‘Futurama‘ always works best, in my mind, when it tackles the pop tech world. When the show struggled to stay on Fox, no other show would even go near the subject in fear of alienating their cool audience by discussing things that only members of the high school audio-visual club could understand without their eyes bleeding.
Apple needed to be taken down a peg or two and that’s coming from someone who is pounding out this article on a dusty old MacBook, listening to an Elvis Costello compilation on an iPod and watching his stocks sink into the Earth’s core on his iPhone.
This time, the “EyePhone” gets the sharp end of Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s very sharp pointing stick and it works … for the most part.
It’s really the perfect target for ‘Futurama‘ because it represents an unrelenting encroachment of technology on our lives and how society just drools at its awesome shininess while overlooking its obvious flaws. Nothing sums up that theme better than Fry’s encounter with a “Mom Store” employee who describes the “EyePhone” as a device that comes with only one service provider and get lousy reception, as dumb ol’ Fry screams: “Shut up and take my money!” The old saying, “It’s funny because it’s true,” is true.
I was also happy to see the little funny touches that the writers and animators wrote into the background for us to find, like those tiny comic strips in the margins of ‘MAD’ magazine. Things like the bird flying through the smoke stack and coming out as a skeleton not only make the show funny, but give me a reason to watch it again. I hoped I would see more of them in the earlier episodes … or did I just miss them?
Of course, the evil “Mom,” one of the most ingenious characters on the show, is behind all of this “EyePhone” infatuation and it turns into yet another plan for world domination with Bender and Fry in the middle. The two are in a “Twitcher” race to attract one million followers and the loser has to do a double somersault into a hot tub sundae of “Puke-Me-Poop-U” vomit/diarrhea, a lovely crude crack at the original ‘Doctor Dolittle’ and its Tibetan “Pushmi-Pullyu.” Mom plans to release a virus through one of the two in order to turn their followers into walking zombies. Then, it gets weird.
The whole episode takes a huge spin into “Druggachussettes” when Fry discovered the singing “boil” on Leela’s ass, a not-so-subtle crack at singing sensation and Internet heroine Susan Boyle. It’s certainly more creative than just turning one-eyed Leela into a surprisingly good singer (it also made a nice little trick as it lead up to that moment) but it goes so far over the top that it’s hard to find it really funny. Craig Ferguson’s surprise cameo as the voice of “Susan Boil,” however, was a riot.
It also gave me an excuse to stare at Leela’s ass for the last ten minutes of the show. (At least this time it was an integral part of the plot.)
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