Futurama Episodes

The real challenge of ‘Futurama’s’ return is one of precarious balance.

In order to survive (again), the show has to find a way to please the hardcore fans that have kept it everyone’s consciousness and bring in new fans who haven’t kept up with it.

For the fans, that means sacrificing some of the facets that made the original so much fun and relying more on humor that can reach the broadest possible audience. The second episode of the new season, fortunately and unfortunately, featured a healthy mix of the two, healthy in a “gym class sex lesson” kind of way.

The episode really felt devoid of the usual ‘Futurama’ staples like the rage against technology and little in-jokes that drive its main humor. It also relied a lot more on crude humor that seems to have become the norm for Comedy Central’s newer, homegrown shows (i.e. the horrific ‘Secret Girlfriend’). ‘Futurama’ isn’t above such humor like the penultimate “Spanish Fry” episode, but it also have to be clever and less predictable.

Zapp Branigan is a selfish, piggish and pathetic lump of a man who clearly seems over his head in every situation he encounters whether it’s destroying a squadron of evil brains or trying to make it with a woman (Matt Groening described him as what the actual William Shatner would be like if he were a starship captain). So his very nature made the so-called “twist” of the episode very predictable. Anyone could see the execution of Zapp’s plan coming, even if it took longer than normal (see? I’m not above crude humor).

The execution was still a lot of fun. Zapp and Leela are marooned on an Eden-esque planet after fighting off a giant “Death Sphere” (a clever crack at ‘Star Wars’) that censors anything objectionable in its path with a giant black glob of censor bars. Professor Farnsworth learns the “Sphere” is a really an out-of-control “V-Chip” satellite that crashed with an FCC satellite and the people of Earth have to hold back on the lovin’ until they can stop it.

It was nice to see ‘Futurama’ stick with its satirical roots. The best of the old episodes always had a touch of something that spoke out about something (i.e. global warming in “Crimes of the Hot,” environmental awareness in “A Big Piece of Garbage”). It really knew how to drive the episode, both on plot and humor, and it works here, for the most part.

Still, this episode lacked a real sense of cleverness and the things that make ‘Futurama’ so unique. That and Bender. He barely had a chuckle the entire show! Come on ‘Futurama,’ you can’t keep a good Bender down. Next time, I want to see the robot with a drink in his hand and a chuckle in his mechanical heart for the entire episode. The preview with the two headed vomiting goat is a promising start.

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It’s here! It’s finally here! ‘Futurama‘ is back baby! And Bender! And his banjo! And Fry! (I’ll never get sick of that joke.)

All of my favorite characters are back in action, as if nothing ever happened to them. The first new episode of Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s genius creation. It’s like being reunited with an old college friend and realizing that they are the same silly, dumb, hard partying freak you spent so much time trying to keep his drooping head from falling in the toilet.

So why, after all this time, does it feel so weird to watch?

Don’t get me wrong. ‘Futurama’ always has been and still is a blast to watch. The clever writing and characterization is still there. The story is engaging and surprising. Bender is, well, Bender. Something about it just still feels strange and haunting.

It’s probably the plucky little back story that kept it in the pop culture consciousness and helped bring it back to life. I’ve been in this situation before with ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000.’ My expectations are never as good as the actual re-product.

Fortunately, that wasn’t the case with Comedy Central’s “rebirthing” of ‘Futurama.’ It’s just as smart, fresh and (most importantly) funny as it ever was.

The first new episode had a hazard of being sub-substandard since it has to tie up the loose end that the fourth film, “Into the Wild Green Yonder,” left them with since the future of the show was still up in the air. As you may remember (and if you didn’t, Comedy Central conveniently ran it before the show’s premiere), the Planet Express ship is careening into a worm hole and just as the ship rides off into the galactic sunset, Fry and Leela finally confess their love to each other, a movie that the writers put in as a final thumb nosing to the world since the show’s future was still so uncertain, according to the DVD commentary track.

As the show returns, we eventually learn the ship had gone into the “Panama Worm Hole” that leads them directly back to Earth including the Nimbus, piloted by the always hilarious space ship captain Zap Branigan, causing a calamitous crash that kills the entire crew, hence the “rebirth” (the sticky, sloppy rebirth, ick).

The episode feels a little contained since it has to take time to explain the link from the old series to the new and make time to re-introduce the old characters to the new ones. Thankfully, they are just as colorful and funny as they always were, especially Bender who has to spend the entire episode partying “Slurms MacKensize” style to keep a life saving doomsday device installed in chest cavity in check. The image of Bender boogeying down in the background in such heavy situations was a nice touch.

It also had a few of the background “nerd” jokes that the old show was chocked full of were nice to find, like the not-so-subtle “Studio 54″ sign (do the math). I would have liked to see more of them since that’s one of the reasons that made the old show so much fun, but I’ll take what I can get.

The story itself also felt a little too forced with it’s tied up ending, but it still had a great sense of surprise and shock that worked like a perfect ‘Twilight Zone’ parody mixed with a little Philip K. Dick-esque (snicker) exploration of the meaning of life using robots as a vehicle for exploring the nature of existence.

The entire episode set a nice smooth pace for the new series. I can’t wait for the next episode. Here it comes now!

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When I talked to David X. Cohen, executive producer and showrunner of ‘Futurama,’ about what season the show is on, he had a very hard time coming up with an answer. Considering FOX used to air the show in an extremely disjointed manner, he decided to go by production seasons. According to him, this upcoming season, which debuts on Thursday, June 24 at 10PM ET on Comedy Central, is considered the show’s sixth.

This included the series of DVDs that were broken up into the initial set of 16 episodes that ran on Comedy Central. And, just like those movies, the first two new standalone episodes were a mixed bag. The season starts of with a bang, and then continues with an episode that could have been better if it wasn’t weighed down with trying to convey a message.

Fans of the show will recall that the last movie, ‘Into the Wild Green Yonder,’ ended with Zapp Brannigan chasing the Planet Express crew into a wormhole, with no idea what was on the other side. Leela and Fry had expressed their love for each other (with the help of brain slugs), and it seemed that everything was up in the air.

The season premiere, ‘Rebirth,’ resolves a lot of these issues, with some clever robot-related satire that seems to parallel scenes from ‘V’ and ‘Star Trek VI’ in equal measure. As is the show’s practice, they refer a few times at the beginning of the episode to the fact that they were canceled by “idiots,” and then picked up by “an even bigger group of idiots,” and make some not-so-subtle allusions to the show’s precarious existence. Oh, and Bender gets to party a lot in this one, and he hates it.

While ‘Rebirth’ is a funny comeback to 22-minute storytelling and takes some clever twists and turns to resolve the hanging issues from the end of the movie, the next episode, ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela,’ stumbles for a couple of reasons. In the episode, a menacing death globe threatens to blot Earth from existence, and World President Nixon enlists the help of both Brannigan and Leela to defeat it.

Of course, Brannigan being Brannigan, he takes this chance to romance Leela once again, even though she’s devoted to Fry. Zapp’s scheming there is always funny to watch, especially the fact that his dreams tend to be in the format of old-timey movie serials.

But the other story, about the death globe, is an “issue” parody, something ‘Futurama’ has never seemed to address with the deft that its cousin, ‘The Simpsons,’ has been able to do over the years. When it works, it’s as funny and thought-provoking as it’s intended to be, but often it doesn’t work, and it comes off as ham-handed or too political. Without going too much into what the message of the death globe story was, I will say that story didn’t generate more than a couple of chuckles from me, and I found it more distracting than informative.

Still, it’s good to have the ‘Futurama’ gang back, especially after last summer’s contentious negotiations with the voice actors. Comedy Central will be airing their 26-episode order in two chunks, and then the fate of the show is again up in the air. But at least we won’t have to worry about that until sometime in 2011.

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New wave rockers Devo are to get animated to celebrate the 100th episode of cult show “Futurama“. The futuristic Matt Groening series was canceled in 2003 but fans brought it back to life.

To celebrate the 100th show, Groening asked his musical heroes to be a part of the show and they agreed to play mutant rights activists. The episode comes as Devo stage a comeback of their own – their upcoming “Something for Everybody” will be the band’s first album in 20 years.

Although Devo will play animated activists in an episode called ‘The Mutants Are Revolting’, they will still focus on the “devolution” of the human race. Bassist Jerry Casale recently said about the band’s role in society, stating “We’re not the guys who freak people out and scare them. We’re like the house band on the ‘Titanic’, entertaining everybody as we go down.”