They’re all on Hulu, for whatever it’s worth. Yeah, I know; spending on yet another digital streaming service sucks.
I mainly watch on Comedy Central while I eat dinner. I can’t stream to TV yet.
All of the episodes prior to season 5 (so basically most of them) look like hot garbage on Comedy Central because they’ve been converted to widescreen via zooming and cropping. They actually look pixelated at times.
Ugh. To the Angry Dome!
(While they’re borrowing underground in the Futurama ship, to go find oil for Robotunnukah)
Fry sees a giant pale worm: What’s that?
Professor: They call it an albino humping worm.
Fry: Why do they call it that?
*Ships start rhythmically shaking.
Professor: Because it has no pigmentation.
“Popular Slut Club.”
Extreme Toddler Wrestling.
Even better: I watch the show on an HD television via basic SD cable, so I get the double-letterbox effect. A.k.a. “windowbox”, “matchbox”, “gutterbox”, or “postage stamp” according to Wikipedia.
I’m really glad I’m making my way through these. They are so funny. The early seasons were good, but seasons 7 and 8 are where they’ve really hit their stride.
The complete series is currently on sale on itunes for 29.99. It includes the movies as well.
I saw the season finale for Season 8 last night. It offered 3 stories about a diamond comet, done in different art styles of cartoons from different eras. Oh my god, it was so funny. I would say I’ve laughed more in Season 8 than all the other seasons combined. I can’t believe this show got so much better so late in its life.
I hope Season 9 is as good as 8.
I finished Season 9 yesterday. Another great season!
These seasons on Comedy Central are the best I think. They grow outside the formula they’d established for themselves and show some true creativity every single week, while still advancing the Fry-Leela romance in small ways. They even did a Zoidberg episode I loved in Season 9 where he becomes rich for a bit. And I hate Zoidberg. Well, I used to. But they’ve won me over this season.
One more season to go. 13 episodes. And I’ve got 13 days left before it gets removed from Netflix.
Wait, you … well … what? No, what?
I know, right?
Yesterday I watched the episode in which they brought Calculon back to life (5 stars), and the episode in which Bender’s parts are sold all over the galaxy and they go around trying to get them back (4 stars).
4 or 5 more episodes to go. But the warning message on Netflix has changed now. It used to say that this show is only available until Nov 30, but now it says Nov 29. So I’d better finish up this weekend. This has been another excellent season by the way. They’ve gotten so good at staying focused on the theme of the episode. The Simpsons started having major problems with that in the 2000s, where the episode would start one way, and then completely change directions two or three times in a single episode. But Futurama seldom falls into that trap.
Wait, I’m not sure I understand this criticism, the Simpsons are pretty famous for having an A and B story where the episode routinely zigs to the unrelated B story. Sometimes back. But it was doing that pretty much from the start.
It’s been too long now since I watched, so I can’t think of specific examples, but the early seasons were more focused. The zigs to an unrelated story started happening more and more to the point where it felt more like Family Guy, which can also have an episode that goes all over the place.
I’m feeling in the mood to rewatch the final season again, but not sure how I’m going to fit it into my backlog of new stuff, and rewatching The Wire. Maybe once I finish The Marvelous Mrs. Maisley.
Instead of an interleaved A and B story that meet up in the 3rd act, there’s been a recent trend of Simpsons episodes basically having a first act A story, which transitions into a completely unrelated B story for acts 2 and 3.
Even the later Futurama episodes tend to be pretty traditionally structured, aside from maybe the high-concept ones, where sudden divergences are the point, rather than feeling like lazy writing.
Ok, let me throw out an example then. I forget the episode name but it’s the one with Michael Jackson. Except they couldn’t credit him or admit it was Michael Jackson for like ever, but anyway -
Starts out with Lisa and Bart talking about her coming britthday and Bart throws a red hat in the laundry, turning Homer’s shirt pink. When he wears it to work he gets called a commie and is referred to a psychiatrist who has Homer committed. There he meets the huge white guy that sounds like MJ. Marge gets Homer out, but Homer feels bad for the MJ soundalike and invites him home. Bart tricks everyone into thinking he has the actual MJ at his house and Lisa too, who thinks Bart got MJ to visit for her birthday. Anyway, big white guy sings her a birthday song and makes her feel better and walks into the sunset.
Anyway, that episode was all over the place. I never minded that because I always thought it was fun to try to work out where a given Simpson’s episode was going to end up, and I hardly ever could. In my mind, this trait was separate from the general decline in quality they’ve seen lately. But yeah, Futurama doesn’t really do that, their episodes are usually more 1-2-3 strucured, with plot beats kind of proceeding from earlier events.
Huh. I guess you’re right. They have been doing that even in early seasons. That’s a good example, since that’s a very memorable early episode. But I think even in that episode, the early parts you’re talking about happened in like 5 minutes, and we soon met the guy who sounded like MJ, and the rest of the episode was about him. But in later seasons, the whole first act is thrown away as the show zigs to something completely different. My example isn’t as good as yours, but there’s on episode from around 1999 that I remember where there’s a PBS telethon and a bunch of stuff going on in that episode, and then later the episode turns into Homer going to Africa as an aid worker or something. But they did bring that one back around by ending the episode on a PBS telethon again.