Futurama Season 8 Episode 1 discussion
The first episode of the new season is out! What do you think of it?
I thought it was pretty okay. It was too self - referential for me. It kept making too many "we're back" jokes but they kind of did that the last time they were cancelled and brought back. They eased off those kind of jokes eventually the last time it happened.
I was worried about how they would handle references to more modern things as "Attack of the killer App" was really painful to watch. But it seems like they handled it pretty decently.
I'm slow, but it took me a while to realise that Scary Mirror as a replacement for Scary Door was a jab at Black Mirror.
I didn't think the episode was very funny, but it wasn't bad either. What was good about it shows promise, so I'm hopeful.
Is this Season 8 or 11?
It's kind of both. It's the 11th broadcast season and the 8th production season.
I couldn't decide which one to go with. I googled a bit and went with 8 since that's what it says on Wikipedia, but now maybe I should have gone with 11 since there's already an existing thread using 11.
I would go with what imbd has it "S11E1", maybe not the pillier of truth but what apps and other places are going to pull meta data from anyway. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18114790/?ref_=tt_eps_rec
TVDB has it as 8 -- this is what sonarr uses, so I must insist it is gospel :)
What or who is Sonarr?
https://sonarr.tv -- you add indexers and/or trackers, your favorite TV shows, and then it downloads them, organizes them, pulls metadata, etc etc.
Its a great piece of software. There's a whole set of *arr for movies, music, books, and more
Oh! I had no idea. Thank you!
Ahh true :P
It's listed on Disney+ as Season 11. (Just to add to the confusion!)
Broadly speaking I disagree with the consensus that they shouldn't have done a self referential poke at how many studios and cancelations they've gone through. It would have been quite odd and disorienting if they didn't given the pattern of previous returns to production.
That said, they shouldn't continue with the "Fulu" and self referential jokes to the degree they did in the first episode. I hope it was getting it out of their system so that the rest of the season can get back to form.
Overall decently strong episode and I'm excited to see where the rest of the season goes. Would recommend!
I agree and think it was completely fine to make self-referential jokes about them returning as they've done that before. It's very on brand for them.
But it was how far they went with it that put me off a little. I still enjoyed the episode though.
I hope this just means they've got it out of their system and mention it less in future episodes.
I think they got the fulu out of their system with this episode, since they probably had to make a giant ad somehow funny.
I had a pretty healthy amount of chuckles. I agree about the self-referential thing , but they tend to do that a lot. hopefully it calms down.
It was a good re-introduction of characters and stuff so I think they are trying to find a new audience as well. Overall much better in my opinion than Enchanted.
I really wish they'd ditch the president Nixon character. It's kind of played out for me. They had a chance to introduce a new president and make fun of someone much more recent but perhaps they wanted to avoid flaming political people up.
I think the writing stayed sharp which is what I was worried about. There are some sharp jokes all throughout the episode that were very clever.
Ugh, agreed. Enchanted (S1 anyway) was almost entirely devoid of laughter for me, so disappointing.
Yeah he's pretty played out for sure, but all the more recent presidents they might replace him with are too recent - they wouldn't want to go there. Not even sure I could enjoy a Futurama that included a Trump/Biden/whoever, reminding me of our current bleak political hellscape. I just want goofy scifi jokes.
(Fun fact: it was 25 years between Nixon's resignation and Futurama's first season, and it's been 24 years between that first season and now. So you could make the argument that Nixon's presidency would have been slightly more relatable to viewers in 1999 than the first season is to viewers today! Or something.)
Also agreed. I thought the trailer was disappointing but the episode was a pleasant surprise. Really looking forward to the next 19!
I haven't watched The Simpsons in a while, but I'm pretty sure they do some stuff with President Trump, so I'm guessing Futurama will stick with Nixon's head when it comes to political lampooning. I agree that I'd rather not have direct stand-ins. To your point about relatable politicians, I guess they'd have to go with Bush Jr. to preserve that same time gap, but that feels odd, too. Or maybe I just feel old after reading your comment, haha.
I thought about W Bush too! But I think he would only work as well if the man had also resigned in disgrace and then died sometime in the intervening years. Nixon was really perfect as a presidential villain.
Looking up those dates made me feel old too, sorry to pass on the pain 😅
Yeah. When I saw Nixon, I was relieved. Not that I wanted more of Nixon in the show, I really don't. But I didn't really want him to be replaced by any recent politician. It would kill some of the enjoyment for me if he was especially replaced by Trump.
Nixon is a distant enough politician from current times that you can think "Ah yes. He was a terrible guy" without feeling too terrible about the current state of affairs.
I just finished watching it. The Hulu jokes got tiring quickly. Animatics did the same thing. It's probably in the reboot contracts that they have to acknowledge it somehow.
Futurama did the same sort of "haha we're rebooted" reference with the Comedy Central reboot but I thought it was much more in passing.
I always liked The Scary Door gag and liked The Scary Mirror update.
Overall the episode was amusing but not laugh out loud funny.
I was cautiously optimistic going in, but pleased to say i was very happy with the episode.
I thought it served as a good re-introduction to many of the established characters and a couple of the recurring gags.
As others have mentioned they leaned maybe a little to hard on the cancellation/reboot joke, though it didn't bother me, overall a solid first episode.
I was especially impressed by the voice work. I found pretty much all the characters sounded very close, if not spot on, to the way i remembered them. The only glaring exception being Nixon whose voice seemed to lack a little bit of "oomph".
Nixon’s first aroo went a little too far into werewolf, but the second, understated aroo killed me
Oh for sure, the understated aroo was pure gold
It's almost like a tradition now - every time 'Futurama' gets rebooted (and how many television shows get to say that?), it makes self-referential jokes about "We're back, baby!" It would have been strange if they hadn't done this!
However, this episode felt a bit flat and old-hat for me. I suspect they needed to get the "we're back" jokes out of their system, before hopefully moving on to better, more original, material. I hope so, anyway!
One thing I noticed was that the actors sound old. Fry is supposed to be a 20-something loser, but he sounds old now. I looked up Billy West, and he's 71 years old now! Even if Fry has aged the 23 years from 3000 to 3023, he would still only be in his 40s. But West sounds old, so Fry sounds old. And when West put on an "old" voice for the Professor... wow. Katey Sagal's voice (she's 69) is holding up slightly better, but she still sounds old for Leela. Zoidberg and Bender have croaky / raspy voices anyway, so the actors' aging won't affect those charactes as much.
One benefit of animated shows is that the characters don't have to age as the actors do (Bart Simpson has been 10 years old for over 30 years). But, the voices eventually change. And that's happening with some of the actors in 'Futurama'.
EDIT: Thanks to @Wes for the correction about Bart Simpson's age.
Marge's voice in particular has sounded exceptionally old for the last few seasons. I feel bad at the idea of classic cast member being replaced, but it does feel overdue at this point.
I understand they try to avoid writing stories with characters that are hard for the VOs to work with today. For Julie Kavner (72), that's Patty and Selma. For Harry Shearer (79), that's Monty Burns. The latter definitely did sound off in a recent episode (S34E19 "Write Off This Episode"), though I can't find a clip to reference it.
He's actually ten, though he drives at a fifth grade level.
Even though it was a reboot and openly acknowledged itself as such, a lot of the jokes had me remembering what Season 1and 2 were all about with them being good jokes and at times reference humor but with the same sort of "stumbling" to figure it all out again too.
I do watch far too much of it as I have been falling asleep with it for about a decade or more.
I just watched it and wasn't impressed, the only joke that landed for me was the actors adlibbing line, the rest felt very much like they'd run out of material ten years ago. Who knows though, the rest of the season might be better.