Toon-arama: Futurama (1999-2013)

Not only is Futurama the namesake of the CommentaramaEmpire, but it is(was) a heck of a cartoon. This was a cartoon the way cartoons are meant to be: irreverent, clever, funny, and doing things you could never do in a live action show. If you haven’t seen this show, you should give the old episodes a try.

The History of Futurama

Futurama was born in March 1999 as an offshoot of the Simpson’s. It was created by Matt Groening, who developed it with David X. Cohen for Fox. Unfortunately, Fox put it on at the end of football games, which meant that it was pre-empted or started in progress more often than not. And so, for four years, the show limped along with episodes being shown in parts, out of order, or not at all. Still, the show found an audience. Thus, when the show was essentially killed when Fox refused to pick it up again in 2004, Comedy Central picked it up for four direct-to-video films, which would then be broken up into episodes. Those proved so popular that another 26 episodes were made to take the series through 2013 before it was cancelled.

What Is Futurama

Futurama is the story of Philip J. Fry, a pizza delivery boy who delivers a pizza to a cryogenics lab and ends up accidentally frozen for a thousand years. He emerges to find a completely unexpected future. All of humanity has been brought together under one government... an incompetent government run by the head of Richard Nixon. Humans and robots and aliens live side by side in harmony... with periodic bouts of belligerence and tons of crime and other vices. And little else has changed.

Fry becomes a delivery boy for a company known as Planet Express, which is owned by his nephew Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, who is 160 years old. The Professor is brilliant, but insane and extremely forgetful. Working with him are a series of colorful characters like a cycloptic pilot (Turanga Leela), Hermes the Jamaican Bureaucrat, Dr. Zoidberg the incompetent alien doctor, Amy Wong the spoiled rich girl from Mars, and Fry’s best friend Bender, a robot designed to bend things... who has become a criminal and moral menace.

The show is episodic in nature but cumulative, as it builds its world and the characters show by show. And what a rich world this is.

Why This Cartoon Rocks

Futurama works on so many levels:

● At the top level, it’s a cutely drawn cartoon with funny robots and creatures, lots of comedic punch lines, and cartoon-violence. The kids will love it, even though the show is probably too adult for kids in its themes.

The show also introduces some unforgettable characters, such as Mom, who appears to the public to be the sweetest little old lady in the world, but who is really a ruthless, chain-smoking, tyrannical industrialist with the power to control all the robots on earth. Or characters like Nibbler, who appears to be a cute kitty-like thing that is really a super intelligent being observing the earth... he poops dark matter. Or Zapp Brannigan, a parody of James T. Kirk in the worst possible way. Or Robot Santa, who makes X-mas a terrifying experience. Or Lrrr or Morbo.

● At the next level, you have a great “fish out of water” story where 20th Century Fry finds himself living in 30th Century New New York. In episode after episode, Fry runs into dozens of things he never would have encountered in our time and he is forced to deal with them. Here, the writers have a great sense of humor in picking which will be meaningful to Fry and which won’t, and how he will react. This is made all the better in that the writers always play with expectations and they fill Fry’s world with strange characters who make it even harder for Fry to figure out what is “normal” for this world. Fry too pollutes this by giving everyone a completely wrong view of the past.

The writers also bring in lots of familiar ideas from the present, which one would think wouldn’t make it to the future, such as the idea that a condo being in New Jersey rather than New New York makes it as bad as a condo into which sewage leaks, or Atlanta (which sinks into the ocean) being an airline hub, or rap music being “the classics.”

● At the next level, you have a strong and interesting social commentary. Excluding the last couple seasons, the show was largely conservative/ traditional and very subversive to modern elitist thinking. Indeed, whenever it poked fun at our conventions, it typically punished the people poking the fun in some ridiculous manner. Thus, for example, a hippy peacenik who claimed we could make peace with a hostile alien race led by Lrrr just by giving off good vibes, and who frees an ape that is being fed to Lrrr as an offering, gets eaten by Lrrr, which solves the crisis... and give Lrrr gas... and makes him high. In another example, Fry is lectured about our primitive morality and how wrong we are to oppose public nudity, only to have the Professor strip naked and everyone cringe and demand that he get dressed again.

In episode after episode, liberal sacred cows get slaughtered. The UN (now DOOP) proves to be cowardly, incompetent, and wrongly conquers a planet. Bureaucrats are brought down by their own obsessions with procedure. Environmentalists and vegetarians are idiots and hypocrites. Etc. Leela too is constantly trying to be a good liberal, but gives it up in every episode when it interferes with her ability to solve problems.

(As an unfortunate aside, this is not true with the last two seasons which dealt heavily with pushing liberal propaganda in episodes dealing with environmentalism, animal-rights and gay marriage.)

● Next, there is a strong emotional layer in this show. There are episode, like the one where Fry’s dog dies waiting for him, which will make you cry.

● Finally, you have the heart of this show... the nerd jokes. Futurama is crawling with scientific and philosophical jokes as well as references to nerd culture, such as science fiction and Dungeons and Dragons. Whole episodes are based around these nerd jokes. And these are subtle; they are not explained. For example, in one episode, Bender is describing a nightmare he had:

Bender: Whoa, what an awful dream. Ones and zeros everywhere. And I thought I saw a two.

If you don’t know that machine language is limited to ones and zeroes, then you won’t get this joke, because no one will explain it. In another rather famous episode, Fry becomes his own grandfather despite the paradox. In another, our universe ends up inside a box in our own universe. In another, the Professor complains that the result of a race was changed by the racetrack observing the ending with a quantum finish. All of these jokes and many, many more come straight from quantum physics and philosophical principles.

This is why this show works: it offers something at every level – from childish humor, to more clever humor, to social satire, to truly deep jokes that require some knowledge to fully understand. But since each level is presented with equal earnestness, this show can be enjoyed by anyone. It is unique, it is clever, and it has strong characters. It's also amazingly quotable.... "I know where you live!"... "I'm gonna buy you so many lizards!"... "Bite my shiny metal ass!"... "How can the power go out? I live in the future!"... "Death by snu snu!"... etc.