Futurama Returns 553
GrumpySimon writes "Good news everyone!
Straight from a one-eyed alien's mouth - 13 new episodes of Futurama have been confirmed by Katey Sagal on Craig Ferguson's Late Late Show. All the original actors have signed up too."
Re:All the original actors? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Restrike while the iron is still warm? (Score:3, Informative)
-matthew
Re:Futurama (Score:5, Informative)
Milt, for the non-biologists, is the sperm and seminal fluid of fish. [reference.com]
Re:Hang on... (Score:5, Informative)
The character Zapp Branigan was written for him, but he died before they started production, so Billy West took the part instead and happen to play the character in a similar way to Phil Hartman's audition.
Re:Restrike while the iron is still warm? (Score:2, Informative)
John Kricfalusi [wikipedia.org] creater and the original voice of Ren was fired after Nickelodeon started rejecting many of his ideas for being inappropriate. I still have the Kricfalusi episode on a VHS tape, good stuff.
From the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
Nickelodeon eventually fired Kricfalusi from his own creation and systematically censored the cartoon down to little more than a remnant of its former self. Eventually, several episodes were deemed unairable and have never been broadcast by Nickelodeon again.
Re:Futurama DOES have a plot (spoilers) (Score:5, Informative)
- Fry and the Brains (and the Nibblonians)
During the series it transpires that Fry is the only human being capable of resisting the psionic attacks of the Brains, a group of free-flying brain beings that want to take over/destroy the universe. Fry's brain waves are different from other peoples because Fry, as a result of events in the episode "Roswell that Ends Well", is his own grandfather.
In the first encounter with the Brains Fry is abducted by Nibbler, who is not only Leela's pet, but also an agent of the ancient and stupendously powerful Nibblonians (which explains why he was the only one of his kind on the planet where he was found). Nibbler explains Fry's abnormality and assists him in fending off the Brains' attack on earth. After Fry succeeds Nibbler wipes Fry's memory (everyone else was too stupefied by the Brains to remember what happened) and resumes his life as Leela's pet.
Later, in The Why of Fry, we learn that Fry was not frozen by accident. In fact Fry was brought into the future by Nibbler, whose much younger self was present on New Years' Eve '99, and who gave Fry the nudge that tipped him backwards into the cryogenic chamber. In this episode Fry is press ganged into service to destroy the Brains' ultimate project, a device that will acquire all knowledge in the universe and then destroy the universe to prevent its knowledge from becoming outdated.
Once Fry is inside the Mega-Brain and has activated the bomb with which he is to destroy it, the Brains reveal what Nibbler did to Fry and offer Fry a choice - he can stay there, blow up the Mega Brain and vanish along with it due to the failure of his escape scooter, or he can let the Mega Brain catapult him back in time to the space-time nexus centred on his own fall into the cryochamber.
Fry elects to travel back, and in fact initially prevents Nibbler from knocking him into the tube, until Nibbler persuades him that he should sacrifice himself and fulfill his predestined mission, because...
- Fry Loves Leela
Fry has an unrequited passion for Leela throughout most of the series. In a sense there is a lack of follow through here, because they do pull kind of a "will they/won't they?" thing, but Fry does succeed in communicating the depth of his feelings at times, and when he wins the devil's hands and uses them to make a holophoner opera in Leela's honour Leela realises that Fry has a depth of character and feeling that is concealed by his physical and social clumsiness.
- Leela and Her Parents
As someone else mentioned here, Leela's parent enter the series late in the piece and stick around. In fact I was surprised that nobody responded to the "straight from the alien's mouth" in the article by pointing out that Leela, as we discover when her parents emerge, is not an alien but a mutant, whose xenolinguist parents left her at an orphanage with a note in an invented alien script, so that she would be taken for an alien and avoid the apartheid-style restrictions places on mutants. This is a major shift for Leela both in the sense that earlier episodes made much of her search for her species and homeworld, and in that at least two episodes towards the end of the series are heavily concerned with her relationship with her newfound parents.
- Amy and Kif
Amy, the engineering student from Mars, and Kif, Zapp Brannigan's XO, fall in love early in the series and their developing romance is the subject of multiple episodes throughout subsequent seasons.
i'm sure there are other examples of long-term continuity that have slipped my mind, but really nobody could accuse Futurama of forgeting its past.
Re:Who needs comedy central? (Score:3, Informative)
How does this pertain the RIAA? The people they go after are the ones sharing material to which the RIAA has rights to. Nothing is stopping individual artists from doing what you describe, in fact there are many independent artists on the net doing their thing and the RIAA/MPAA leaves them alone. Stephen King did his own online distribution of "The Plant" and while it did disturb the publishers, there wasn't a frenzy of lawsuits to shut him down.
The strength of the labels, studios, and publishers isn't distribution itself. It's the hype machine, that creates markets and encourages people to try something and like it (even though it sucks). Distribution control of their material, is merely a method to collect money from people. The labels are also changing, to capitalize on their marketing strength. American Idol is a perfect example. Not only do they make money selling CDs by some no talent pop singer, they are making money on the show whose main purpose is to create a frenzy around a disposable one-hit wonder.
Re:Restrike while the iron is still warm? (Score:2, Informative)
"This episode was originally written for the original series' second season. It was conceived as an answer to the fans who wrote to Spümcø, wanting to see an episode made purely out of gross-out gags, but not originally as "adult" as this version became."
While it doesn't say whether That Scene was in the original cut
Re:Who needs comedy central? (Score:5, Informative)
You bitch needlessly. All the tools you need are but a few hundred dollars away!
1) Registering a domain name and getting cheap-ass hosting costs less than a few hundred dollars per year.
2) You can put a link to your project on your slashdot sig and get surprising amounts of attention that way.
3) You only need to come up with an idea for a show, and recruit some star talent. Really, you're on your way already, since you have a business plan that's pretty detailed!
Unless you aren't serious about your business plan. Maybe you wouldn't know a real business plan if it kicked you in the nards. Maybe the idea of actually doing anything outside your mother's basement scares you. In which case, your post is just so much whining and incoherent noise on a populate public blog. There's lots of that already.
The proof of whether or not you have a good idea is in your ability to make it reality. Otherwise, it's just so much hot air, and thanks to global warming, we have more than enough of that.
But, I suggest you give it a try. You'll either succeed, or learn lots about how the world around you works - either way, you win, and win BIG.
Re:YAY! (Score:3, Informative)
"glowbal wopple?"
Re:choice quote (Score:3, Informative)
But hey, what do I know. I haven't had mod points in probably a year no matter how much I meta-mod (which I've stopped) and can't get stories accepted.
As people keep telling me, the systems broke. Accept it. Once you do you'll be better off.
Or, to put it in terms a geek should understand, "It's dead Jim."
Re:I believe it 100%!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Fool's Gold pt2 (Score:1, Informative)
comments on Katey Sagal's comment on his site. [billywest.com]
Logic? (Score:5, Informative)
PS: best episode ever: Jurassic Bark.... poor Seymour the dog.
Re:Restrike while the iron is still warm? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, Family Guy will hopefully be the mold for Futurama. I find Family Guy hillarious every time I watch them - so does the entire Adult Swim viewing audience, because when they took Family Guy off for a week, the message boards went crazy, and Family Guy was returned to the Adult Swim lineup.
Further to that, the new episodes stuck to the original formula and are as funny for a single reason - Seth McFarland is still at the helm. Hopefully, Futurama will retain the same writing staff, geniuses in their fields, people who actually understood and could properly mock science and physics.
American Dad was never funny.
Re:Restrike while the iron is still warm? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Restrike while the iron is still warm? (Score:2, Informative)
I.e., they did plan it out. Just not that far in the past.
The story of The Why of Fry is hilarious. One of the writers came in and pitched it, and they all just stared at each other in shock, because it completely explained two completely unrelated episodes they'd already done, the flying brain episode, aka Fry's-brain-thing, and the Fry's-his-own-grandfather episode, and linked in stuff from the first episode, like what Fry was doing at the cryogenic place in the first place and the 'almost fall into the tube right before he actually did it' gag.