad this doesn't seem to be canon," and I'm inclined to agree with him. I wish they went with one or the other in terms of the plot- either commiting to the mind control/prince plot or the anthology plot. There were a few good jokes, but all in all I much prefer the classic Futurama episode setup we've seen in other parts of this season.

Maybe my least favorite episode of the series so far, just because it's so all over the place and unfocused in its writing. Not my cup of tea (and it seems others feel the same).

[Reply #31 on:]

Hey zappdingbat! I took that conversation over to the General Futurama Discussion thread because this is a review thread for a particularly bad episode.

[Reply #32 on:]

^To be fair, I’m the one who started steering us in this off-topic direction. My bad!

With that said, these review threads are unlikely to reach 20 pages on their own steam, so I think the occasional digression is OK as long as it remains at least tangentially related to the episode in question. But I am not a mod, so who cares what I think? Hell, who in their right mind cares what I think regardless?

[Reply #33 on:]

Hey zappdingbat! I took that conversation over to the General Futurama Discussion thread because this is a review thread for a particularly bad episode.

OK. I was happy with the discussion being here, too (there was a delivery in this episode, and I did persist in mentioning that delivery in my review, again). Also, for the record, I didn't think this episode was particularly bad, though I'm in the minority on that.

[Reply #34 on:]

I'm sure there are probably some ideas that are hilarious, but won't work in the show's continuity so the only option is to use them in the anthology format, but these stories just aren't funny. It feels less like "It's so funny we HAD to use it" and more like "We're out of ideas so lets throw some random crap at the wall and get one episode closer to a full season."

This isn't a tradition like Treehouse of Horror; there's no need to feel obligated to doing these episodes. I hope they will wait until they come up with some legitimately funny and interesting ideas before taking another swing at an anthology.