Very cool episode. Definitely one of the season's best. I was ROTFLMAO at so many parts I can't count them all... previews of upcoming episodes look promising too. Is Fry really going to marry Leela? Sounds like a "What If?" question to me.
== Mike Reed
Mike Reed wrote:
It could very well be a spoiler if unlike me, you don't read every bit of available Futurama News. so spoiler space. 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 go!
It's supposed to be a flash forward in "Time Keep's On Slippin'" caused by a temporal disturbance. So it may well will have had did happened in the future.* But we shall have to see. I have the feeling Leela may be time shifting like in Quantum Leap and/or Babylon 5's "War With Out End" episodes, On account of her suprised face when future Fry makes to "kiss the bride". But we shall have to wait until the week after next to find out.
*(not a guarantee of temporal certainty)
I was going to write up a long bitchfest-esque rant about how terrible this episode was, but I decided to simply write some suggestions for better quality shows than the one we were subjected to last night.
1] A show only showcasing a celebrity is NOT funny or entertaining. If we want to hear/see Beck, N'Sync or anyone else, we'll listen to their albums or watch MTV. Please do not pollute our TV watching with their unfunny presence.
2] I/we love the Futurama characters. The main reason I/we watch the show is for funny situations with those characters. I/We do not watch the show just to see our characters fade into the background and only show up when its absolutely necessary to forward an asinine plot which has nothing to do with them.
3] Please do not rehash old jokes and expect them to be as funny the originals. For example, Dr. Zoidberg's ink pouch was funny; Dr. Zoidberg coughing up love beads was not.
4] I know this goes against everything they teach you in TV school, but just because something increases ratings doesn't mean it's good for the show.
This little post of mine is getting longer than I expected, so I'll just end with a simple test to see if a celebrity guest spot is OK:
Replace the current celebrity with another one. Is the scene still funny? If not, then the comedy is centered around the celebrity, it will not be funny. If it is still funny, then the comedy must be as a result of a funny situation or our characters, keep it.
*waiting for some flames that are sure to come his way* RSN
On Mon, 23 Apr 2001 13:15:16 -0700, "Roop Nanuwa" wrote:
Personally, I thought it was great. I think the plot setup was rushed too much, but the premise didn't warrant a two parter. Perhaps I related to this ep more than some people because I'm a deadhead.
It gave more information about the rights of robots and their place in future society. Although it seemed to contradict some previous information. Are robots owned property or free beings? and so on.
Bender's secret yearning to be a folk singer goes back to the second episode. Two years after it was foreshadowed, we finally get to see that side of him explored. It would have been hard to do without a guest musician. Groening said they intended to use 20th century celebrities' heads in jars before the first ep even aired.
When the guest spots become too frequent and the plots too thin to support them, then I agree with you. I don't think that last night crossed that line.
For me, watching circumstances chance Fry, Leela, Zoidberg and especially Amy into barefoot hippies living in a VW mini bus and wearing tiedye was just that sort of situation. Of course, being familiar with the type of people being parodied made a big difference.
Since they were all taking time off work and making no money, Fry and Zoidberg were in the position of being more experienced. It was a bit of a roll reversal which I liked. The show really focused on Bender and the fact that he really cared about something besides himself.
He's seafood and he ate dirt, naturally he developed pearls. Besides, it's not a real Dead/Phish/hippie show without someone selling jewelry in the parking lot.
You mean like running jokes? If they never again used Fry being stupid or Amy being rich or Leela having one eye or the Professor being old, or Zoidberg being a sea creature, the show would wind down very fast.
Fine with me as long as it's not over done.
In this case, it would have to be a musician, since Bender always wanted to be folk singer. In fact. it would have to be a musician with folkish influences. The fact that the scenes wouldn't work with Sylvester Stalone or Woody Allen doesn't negate the humor one bit.
Further, they want a celeb who's popular enough to get people who otherwise don't watch the show to tune in. A percentage of those people will continue to watch, thus upping the ratings and helping to get the show renewed.
The celeb will also have to have a sense of humor about themselves and must be willing to play a head in a jar.
Beck filled the needs of the episode and I think it worked well.
--Larry
We've had episodes that really explored robots thought processes, origins, and culture before. This one just decided to stick them into a predictable plot about disability that could affect any human just the same. I don't see a contradiction to the history myself...if some animals can be property and some can be free, why not robots?
I will say it was dealt with much better here. The way it was treated as a one-dimensional, broad joke in the second episode helped make that still the worst episode of the show to date. But this was not a plot point I wanted to see come back.
I'm not judging the whole series, but just this episode. The guest star was much too frequent within this episode. The appearance of Donovan in the mermaid ep last year was the appropriate way. Take an obscure, cult favorite artist that most of the audience knows nothing about, use his music simply as background to a fully developed scene, drop one or two references to him in as generic a way as possible, then get him off the screen. The wrong approach, just like Beyond Blunderdome with Mel Gibson on The Simpsons, is when they buddy up the star with one character at the expense of involving the rest of the cast. The ep works only for people who already know Beck and what he's all about. It is dull for the rest of us who don't care about him like we do the characters we turn to the show for every week. And worse yet, the presence of the rest of the cast in this episode became obligatory. It's also a wrong approach to have the star sing in music video fashion at length in the episode, like the terrible Beastie Boys cameo in season 1.
A good parody has to hint at the depth and detail of the material it's parodying. Whatever jokes there were about riding around in a van in this episode were thin...more of a simple reference than a parody. That's a wink-wink for people in the know, but it doesn't provide new insight and doesn't really make anyone laugh.
How many times did he have to cough them up though? It marked the lack of inspiration in this episode when that joke, surprising at first, was repeated ad nauseum, pun intended, in the gross-out fashion that has become de rigeur in recent comedy.
Huh? What do running jokes have to do with a guest star used as a cheap grab for ratings? Most guest stars are, but you don't need to center the episode around them to get people to watch. Just slap their name in the promos and get them on and off fast, like Britney Spears on The Simpsons.
If Beck's appearance wasn't overdone, I don't know what ever could be.
He is saying that when you bring on a celebrity, especially one that's anything but a household name, give him a co-starring role, and then base every other joke on how it relates to his work and image, you are making an episode that many will find unfunny. The jokes should be more general in a case like this, so that you could stick any musician in there and they would mean the same thing.
"Eric S." wrote:
Worst episode? Your totally discrediting all the early Fry/Leela development made in that episode The LEM scene itself puts it way up in my top 5. (Even it that was probably Apollo 12 in the ocean of storms and not the sea of tranquility)
[email] wrote:
Not only that, there was tons of important character introduction and storyline development in that episode. That makes it all the more disappointing to me that the humor, plot, and dialogue were often so lame. The Fry/Leela emotional content was the most forced and awkward "touching" scenes the series has done...which admittedly has never really been Futurama's strong point. I thought the Titanic episode still had the best, most subtle and believable Fry/Leela relationship development so far.
I'd have to say the business with the farmer and his robot daughters make up probably the worst scenes in the series, and that creepy giant moon-face guy with the horrifying squeaky voice was without a doubt the all-time worst character.
"Eric S." wrote:
Actually I meant character development For Fry and For Leela. And I can accept the slightly weak dialogue since this was practically still the pilot. But where as "Space Pilot 3000" was just introducing the characters "The Series Has Landed" Starts getting you comfortable with them and for that matter is written so that the Characters themselves are still getting comfortable with each other. And then by "I, Roommate" it's been about a month story time. So now all the familiar character interaction makes more sense.
What? You must never have seen "Le Voyage Dans La Lune". Crater Face Rocked!!
[email] wrote:
I've seen it, and I get the reference, but a character created just for the sake of a reference isn't a very strong starting point to begin with, let alone this one's horrific Barney-esque design and nightmarish helium voice.
On Fri, 27 Apr 2001 18:27:05 GMT, Mike Zaite wrote:
Right on! how else to perfectly launch a sci fi spoof series than by spoofing the first sci fi movie ever. His voice was a perfect parody of Mickey Mouse, the mascot of another theme park.
I thought the second episode was great.
"Let's set it on fire and say we dumped it in the sewer."
"I'm gonna build my own amusement park, with blackjack and hookers."
"If you through being stupid" "I've got more . . ."
"Do I look like a guy who's not lazy?"
"I'm gonna be a hero, like Neil Armstrong and all those other famous people no one remembers"
I could go on. I would also include it the top 10 for certain, probably the top 5. I'd have to count them up.
--Larry
On Tue, 24 Apr 2001 01:07:08 GMT, [email] (Eric S.) wrote:
Absolutely nothing. I misplaced my comments. I meant that to go under # 3
Under this, my comments on running joke would have made sense. Sorry, my bad.
The running joke being that Zoidberg is a sea creature and does a number of sea creature things. Kind of like the Cat on Red Dwarf. He has an ink gland, and forms pearls around dirt that gets caught in his throat.
--Larry
Larry F wrote:
A Futurama episode that contradicts previously aired information? I can't believe that.
<< Replace the current celebrity with another one. Is the scene still funny? If not, then the comedy is centered around the celebrity, it will not be funny. If it is still funny, then the comedy must be as a result of a funny situation or our characters, keep it. >>
Okay, I'm not going to flame you, I think we can just have a discussion about this. Putting in a celebrity cameo that may well have just been interchangable (if the celebrity is playing themselves), to me, is much much more awful to watch. Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, for example, was bad, and it's because it could've been any "power couple", Brad and Jennifer, blah and bleh, whoever.
BUT if your writers actually know a bit about the "celebrity" than you can do cool shit that fans of the celebrity who might watch the show for the first time because said celebrity is on it will think "Oh, fucking cool. That Becktionary actually has real fucking lyrics on the cover. Wicked. Bender said 'Odelay'." etcetera.
This is actually how celebrity appearances on TV shows used to work, when they were great; on I Love Lucy and Dick Van Dyke, etcetera. Obviously if you devote an episode to a guest star, some of "our characters" might get lost in the shuffle, but Bender's desire to be a folk singer has been canon since episode 2. It's not like they brought David Foster Wallace on the show and all of a sudden Bender wanted to be a post-structural novelist (and don't even think about it, I've already written the spec script).
There wasn't a lot of Bender in Parasites Lost, just like there wasn't a lot of Fry in Bendin' In The Wind. I think it's cool if shows end up neglecting a few characters if it means there's a good focus on one of them. That's why it's an ongoing series, where they can do lots of things, focus on lots of characters, without some kind of quota of Zoidberg jokes or Fry tripping over something. I'm all about Futurama taking the long way around the way many people might think a TV show "ought" to be made. And, hey, if it's not your cup of tea, there's like new ones being made every two months. Invader ZIM, for example, is excellent. No guest stars, continuing narrative, three main characters. Seriously, you'll love it. Maybe.
See? No flames. Was that a flame? Benjamin.
We want it to be interchangeable with any "power couple" because if they're going to hang around for the whole episode, the jokes sure better not go over the heads of everyone not intimately familiar with Kim and Alec's careers and personal gossip. That episode sucked but it was because of Homer's characterization and the poor plot, not because Alec/Kim dominated the tone and direction of the episode. The Mel Gibson episode was one where the storyline really suffered by forcing Homer to be buddy-buddy with Mel in a story that didn't fit the tone of a usual Simpsons episode and pushed every other character into a meaningless, obligatory role. Same exact thing happened last night with Beck and Bender.
We've come a long way from those days. The Simpsons showed us you can have guest stars play viable characters, they don't have to play themselves. The latter almost inevitably destroys our belief in the show's reality, especially when the stars pal around with the characters in oh-so unrealistic fashion. We've also seen how stars can briefly be brought on to parody the image, or the idea of having guest stars itself. Bringing them on to be the best friends of our everyday counterparts is a giant leap backwards to plasticized, manufactured, Hollywoodized television shows.
In season 2 it was a bad throwaway joke. The way they changed the meaning of it here they could have just as readily have reinvented Bender as a novelist. It really makes no difference. Neither one was meant to be a recurring character trait...or at least after episode 2 they wisely realized that trait should not be brought up again.
So this is the kind of philosophizing Beck fans are "all about." I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this cool "artiste" and his "laid-back" lyrics failed to make any impression on me.
Roop Nanuwa wrote:
I liked it, actually. Probably behind "War Is The H-Word" and "Parasites Lost" as the best of season.
I was worried about Beck's appearance, too, but he turned out to be a great self-satire. (i.e. forgetting how the song ends, asking what his own songs were about, going to sleep during the concerts).
I/We? Schizophrenia, eh? ;-)
I think it would be funny with pretty much any other singer as well. But, with Beck they were able to make fun of individual things specifically about him, such as the Becktionary. That wouldn't be as funny with another guest because it wouldn't make sense, but for Beck it worked. And anyway, the bong scene? How could you not laugh at that?
== Mike Reed
"Mike Reed" wrote in message news:[email]...
I agree with you about those two episodes.. awesome.. I think "Luck Of the Fryish" was up there too..
I wanted to clarify it was my opinion about what a group of people think. Or what I think people think. Errr... damn logic loops..
The problem with doing Beck-specific comedy is that you expect your audience to already know Beck-specific stuff. It's one thing to slide in a Beck joke for Beck fans, but to base a whole show on it?
In fact, that's the only spot I laughed at. =)..
My main problem with this episode was the predictability of the plot. Look at some of the great episodes of the past. For example "The Problem With Popplers".. could you even guess at where any scene was going? Could you predict any of it? No. It was completely original, not rehashed sit-com material. "Bendin' in the Wind" on the other hand was utterly predictable from a plot standpoint. Honestly, as soon as I heard that Bender was disabled, I knew where this plot would lead ( ie, gaining his motion back and then lying about it etc).. I kept watching the episode thinking that the standard good writing of Futurama would prevail and they would put some original twists on a run-of-the-mill sitcom plot. They didn't. In all honesty, this plot could of been done on other shows like 'Friends' etc. Just replace the characters, and bam...
Again, these are just my opinions.. =).. I know a lot of people (including the people who responded to my first post) who absolutely loved this episode. I'm just trying to show why I thought it was a terrible episode.
RSN
On Tue, 24 Apr 2001 15:37:02 -0600, Mike Reed wrote:
Forgetting the ending of the song was another golden moment in this episode. It reminded me of Chico's piano playing in A Night a the Opera. He ends up playing in circles because he can't remember the way out.
Chico: You know I can't think of the ending. Groucho: I can't think of anything else.
Jimmy Page did that with Led Zeppelin in "The Song Remains the Same". The camera catches Bonzo and Jones looking at each other and shrugging as the guitar part loops again.
I wouldn't go that far. Well, I would. No you shut up!
I laughed so hard I blew all the water out of my time shifting device.
--Larry
Just have to know what 'ROTFLMAO' means, it was too long for figuring it out myself.
/Kristian
"Mike Reed" wrote in message news:[email]...
"Kristian Karlsek" wrote in message news:ShmG6.1561$[email]...
out
ROTFLMAO = rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off
RSN
Kristian Karlsek wrote in message ...
out
"Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off", or some variant thereof. ;) Terrorized house pets are also a common theme...hehehe.
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