The Return of Futurama: Anyone Else Excited?

[bazooka_beak]

^ I know you can buy the episodes off iTunes for about $3, but that's about it right now.

 

[AndyWan Kenobi]

Hilarious episode tonight, I thought. Classic! All of the Apple / Twitter stuff was just perfect.

 

[dwmckim]

If it's one lesson learned from Ren and Stimpy Adult Cartoon Party its that sometimes working around censorship is funnier than not having as much. Heck, I watched a Phineas and Ferb that had cat whipped reference (and we ALL know what that means), and that's a kid's show. I personally find subversive jokes subliminally hidden funnier and more clever than outright saying it. it has to do with the unexpected factor.

Vulgarity is usually just an admission of total weakness on the part of the writer/comedian that they're not skilled enough to come up with something funny or clever. Cursing almost never gets a huge laugh...unless there's some actual comic skill behind it -but again it's very rare and can only be done by the truly talented to make it actually laugh out loud funny (Case in point, Gilda Radner's Emily Litella sketches on Saturday Night Live. After she had done a good number of them, and everyone knew the "formula" of her routines, after Jane Curtin corrects her on her latest mix-up, instead of the expected "Never mind" (or a moment after it, don't remember off the top of my head) Gilda just so ever so sweetly mutters "B****" and it's so unexpected, perfectly set up and delivered that it just had you rolling on the floor.

...and look at the recently released Dog City for a perfect example of how working around it ends up much more hilarious than if you flat out said the word (again with the same word in question as the above example) - during Colleen's song, she sets up a lyric clearly meant to end with the B word, but before she sings it, Rowlf interupts with a cacaphony on the piano and says to the camera, "Welcome to family programming!" That made the joke laugh-out-loud funny more than going ahead and using the word would have been.

 

[Drtooth]

I could mention stuff they snuck into kid's shows so subversive and so adult that I can't even post them.

Vulgarity works if it's clever... anything does. Doing something, anything for the sake of doing it isn't funny or clever at all. I've seen hundreds of James Bond parodies over the years, but the only time I really laughed at one was when American Dad took a completely different approach to it with the episode "Tear Jerker." On that note, the only time I ever laughed at a reference to the most over used line from Scarface was The Cleveland Show. Not so much because Cleveland said a variation of "Say hello to My Li'l Friend," but the Bear's line after, "Black guys can't stop talking about that film!"

And I think as far as Family Guy and Futurama is concerned, Wordgirl did a BETTER Parody of Willy Wonka, making Willy an unimaginative, unpleasant cheapskate who's name wasn't even real, and a creation of marketing.

It's all stuff that seems shocking and or original when we first see it, but it becomes so old hat after a while it's just not funny. It's like when your a kid and you buy a joke book you laugh your head off because they're all new to you... but then years later, you see it on a Laffy Taffy wrapper and say "Oh... yeah. I remember hearing that one when I was his age."

I bring up Ren and Stimpy in that post for a reason. In the course of the series, when they shared sleeping arrangements, that sort of thing was implied. Then they actually showed it and it felt like the same joke, but longer, and more uncomfortable to watch.

Again, I have YET to see the new episodes of this show in question... I'm going to keep an open mind, and I just might enjoy them... but I've got quite a while before these hit DVD.

 

[ZeppoAndFriends]

...and look at the recently released Dog City for a perfect example of how working around it ends up much more hilarious than if you flat out said the word (again with the same word in question as the above example) - during Colleen's song, she sets up a lyric clearly meant to end with the B word, but before she sings it, Rowlf interrupts with a cacophony on the piano and says to the camera, "Welcome to family programming!" That made the joke laugh-out-loud funny more than going ahead and using the word would have been.

I think that joke would've worked better if she hadn't lingered on the word 'his', it just made it seem that she was waiting to be interrupted. However, it still makes me laugh, regardless.

 

[ReneeLouvier]

I have to say, while I love Futurama, I don't like the direction they seem to be heading in. I liked them better when they simply had harmless innuendo, now they are just going all out. Case in point: Amy's dominatrix outfit :/ The ending to the second episode made me completely uncomfortable, to boot. Leela was SERIOUSLY out of character in that one.

I have to agree with you on those points. It seems they're being dirty for the sake of being dirty. I'm still watching them, but...eh, me and Robert are divided on how we feel about them. He loves them, and I'm just eh on them.

 

[Erine81981]

I was glad to see that they were coming back. So when i watched the new first episode it was like watching the an episode from other seasons. I'm really enjoying them.

 

[ZeppoAndFriends]

Did everyone forget about the new episode on Thursday, or was that just me?

 

[AndyWan Kenobi]

Did everyone forget about the new episode on Thursday, or was that just me?

Nope--loved it. Especially "Inter-racial" marriage featuring the two black/white races from Trek's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield." Great gag.

 

[ZeppoAndFriends]

Once again proving that I'd lose my head if I didn't keep it in my wall safe crazy, I remembered that I had my VCR set to record the episode in case of mind-slippage.

First of all, I was amazed that an episode that had the potential to be full of in-your-face sex jokes also seemed to be the first of the new season to try and restrain itself in some capacity.

As for the episode itself, I loved it. For the first time since Hermes' 'kiss my front butt' line in Bender's Big Score did something in Futurama make me laugh out loud. I was actually left unable to wait for it to come back from commercial (again, lost head). It just felt like an episode that could have come out of the original run.

There were a few jokes that were just too perfect. The horse and ghost bit gave me a good chuckle, as did the fact that Bender was all for a relationship with Amy until the word 'monogamous' came up.

However, there was one thing that my study of plot structures just will not let me ignore. I think that it would have been better if they introduced the motives for the Professor's actions earlier in the episode. That way his revelation towards the end would not have been such a one-two punch.

Other than that it was a magnificent episode.