There were some great gags in it, although I didn't really get into it until Fry drank his 100th coffee. Then he starts seeing the world in slow-motion.
What was this a direct reference to? My first instinct was The Matrix, although the idea of being super-accelerated and perceiving everything in slow motion has been a staple of sci-fi for a while.
Someone else mentioned "Heretics of Dune", although that may be a little too obscure for the writers. But then, considering the stuff they've come up with...
I am told that slow-mo is also traditional in sports movies about baseball and the like. Not that I would know much about that.;)
Does anyone rember anything about the Flash comic book movie? I don't.:)
Of course, this might be just a traditional caffeine joke. Remember the time on the Simpsons when Apu stayed up for 72 hours straight and behaved like a hummingbird?:)
Was Nixon lying when he said that everything was destroyed? Fry saved pretty much everything.
Nixon lying? surely not.. he himself said he's nota crock! (sp?) I ahve to rewatch as I don't remember all that was said, but didn't he say all LOOT was lost? The tapestries on the wall was loot and was the first to go.
On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 04:37:22 GMT, "Hiro Protagonist" wrote:
Well, at least one part was a direct reference to an old commercial. The part with the slowed-down hummingbird. I think it was a car commercial, but I have no idea what brand...
Maybe it wasn't a reference to anything at all, just simply that Fry got so much caffeine and went so hyper that he went "over the edge" and went berserk? After all, there was a gradual buildup to that climatic scene as Fry kept getting more agitated and impatient.
I think people too often confuse "reference to" with "reminiscent of".
I laughed more during this episode that just about any other. I kept thinking, "why did they cancel this?"
On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 08:15:35 +0000, Herb Kauhry wrote:
Even Star Trek did a hyper-speed show where Spock went around the ship instantly repairing everything. I'm glad they ended the show with Fry getting the super scifi powers to save the day. I didn't see that coming. Frankly, there are less classy ways a man who drank 100 cups of coffee could have put out a fire.
Forget the matrix -- what was the little coffee-cup indicator a reference to? I swear I've seen that before somewhere. Some old coffee commercial, perhaps?
I don't think it was supposed to be a specific reference, more to do with something we've seen in a zillion-something video games, where you collect 100 coins and you get a free life or something to that effect.
It's very specifically the look of the coffee cups, not just the general indicator thing. Perhaps I'm just having deja vu, but I could *swear* it's a takeoff of something.
South Park has done an episode where they had a counter at hte bottom of the screen counting the number of times they said 'shit'. Not quite the same thing, but the same counter idea.....
I'd say it might be a direct reference to Trondheim's last Lapinot album, "l'acc�l�rateur atomique" - or in English : the Atomic Accelerator. Or it may be the contrary... (In that story, an insane scientist builds accelerator costumes, that make people go so fast, when they wear them, that they feel the world as if time was stopped. He uses it to steal money and jewels to finance his work.)
Lewis Trondheim (a French comics writer) and Matt Groening know each other, and being a big fan of both, I have already noticed lots of common ideas between Lapinot and Futurama. Even one of the principles of the serie is similar to the one of Lapinot (mixing episodes that develop the story, with ones of pure fantasy, usually placed in other environments)
It is not really clear who did influence the other, maybe it depends from time to time. In this case, "l'accelerateur atomique" was written in 2002 and released last fall, but this Futurama episode must have be produced much earlier.