It was a nice ending, and it did feel very final, unlike the previous endings. (Oddly, they way they wrote it leaves a narrative window open for a “reboot”, although that will never exist). I’ll miss Futurama, but we got more of it than we ever could have expected, and it remained one of my favorite shows throughout its run.
I have every piece of it on DVD (except the last season, of course), but I look forward to the $500 mega-box “Collector’s Edition” release of the entire series in a tin Planet-Express ship, or whatever it will be.
Over the last year or so, I’ve been making my way through Futurama on Netflix Instant Watch. I caught an episode here and there over the years but never watched it from the beginning, watching all the episodes before.
It’s been a ton of fun. Obviously I’m making my way through it rather slowly. But at the start of June, I was watching a Season 3 episode, and it gave me a message saying This Season is only available until July 1st.
So as a result I’ve accelerated my viewing a lot. I made it all the way through Season 3 in only 13 days, watching on average, an episode a day. I’m not sure I like this binge-watching method for this show. A lot of the jokes aren’t as funny because there’s some repetition and I feel like the show is getting a bit stale compared to the first two seasons. But maybe that’s a result of me watching too many episodes too close together? Not sure. But Netflix isn’t leaving me with any other choice. I started Season 4 this morning, and I got the same message, so it looks like Season 4 will be gone on July 1st too. So I’ll just have to keep on binging on this.
Season 4 is the best season, so it may not feel like such a grind. But even so I do think Futurama holds up to binge viewing. I certainly watched it over and over again when it first came out on VHS.
Around here Futurama is still running in syndication on various channels. Wouldn’t even need Netflix, just set the DVR to record for a month or so and you’d have most of it!
True. That’s how I watched a bunch of episodes back in 2006.
But, I don’t know, there’s something cool about watching it all from the beginning, in the right order. There was definitely things I had missed by not seeing every episode, especially from the first two seasons.
And even though I’m generally down on Season 3, it also had some great episodes. Like the one that goes into Fry’s backstory with his brother and his parents, and his trip back to old New York.
I forget sometimes which episode is in what season - the initial four seasons are just kind of a single entity in my head - so I went to Wikipedia and holy crap, there are some stone cold classics in there:
Amazon Women in the Mood
Parasites Lost
Where the Buggalo Roam
Insane in the Mainframe
Time Keeps on Slippin’
And I have to assume you just haven’t gotten to Roswell That Ends Well yet because … well because. I mean, those are about as good as it gets.
Yeah, Wiki’s episode listing is way different than what I’m watching on Netflix. I found the explanation near the top of the wiki page:
[quote]Fox Broadcasting Company broadcast many episodes of the original four production seasons of Futurama out of order, resulting in five broadcast seasons. Comedy Central also chose to air the parts of season 6 and 7 out of order as well. This list follows the season box sets, which feature the episodes in the original, intended production season order, ignoring the order of broadcast.
[/quote]
It looks like Netflix has it in original broadcast order, since it’s totally not what’s on wiki.
For example, Where the Buggalo Roam and Roswell That Ends Well are coming later in Season 4.
Amazon Women in the Mood lost some of its luster for me this time, because it’s one of the episodes I’ve seen multiple times before. I did laugh a lot the first time I saw the episode, so the repeat viewing wasn’t as good.
I just got to “Godfellas”, the episode in which Bender drifts through space and becomes god to a race of little people who live on him.
I used to not like Futurama, but this is the episode that turned me around on the show. It was after loving this episode that I tried to watch every re-run I could. None of them could quite measure up to this episode for me, but a few came close. I realized that I’d let my annoyance with Dr. Zoidberg color my perception of the show.
And honestly, in this run, now that I’m watching from the beginning, I even like Dr. Zoidberg, which is different. I had never seen the first few episodes of the first season before, and those are pretty key in laying the foundation of the ridiculousness of Zoidberg. It doesn’t change the fact that his bits are stupid, but it provides a context for their stupidness, which makes all the difference!
But yes, getting to “Godfellas” again, I just loved this episode again. Such a fresh take on the trope of playing God. I still think it’s a better take despite Rick & Morty’s recent episode where Rick has created a tiny universe, and on it is a scientist who has also created a tiny universe of his own.
So after feeling trepidation in Season 3, where I felt the show was getting formulaic, Seasons 4 and 5 were really imaginative and broke out into wildly creative episodes. I loved it. And then the show must have been cancelled because the last episode of Season 5 started with “See you on another channel”. And then Season 6 started with them saying they were back on Box(Fox) and the network executives who fired them had been executed.
But Season 6 consists of four 90 minute movies? Score, right?
Except the first movie, I just didn’t like it. Like with Star Trek Generations, I can see that their ambitions were noble. They wanted to weave a grand time travel tale that would weave in and out of different threads, and it would all come together in an incredible science fiction love story. Only, the whole thing was just so weird and full of stuff that was only mildly amusing. The nudist email scammers who take over the world, and the world lets them take over. And only after everything has been lost to the scammers, including all antiquities throughout history, only then humanity decides to fight back? I don’t know, instead of being a grand epic tale, I just thought it was boring and I was really happy when it was finally over.
Hopefully the other three movies will be much better.
Look, I don’t know how to tell you this except to just come out with it: you’ve seen the best Futurama has to offer. Not that the remainder isn’t worth watching, it totally is, it just never hits those heights again. And that whole thing about being on another network was actually a gap of about a decade, if I recall correctly. And I rarely do.
