Re-Futurama

Reviewing the original run of Futurama, one episode at a time.

[refuturama-blog]

Season 1, Episode 3: I, Roommate

This is an interesting episode. I mentioned that "The Series Has Landed" felt much more like a Futurama episode than the pilot did, despite basically repeating the plot of several episodes of The Simpsons. "I, Roommate," though, doesn't repeat anything from The Simpsons (or at least isn't as obvious in its repetition) and introduces a bunch of Futurama elements, and yet it still feels less like an episode of Futurama than "The Series Has Landed" does. Got that? I think the problem lies in the extended pastiche of The Odd Couple that serves as the episode's conceit. Futurama would try these episode long pastiches a lot in this first season--I would say about 1/3 of the episodes in this season could be classified as such--but whereas at its peak The Simpsons managed almost to become the definitive version of some classic films and stories, "I, Roommate" isn't quite at that level. As it stands, this isn't really a sharp parody, and it obscures some of the strides the show is making in this episode.

The focus of the episode is Bender and Fry's relationship. In a clever bit of writing, Bender's dependence on his friendship with Fry doesn't undercut his many negative qualities, and Fry's callousness in the episode (combined with the introduction of his wholly unfounded vanity) gives his character a bit of an edge that might otherwise be lacking. In short, they make a lot more sense together than apart after this episode, a point that will be exploited for the rest of the series. There's not really a B-story in the episode, but the show within a show of All My Circuits makes its debut--a moment that should be treasured by all--and its story arc kind of works in place of one. The star of All My Circuits is Calculon (who, we later find out, has been all of history's greatest acting robots, including David Duchovny), and Maurice Lamarche's voicing of him phenomenal, taking Orson Welles as his starting point and making him even more pretentious and narcissistic. Like The Simpsons, Futurama has an extended cast that trumps most shows' primary casts, and that means that some great creations (like Boxy Robot), show up only in rare glimpses. This is a relatively Boxy heavy episode, though, so lap it up!

Plotwise, the story is fairly straightforward. Fry is annoying everyone by living at Planet Express (his unsanitary habits are attracting owls, ushering in one of the most infrequently referenced aspects of the future) and so he's forced to move out. While he first moves in with Bender, the robot's apartment proves inadequate (no bathroom, a roommate who dreams out loud about killing all humans and sexy female robots) despite being a spacious two cubic feet, and Leela tries to help them find an apartment. When Fry and Bender finally get a place, Bender's antenna interferes with the TV, and he must either move out or remove his antenna. After an extended stretch of sobriety (whose effects loosely correspond to getting really, really drunk for humans) covered by a sequence that inverts the late night neon lights passing by a character montage already done by The Simpsons, Bender cuts off his antenna. Fry, after some prompting from Leela, feels bad about what he's forced his friend to do, and they move back into Bender's original apartment, only to discover that his comically oversize closet serves as an effective living space for Fry (and his miniature fruit salad tree). There are some nice sight gags sprinkled throughout (like an M. C. Escher-esque apartment that Fry decides against because he's not sure about paying for a dimension they're not going to use), but most of the laughs come from All My Circuits, to be honest. 

I have to admit that this isn't one of my favourite episodes. I don't even have much to say about the animation. It's usual Futurama quality, but nothing really stands out as being exceptional (minus the above mentioned Escher scene). There's a lot of nice character development stuff in the episode--Fry and Bender are really fleshed out here--but it just feels kind of dull as a whole. Re-watching these first few episodes I've been struck by just how much smaller the show was at this point. Everything feels a little timid, as if the writers are worried about being too outlandish at this point. Thankfully, everything is going to start getting a whole lot crazier soon, and by the end of the season, the show's parodic abilities and its ambitions will have grown impressively.

Next week, on a very special Futurama: The Planet Express crew meets a Space Legend!

[refuturama-blog]

Season 1, Episode 2: The Series Has Landed

As the title of the episode makes clear, Futurama has survived the pilot stage and is into its main run. So what does the episode do first? Introduce a bunch of extended cast members, of course. It's hard to believe, but Horrible Gelatinous Blob is actually introduced before Hermes, Amy, and Zoidberg, and, in a shocking bit of injustice, Sal is introduced before Scruffy. Hermes Conrad is next, though, and everyone's favourite Jamaican accountant is, like the rest of the characters, a little rough at this stage. His voice is deeper, and his wonderfully boring personality as a bureaucrat hasn't quite arrived. The more exciting introduction is Dr. John Zoidberg, the Planet Express company physician. Speaking of rough drafts, this is Zoidberg as he was originally designed: a parody of Bones from Star Trek, the joke about Zoidberg at this point in the series is that he's a bad doctor ("Now, open your mouth and let's have a look at that brain!"). Very quickly, this will be replaced by his more familiar characterisation as a poor, needy, friendless loser (who's also a bad doctor). Last up for the Planet Express crew is Amy Wong (of the Mars Wongs, natch), a rich engineering graduate student who conveniently shares the Professor's blood type.

Amy arrives pretty fully formed in this episode, which is an interesting point: both female characters are much closer to their final forms than any of the male characters. Leela is a badass, a bit of a busybody (the less kind might say nag), and a lonely orphan, while Amy is a klutz who curses loudly and lustily in Cantonese when things don't go her way. Though both characters will obviously grow richer as the series goes on, both the writers and Katey Segal and Lauren Tom (who voice Leela and Amy, respectively) seem to have known what they were going for from the start. Of course, the downside here is that much of Amy's growth is tied to her romantic life. I think that, like The Simpsons, Futurama actually does a good job of providing strong, interesting female characters, but the show is also reliant on some of the same outdated and unfair modes of characterising females and providing female characters with depth that plague your standard sitcom. This is definitely an issue to keep an eye on over the course of the series.

Anyway, back to the episode at hand. In the commentary, Matt Groening mentions just how impressive the animation has been right from the beginning, and there are a few sequences in this show that back him up. The trip from the Planet Express headquarters to the moon is very impressive--though not in the same way the technicolour explosion of the ship's takeoff in the first episode is--and the shot of Fry and Leela looking at the moon from the LEM (as seen above) remains one of my favourite scenes in the entire series. Seriously, those colours and the subtle glow around the Earth are just beautiful. That scene also wraps up the focus of the main story quite well: Fry is genuinely excited by the prospect of visiting the moon, only to find himself at a tacky amusement park that misrepresents the history of the space race. His enthusiasm for experiencing the "real" moon gets them into trouble, but it also allows them to find the location of the original moon landing, presumed lost years ago. His impassioned speech to Leela about what the moon means to him--a symbol of escape and how life could be better somewhere else, even if you can never reach that place--is really quite poignant. Fry seems genuinely taken by the romance of the Apollo missions, and his quiet countdown to himself during the anticlimactic trip to the moon is endearing and funny at the same time.

For as well as the A-story is written, the B-story (Amy loses the keys and must become a master of the claw game to get them back) feels shoehorned into the episode. I cringed when, apropos of nothing, Bender drew Amy's attention to the box they had delivered just as its contents are emptied into the machine. The writing would get a lot more organic as the series went on, obviously, and Ken Keeler would write some of the best episodes in the show's run, but this is rough. That being said, this episode feels much more like a Futurama episode than the pilot did. Little touches like the crocodiles wearing space helmets in the craters are pure Futurama, and though The Simpsons had already done several fantastic amusement park parodies (Duff Gardens, Itchy and Scratchy Land), the focus here isn't on irony and cynicism to the same degree.

The real development, for me, is Bender. If the first episode didn't quite get him right, he's a lot closer here. The way that he does such a deliberately crappy job of diverting Amy with his head so that his body can steal her wallet is hilarious and much more in line with the rest of the series. Similarly, his romancing and impregnating (?!) of the Crushinator (is this where his firstborn son comes from?) reinforces his sleaziness and establishes his penchant for getting into relationships with modes of transportation much larger than himself. He also (inadvertently) creates an internet meme in this episode and, under the cover of his fear of magnets that lower his inhibition unit, reveals his secret desire to be a folk singer, an infrequent but long running joke.

Ultimately, this episode is a bit of a mixed bag. There are some great bits of animation, some nice moments of character development, and a whole bunch of new and much loved characters. At the same time, though, the writing is a bit choppy in places and the episode feels kind of small. It makes sense that the first destination would be the moon, but compared to how bizarre and outlandish things will get, I kind of wish the show had dived right into the deep end. The series might have landed, but it isn't walking around on the surface just yet--the influence of The Simpsons is still dominant and the jokes aren't flying quite as furiously as they will in later episodes and seasons. Some of the larger plot movements will kick in soon, though, and hopefully that will coincide with the series really coming into its own.

Next time, on a very special Futurama: The Planet Express crew goes apartment hunting!

[refuturama-blog]

Season 1, Episode 1: Space Pilot 3000

I can actually remember watching this the night it premiered. I was super excited. Sadly, I don’t remember what my reaction to it was. I must have liked it, but it was so hard to actually see episodes of Futurama (thanks, FOX!) that my fandom was slow in developing. The episode, and the series, opens up with some (deliberately) crappy animation as Fry narrates how to play Monkey Fracas Jr., and the first few moments are little more than setup. There are some nice background jokes (“Do not tip the delivery boy!”), but these first scenes are all about telling us how Fry ended up in the year 3000. Oh, and setting in motion one of the longest, strangest reveals I've ever encountered on a show. On the off chance that you've never watched the series straight through, I’ll keep this one a secret for now, but if you pause just before Fry falls into the cryogenic tube, you should notice a shadow that will become very familiar. . . The sequence of civilization being destroyed and rebuilding itself as Fry sleeps is well animated and worthy of a chuckle, but it’s the slowly zooming shot of New New York that a stunned Fry stares out on that hints at just where the series was going. A nice bit of subtly beautiful animation, that. The shot of Fry walking along the street after having escape the cryogenic building must have seemed so fast, so full, and so crazy when the series premiered. Along with the title sequence, it’s one of the best examples of how richly detailed the animation on Futurama was from the very start.

Plot-wise, this is very much a first episode: most of the time is spent having characters meet each other and getting them into the roles that they’ll play for the rest of the series. That said, there are some very funny moments, like Fry's turn on the probulator immediately after Leela gives him a speech about dignity, Fry’s impassioned demand to know if a passing blimp is accurate when it flashes the date, or Bender’s impossible reassembly of himself. The whole Fry doesn’t want to be a delivery boy plot is a little dull (the reversal at the end of the show when Fry happily becomes a delivery boy for his nephew, Professor Farnsworth, isn’t the payoff the writers clearly thought it would be), and much of the best stuff in the episode comes from the throwaway gags littered throughout. Like The Simpsons, Futurama had mastered the freeze frame and quick scroll gag from the very beginning. The Head Museum, though, is a brilliant concept, and Leonard Nimoy is his usual solid self as a guest star.

If there’s a flaw to the episode, it’s one that only becomes apparent in retrospect: the writers hadn’t really figured out the characters quite yet, especially Bender. He might say “bite my shiny metal ass!” to Fry, but this is not the lovable scamp of later episodes and seasons. The introduction to Bender, via his attempt to kill himself (and Fry) in a suicide booth, doesn’t really make sense given who he will become. Even less convincing is the reason Bender wants to kill himself: he’s discovered the girders he’s so awesome at bending—his bizarre pride in his ability at something he’s programmed to do, along with having a quarter on a string to activate the suicide booth, is the first glimpse in the episode of his future self—are used in the manufacture of suicide booths. Remorse has driven Bender to seek his end, and this is a note that just rings false now. However, the suicide booths themselves are an awesome gag, and the way that the knife comes out to slowly but determinedly make sure that the user is dead, coupled with the “You are now dead!” proclamation, is gloriously distasteful humour at its finest.

To go along with these minor issues in characterisation, the cast—one of the finest voice-acting casts I’ve ever heard—is still feeling out the characters. Fry and Leela would become sharper, and Bender would gain both swagger and abrasiveness, while the Professor sounds almost like a different character here. Nevertheless, there are some phenomenal bits of voice-acting scattered throughout this episode, particularly John DiMaggio’s sad noise after proudly announcing he will bend a grate open so that he and Fry can escape only to have Fry simply lift the grate. The best lines in the episode are saved for the Professor, oddly enough. From his bizarre penchant for bits of wire to the absolutely fantastic “Though I am already in my pyjamas. . .”  used as a reason not to escape a police raid, he makes the episode. His funniest line might his response to questions about his former crew, a distressed “Oh those poor sons of—” immediately cut off by a chipper “but that’s not important!” as he shakes their career chips out of an envelope marked “Contents of Space Wasp Stomach.”

The series is off and running, then, and there are already hints of the greatness to come, which is encouraging. Watching this episode almost fifteen years after it first aired, it’s funny how strange it still feels. The show is obviously indebted to The Simpsons, but the humour is at once geekier (Old Fortran Malt Liquor) and more insular than its predecessor’s warped view on American life and culture. Futurama would arguably emphasise both those qualities as it developed, and it became a better show for it because it created a world with an internal coherence that it did its best to never violate. Right now, though, one episode in, it’s hard to tell just what this The Simpsons-go-The Jetsons show was trying to do: the sub-Office Space plot doesn’t really work, but the characters are intriguing and the setting feels fresh and inspired even as it tips its cap to every science fiction trope in existence.

Next time, on a very special Futurama: the Planet Express crew goes to the moon!

[refuturama-blog]

Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!

Futurama is a great show. In fact, it’s my favourite show (this would probably be a bigger deal if I watched more/owned a television). So, inspired by the AV Club’s reviews of classic episodes of The Simpsons, I decided to review the original run of Matt Groening’s other show. I’m doing this in support of a big claim: at its best, Futurama managed to recapture the glory of golden age Simpsons in a way almost nothing else has. That’s probably writing a cheque that my reviewing abilities can’t quite cash, but we’ll see where the episodes take us! I’ll be going chronologically according to the episode order on the DVD releases of the first four seasons (that is, the shows produced before Futurama went off the air the first time) for a few reasons: 1) if there’s such a thing as a golden age of Futurama, I’m pretty sure it’s the third and fourth seasons of the original run, 2) I don’t think that the movies or the new seasons are quite as good, and 3) I have the DVDs of those first four seasons handy, but not all of the movies or the newest season. I don’t mean to slag off what the writers and animators have put out since returning—the movies are often hilarious, and at least one episode in each of the seasons that have followed Futurama’s return to the air has been all-time classic status worthy. Moment for moment, joke for joke, episode for episode, though, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the show’s quality has slipped slightly from the heights it once achieved (not really a damning problem: few shows ever reach those heights at all, let alone just miss hitting them after an extended layoff and in their second go round). Preliminaries aside, then, let’s get to the first episode!