Pi in the Sky

Futurama

Posted on July 8th, 2007 at 8:30am by Pi.
Categories: Television.

Futurama is a TV series created by Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons. In it, a pizza delivery boy is criogenically frozen, waking up in year 3000. There, he meets a bending robot an a gorgeous alien cyclope. And these three characters have all kind of funny adventures during 72 episodes.

Honestly, the description of Futurama seems a bit dull. It just looks as any other animated TV series. Yet, Futurama is not like other animated series. It owes a lot to The Simpsons, and some characters are stereotyped like Simpsons characters, yet they’re different. Characters get involved in loony situations while meeting loony secondary characters, many of them appearing in other episodes. Does it sound familiar? Yet Futurama is different.

Probably it’s the science-fiction background. It allows more room for suspension of disbelief, and the writers have found original and funny ways to link the future with the present, and parody modern stuff in futuristic twists.

And, Futurama is not a no-brainer, senseless amalgamate of science fiction stuff mixed together without a second though. It’s quite smart in many of its jokes, and there are so many hidden messages and subtle references to make it fun to watch the episodes again.

Anyone who has watched a couple of Futurama episodes already knows the three main characters: Fry, a quite idiot guy from the past, Bender; a heartless, evil robot; and Leela, a cyclope alien with more common sense than anyone else in the series. Yet Bender sometimes isn’t so cruel, Leela isn’t so perfect, and Fry isn’t so dumb (well, I’m not sure of this last statemen). They work for Fry’s grandgrand…grandniece, the Professor, in his delivery company which allow him to keep on with his mad experiments. With them, there are some more coworkers: Hermes, jamaican accountant; Amy, martian (of chinese origin) rich girl; and Zoidberg, a mixture of squid and lobster, Ph.D “specialized” in humans.

With this loony crew, the mishaps are guaranteed. In some episodes, the entire universe is in peril; in others, Fry just want to hit on Leela. There’s a bunch of notable semi-permanent characters who usually are damn funny. Zap Brannigan, the totally incompetent and over-condecorated space commander, is one of the funniest ones. As funny as Dr. Zoidberg (which doesn’t keep his first name from one episode to the other). And one of the winning moves in Futurama is its broad variety of humour used. Black comedy, self-deprecation, parody, blunt cruelty, etc.

There are plenty of fan sites in the web to find all you could ever imagine about Futurama: listings and transcriptions of episodes, the hidden alien messages, obscure references to movies and science-fiction works, stunningly exact scientific calculations… The episodes have many subtle details.

The big question: Five or Four seasons?

Futurama was broadcasted for five seasons, totalling 72 episodes. Yet there are only four seasons available in DVD. Well, if you look at the DVDs, they also total 72 episodes.

The mistery is no mistery at all. There were four production seasons, which correspond to the DVDs. However, not all episodes produced for a season were used in that season, and where broadcasted in next season instead. After the fourth broadcasted season, which wasn’t very successful, they made a mix up of all unreleased episodes to do a fifth season without having to produce a single episode. And they cancelled Futurama; no more episodes have been made.

So the answer is, both five and four seasons were made: five broadcasted seasons, composed of the episodes from four production seasons. So you might find some listings with sorted four production seasons, and others with five seasons of chapters apparently unsorted. Personally I prefer the production seasons order.

Which is the best Futurama Episode?

For me, it’s the very last one, Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings. It has it all: music, love story, irony, intelligent script and dialogues…

If you’re just searching for that Futurama moment, I read once that the best moment is the last minute of Jurassic Bark. It’s certainly a great dramatic moment, but Futurama is a sitcom, not a drama. No matter how beautiful and sad that scene is (I find it really depressing), it is not the best moment in Futurama.

Again for me, it’s just my personal taste, the best Futurama moment happens by the end of Three Hundred Big Boys, where everyone gets $300 extra, and Fry decides to take 100 coffee cups with that money. While drinking them, Fry gets incrementally hilarious, but when he takes the 100th… Whoa. That is the best Futurama moment IMHO.

So is it finished?

Actually, the series were cancelled at the peak of their popularity. Since its cancellation, it has been rebroadcasted a thousand times. There are associations of Futurama fans bugging Fox to make more seasons. The reaction was that producer David X. Cohen reunited the old Futurama cast to make a full-length movie.

It’s planned to make four movies, which will also be divided in four episodes each and broadcasted as a 16 episode season. For now, the first movie has the working title of Bender’s Big Score, to be released directly to DVD around December this year. The rest of the movies, and the resulting season, will be released in 2008.

To finish…

Some Futurama links:

• Futurama Madhouse, the oldest living Futurama site.
• Futurama in Wikipedia, good articles about each season and espisode.
• Can’t Get Enough Futurama, the first good resource I found years ago.
• Bender Bending Rodriguez’s page(in english and spanish), a good resource, check out the maths section!

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