Review of Futurama: Series 3

Introduction

The full 3rd production series of the animated sci-fi comedy series on four lovely platters. Episodes include:

Amazon Women in the Mood:
After a disastrous double date between Zapp, Leela, Kiff and Amy ends in a crash-landing on a seemingly desolate planet, Fry and Bender are eager to fumble to the rescue. However, when the planet proves to be inhabited by gigantic militant jungle-women, our male heroes lives are plunged into danger when their hosts devise a most ambivalent form of execution.

Parasites Lost:
Having stupidly consumed a truck-stop egg-salad sandwich, Fry’s body is taken over by super-intelligent parasites who work to change his body for the better. Whilst the Professor attempts to evict the microscopic menace from Fry’s bowels, Leela takes a shine to his newly acquired intelligence and emotional sophistication, leading to the conundrum, is Fry better off with parasites?

A Tale of Two Santas:
Santa’s back in this apocalyptic Xmas special. After taking Santa out of action, the post of present/death giver is temporarily acquired by Bender, who quickly discovers that taking over the role of Santa isn’t all it’s cracked up to be when he’s the most hated and feared robot in the universe… and then guess who shows up to destroy the world.

The Luck of the Fryrish:
Down-on-his-luck Fry ruminates about his past and the family he left behind in the year 2000, particularly his cretinous brother Yancy, and his long-lost lucky seven-leaf clover. Sick fed up with his lot, Fry goes looking for the clover and the charmed life that passed him by, only to discover that all is not what it seems in his bitter mind.

The Bird-bot of Ice-catraz:
Environmental madness and trouble in paradise for Fry and Bender as Leela joins a fundamentalist band of environmentalists who end up causing more problems than they solve. Leela’s career change thrusts Bender into a field promotion as the new captain, however, his Napoleon complex gets the better of him and his relationship with Fry flat-lines. Drying his sorrows, a stone-cold sober Bender crashes an oil tanker into Pluto, plunging the penguin population into chaos, and thus courting the wrath of Leela and her fellow green revolutionaries. As Leela fumbles from one environmental disaster to another, Bender is punished for his criminally low alcohol level… a bizarre identity crisis ensues.

Bendless Love:
In order to cure Bender’s repressed desire to bend, the Professor orders him to purge the instinct at a local steel factory, where he bumps into arch-nemesis and bearded doppelganger Flexo, as well as the potential woman of his dreams, Anglelyne. However, the path of true love doesn’t run smooth when your true love is also your evil doppelganger’s ex. Cue jealousy, male irrationality and somehow disturbing scenes of robot mating rituals.

The Day the Earth Stood Stupid:
When giant brains take over the Earth by making everyone too stupid to resist their assimilation, Nibbler accosts Leela and takes her back to his home planet where his race of cute, super-intelligent creatures plot the annihilation of the Brains, and who is the only person who can facilitate the survival of the human race? Meat-bag will inherit the Earth.

That’s Lobstertainment!:
Attention craving Dr. Zoidberg contacts his Uncle Zoid (former Hollywood royalty, now cantankerous has-been) in order to presumably gain some of the latter’s comedic expertise via osmosis. However, Zoid has bigger plans in mind and invests the money of TV star Calculon into a disastrous movie deal that tanks spectacularly and exposes the lobsters to Calculon and his Hollywood hoodlums. Meanwhile, Leela and Fry get stuck in a tar-pit with Sylvester Stallone’s skeleton.

The Cyber House Rules:
A reunion at her childhood Orphanarium reunites Leela with Adlai, a potential suitor who promises intimacy in exchange for some plastic surgery to graft a second eye onto her face. Meanwhile, Bender adopts a dozen orphans in an attempt to fraud welfare payments. However, the love of small children, and the inability to quickly sell them off as an economical meat product, disrupts Bender’s attempts at profit-making.

Where the Buggalo Roam:
Kiff and Amy’s romance hits a speed-bump during a visit to Amy’s parents on Mars. In an attempt to prove his masculine virility, Kiff vows to arraign the Wong’s lost Buggalo, only to get Amy kidnapped in the process. At the end of their tether, Amy’s parents enlist the help of the universes` most decorated lawman… they call him the Velour Fog.

Insane in the Mainframe:
After being mistakenly convicted of aiding and abetting a bank heist, Fry is sent along with Bender to a robot asylum where the staff and inmates refuse to acknowledge his human status. Driven to madness after one too many discs being crammed into him (and not Oreos, and not in the mouth), Fry renounces his human status and adopts a machine’s personality, much to his co-workers concern, and to Bender’s total indifference.

The Route Of All Evil:
A father-son spat leads Hermes’ son Dwight, and the Professor’s clone Cubert to create a rival delivery company to Planet Express. Hermes and the Professor’s guffaws of sarcasm are soon silenced after ‘Awesome Express’ takes over their customers and employees, leaving the dads destitute. However, Dwight and Cubert’s franchise is soon proved to be more smoke than fire.

Bendin` In The Wind:
When he’s paralysed in a freak tin-opener accident, Bender befriends alt-folky Beck and becomes a cult hero to broken robots everywhere. But when Bender miraculously regains his ability to move on the eve of a massive charity gig, he resolves to make like Christinna Aguillera and fake his disability.

Time Keeps on Slippin`:
Having meddled with the space-time continuum in an attempt to create a team of indestructible basketball playing mutants, the Professor inadvertently causes time to skip forward randomly, promising the swifter than usual annihilation of the universe. With the help of science boffins/ basketball geniuses the Globetrotters, the Professor attempts to restore the universe to its former glory, which will no doubt involve a doomsday device or two.

I Dated A Robot:
Fry discovers the joys of illegally downloading celebrities into the bodies of blank robots and snatches his dream-woman Lucy Liu and falls madly in love. In an attempt to cure Fry’s perversion, Leela and Bender try to shut down ‘kidNappster.com’, however, the copyright smearing geeks retaliate by unleashing a hoard of Lucy Liu’s upon the world, who proceed to decimate the city.

A Leela of Her Own:
Leela discovers a unique talent for knocking batters out in Blernsball only to become a freak-show/folk hero to female sports fans. In her yearning to become not the worst player in history, Leela acquires the services of the current worst player to try to boost her skills for the decisive game.

A Pharaoh To Remember:
Bender, Fry and Leela are enslaved by a Pharaoh on an Ancient Egyptian planet and forced to build a grandiose monument to his glorious era. Bender, impressed with the Pharaoh’s ability to force his memory through the ages, conspires to become the new Pharaoh and forces his minions to build an even bigger statue to his magnificence.

Anthology of Interest II:
The second collection of short-films from the ‘What if?’ machine. This time we find out what happens if Bender were turned into a human; what the world would be like if it were more like a videogame and what would happen to Leela if she returned to her true home.

Roswell that Ends Well:
When an exploding supernova and the Planet Express ship’s overheated microwave overlap, the crew are thrust back in time to the 1940s, only to discover that the alien captured at Roswell, New Mexico was Dr. Zoidberg, and the alien space-craft was nothing more than Bender’s shiny metal ass. Whilst Leela and the Professor attempt to procure a microwave in order to get back to the future, Fry protects his Grandfather Enus from the dangers of life: a mushroom-cloud sized irony and a disgusting sexual paradox are just round the corner.

Godfellas:
An exhausted Bender tries to get forty-winks by locking himself in the torpedo tube; however, when the ship is attacked by space pirates, Bender is fired into deep-space with no possibility of retrieval. Whilst drifting, Bender nurtures a self-destructive society of tiny, rural peasants on his torso before meeting the Almighty. Meanwhile Fry attempts to find Bender with the use of faith, hope, religion and a really big telescope.

Futurestock:
When Fry meets an ‘80s stock broker at a defrostees counselling group, they take-over Planet Express and flood it with their neo-Reaganite slogans. However, when the evil Mom gets wind of the scam, she moves to buy out the company and consume and devour it for herself.

30 % Iron Chef:
His ego dented by lukewarm reactions to his skin-dissolving cuisine, Bender corrals the assistance of a former genius chef in an attempt to beat TV Chef Elzar in a televised contest. With Martha Stewart’s head judging, and a vial of LSD to lace into the food, Bender might just stand a chance.

Video

Having been digitally-sourced, ‘Futurama’ looks considerably better than most animation translated from television, although the colour is subtly variable between episodes.

Audio

Functional 2.0 surround, rendered more endearing by Christopher Tyng’s superior score and remarkably dense sound design.

Features

A nice bouquet of extras, marginally more thorough than the two previous series. Very funny commentaries on every episode (two on the Emmy-winning ‘Roswell That Ends Well’), as well as a series of brief deleted scenes. Some quirky additions add some amusement value: an incomprehensible description of how to draw Fry and Leela; an animatic for ‘Anthology of Interest II’; galleries, foreign audio samples and 3-D test models complete the official list. Easter eggs are plentiful, with a surreal Christmas message from executive producer David X. Cohen; a hilarious cast read-through of ‘A Tale of Two Santas’ and countless rejected opening title quotes.

Conclusion

The nimble, exasperating plotting of the first and second series have largely evaporated by this point, replaced with a self-reflexive exhaustion, a seeming tiredness borne of the show’s premature adoption of latter ‘Simpson’s ironic posturing. However, not even this is enough to deplete the show’s inherent satirical bite and conceptual irreverence. Warmed-over Simpsonian character-development is exploited with self-reflexive glee, deepening the inexplicable complex of mutual hatred between anal bureaucrat Hermes and starving, emotionally groping lobster doctor Zoidberg; the relationship between mis-matched Leela and Fry also marches through its futile trajectory. However, despite plenty of knowing, insular laughs, the lack of genuine humor is felt particularly hard in episodes devoid of the usual sci-fi inventiveness of executive-producer David X. Cohen: ‘A Leela of Her Own’, ‘The Route of All Evil’ and ‘Futurestock’ all personify the new complacency.

However, all is not lost, episodes like ‘The Luck of the Fryrish’, ‘Parasites Lost’ and ‘Bendin’ in the Wind’ achieve a rare and subdued poignancy whilst never failing to deliver the laughs; Meanwhile ‘Time Keeps on Slippin’, ‘Roswell That Ends Well’ and the always excellent ‘Anthology of Interest’ create a seamless harmony between ingenious speculative sci-fi plots and anarchic humor. So, whilst the cumulative effect of the mediocre episodes and their absurdly twisted cousins is one of mild disappointment, an episode like the darkly humorous and playfully profound ‘Godfellas’ suggests that the free-wheeling inventiveness of ‘Futurama’ has been replaced by something quite different: weirder, darker, more philosophical, the humor more offbeat, the show’s sci-fi credentials more up-front. It’s tempting to make parallels between the fates of both ‘Futurama’ and ‘The Simpsons’: initial teething problems, freewheeling adolescent genius, and directionless, self-absorbed young adulthood. ‘Futurama’s course seems to be a truncated version of ‘The Simpsons’ oscillating fate, but moments in this fitfully erratic series suggests that the original magic isn’t only still there, but something fresh is scrambling to get out.