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Hulu Futurama Revival Part 1
779 Plays1 year ago
The first 10 episodes of Futurama's new season on Hulu have aired - J Scotty had to hop on to give some quick thoughts!
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Transcript
Futurama Revival Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
On another exciting entry of Animation Deliberation, we're talking Hulurama. The first half of the revival of Futurama on Hulu has come and gone and I wanted to hop on and give some quick thoughts on it. Gonna get right into that after some ads that are entirely random and we have no say over whatsoever.
00:00:21
Speaker
Sing along if you know the words. One, two, three, it's time for animation deliberation. A conversation and a celebration of our favorite action animated series. Yeah.
00:00:37
Speaker
All right, welcome into Animation Deliberation, the podcast that takes action animation and cartoons seriously, but not too seriously. My name's Jay Scottie St. Clair, and it's just me. Like I said at the top here, before the ad break there, just wanted to hop on, give some quick thoughts to the first half of Hulu-Rama, the Hulu Futurama revival, the, I guess, technically season eight production wise, season 11, as far as
00:01:07
Speaker
air airing goes. But yeah, I just non-spoilery thoughts here. I haven't talked about this show since episode two, which focused heavily on Kif and Amy, but I really, I really did like this season. I thought it was right up there with some of the best seasons of Futurama. It had all the hallmarks of Futurama in terms of being like this really
00:01:31
Speaker
absurd and dumb, but also surprisingly smart and witty and timely, uh, animated series with, you know, all the sci-fi flourishes and they, they don't waste that at all. So it's just an outstanding cast of characters, uh, voiced by some very talented people. So I'm pretty grateful, uh, that they were able to get everybody to
Bender's Role Negotiation
00:01:51
Speaker
come back. I know John DiMaggio who voices Bender,
00:01:54
Speaker
when we were first hearing about this series, the negotiating it required to get him to come back to the role. I guess they kind of lowballed him in terms of what he was going to be compensated, but eventually they were able to get him on board, which I can't imagine what the show would have felt like otherwise. Similar show, similar but different show, Rick and Morty, as well as
00:02:15
Speaker
Solar opposites are having to contend with the departure of Justin Roiland currently with, you know, Solar opposites taking the approach of just recasting with a new voice and just explaining within the story, having Dan Stevens there. And I think there was talk about doing something similar with Bender having like a different guest actor kind of come in to voice the role. Cause I mean, you can, there are ways to, you know, work that out in your head cannon with it being a robot character.
00:02:42
Speaker
But I'll just all right. So now that the you know, the somewhat non spoilery thoughts are out of the way, I will give a quick rundown of all the episodes that have aired so far because we knew that we were going to get a 20 episode season and the first 10 of those have aired yet. And there are four other episodes on the docket that have
00:03:05
Speaker
titles attached to them, but no release dates.
Plot Highlights & Callbacks
00:03:08
Speaker
Actually, you know what? All 20 episodes have titles for them, but we do not have release dates whatsoever for the the final 10 episodes here. Just to run down the titles of the episodes that I didn't cover and give you kind of a brief idea of what they were about. Episode three was titled How the West Was 1010001.
00:03:34
Speaker
and the nice binary play on words there. And in this one, Professor Fonsworth is indebted to the robot mafia after losing all his money on Bitcoin. So the Planet Express crew basically heads to this town where they're living in the Old West because of, you know, cryptocurrency mining. So a pretty good episode, not super memorable in the great scheme of things. It kind of gets lost in the shuffle to me. But then we move on to episode four titled Parasites
00:04:02
Speaker
regained. And in this one, the crew realizes that Nibbler's litter box is infested with parasitic worms that are eating his intelligence. So I did think that this was one of the really good episodes. We didn't get a ton of Nibbler in this season, but this was definitely his episode.
00:04:18
Speaker
It also featured the return of the parasitic worms who they plagued fry back in the past but I think that was like as early as like maybe suit season two season three so definitely definitely a throwback and a callback and just kind of solidifies this this new season even though it's coming from Hulu.
00:04:40
Speaker
It doesn't miss a beat. It's in line and having those callbacks and continuity to the previous seasons that aired elsewhere, be it Fox or be it Comedy Central. Episode five was called related to items you viewed. And in that one, Leela moves in with Fry, making Bender so jealous that he quits Planet Express and moves to work on the moon in the warehouse of Mama's On, an immense online shopping and delivery company owned by Mom.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah. And this one, I think the big, again, stand out for me was having the return of a character like mom and her three kids. And yeah, just, you know, mom is a classic Futurama villain. So just having, you know, her in the mix. And it just helped it really feel like a season of Futurama. It didn't really feel so much like as this revival, even though it's been
00:05:29
Speaker
you know, 10 years since we've seen these characters are really, I keep saying this particular expression, but it really feels like they just didn't skip a beat. They just passed the baton on like the 10 years never really happened. You know, albeit I will say, uh, I'm not going to be super negative on this one because I really did like the season. But if I had to have any quibbles, I will say Billy West, as much as I love him and the man is doing an insane amount of work with the number of characters he voices fry.
00:05:55
Speaker
Professor Farnsworth and Zoidberg's Zapp Brannigan as well. So he's doing a lot of work and incredible work. I will say
Voice Acting & Guest Appearances
00:06:05
Speaker
in the 10 years that he has not voiced a lot of these characters, particularly Fry, Zoidberg, and Professor Farnsworth, I did feel the age in his voice just a little bit. It felt like his register was just a little bit deeper and he had a harder time
00:06:20
Speaker
uh getting to that higher register but like I said total nitpick the man is insanely talented and we are fortunate to have him be a part of the show and voice these characters and uh and dear them to us so much but uh let's move on here to episode six I know what you did last or I know what you did next Christmas which was you know uh Futurama's had a number of Christmas episodes and in the world of Futurama Santa is not the you know the
00:06:49
Speaker
gift-bringing hero that he is in our culture. Robot Santa is not a fun guy, so they definitely had some fun with that. It was kind of a Bender-Zoidberg episode, but another point of note for this episode is that it did feature Quanzibot, and that was actually a posthumous final performance for Coolio, who passed away earlier. So nice to have the tribute to him and have that kind of throwaway character brought back into the fold.
Social Commentary Themes
00:07:20
Speaker
All right, episode seven was race against the vaccine. After coming out of a third COVID lockdown, Earth is beset by a new virus, exploded 23, that causes and is transmitted by rage. Earth is additionally affected by the new pandemic when
00:07:36
Speaker
Omni crony ends launch a disinformation campaign to cause earthlings to fight against one another. Over vaccine safety that so they can but i mean this one where's its heart right on the sleeve like future has always been a satire as pretty much all of the works of mac graining but this one like a you know please.
00:07:57
Speaker
COVID pandemic that we all experienced as a planet and as a society was just pretty ripe. Futurama is not the first one to take it on or tackle it as the years have gone on. We've seen more and more approaches to adapting that whole situation. But of course, Futurama did it. And it's insanely smart, funny, and
00:08:27
Speaker
What's the word I'm looking for here? It's funny, but it's also a little bittersweet because of the truth that's there. I guess I'm not expressing myself as well as I would like to, but you get the gist there. Definitely a solid episode and gets points for the cultural and social commentary.
00:08:45
Speaker
Episode 8 zap zap gets cancelled and this one again kind of like referring to the whole Cancell culture that our society is dealing with now You know zap is it's a prime target for that. So zap is one of my favorite characters love to hate him He's such a buffoon. So to see him have to you know, navigate a World in which that kind of behavior is not tolerated was was pretty great and of course, you know
00:09:13
Speaker
Zapp manages to fumble his way to, you know, upward, upward. He fails upwardly, is what I'm going to say. But, you know, I definitely enjoyed that episode. But then we get into the final two episodes where I really feel like the the season came to a head like figuratively and literally in terms of quality, like these were some really, really standout episodes.
Innovative Episode Formats
00:09:37
Speaker
And I found myself really enjoying them and
00:09:41
Speaker
looking forward to revisiting them and they hold a place as some of my favorite episodes of Futurama, not just within this season, but within the series as a whole. So starting off with episode nine, the prints and the products. So this one was interesting because Futurama in its previous seasons, not every single season, but certainly the later seasons, they have a tendency to do a anthology episode in which you get like, you know, four or five, maybe three or four,
00:10:11
Speaker
little vignettes and these little side stories where you take the characters from Futurama but they're basically just you know the players for these like various different stories they want to tell it's kind of like American Horror Story or like the Twilight Zone or something like that where
00:10:29
Speaker
American Horror Story is the better comparison because you often see the same actors just in different seasons. They portray different characters, and it's the same thing here. The Futurama characters are usually playing versions of themselves, but the situations are always pretty crazy. But this one, what makes it unique from previous anthology entries is the fact that it has a
00:10:53
Speaker
story device that like frames around it, like with the title of the prints and the product. It's all about like Leela falling in love with this Prince of Space when they're on a delivery mission.
00:11:05
Speaker
and everything that goes wrong there. But within that story, which I mean, uh, it's pretty short. There's not that much to it, but they make the most of what they do have, especially with the relationship between Lila and fried, because this is like the first full season that we've really get to see them be a couple and how Lila just kind of throws that away, um, seemingly anyway. But we get these little vignettes and this one, they're all based on like products. So you get like a little infomercial or commercial like
00:11:33
Speaker
Jet jab at the beginning and then it just goes right into a story that features the characters as whatever product has been advertised so in one of them they're all wind up toys and fry discovers he's dying due to his clockwork key slowly winding down from his time in the cryogenic freezer and the next one it's a world of round wheels cars and citizens are being murdered.
00:11:53
Speaker
Not long after reading a text message. So it's kind of like the ring or something like that Pretty I like the way that one ended up going is pretty funny and into the final one there are rubber ducks and These like egg weebl weebl egg creatures and it's basically, you know a star-crossed forbidden love situation where these rivaling societies kind of are forced to confront each other with the the the lovers, you know
00:12:24
Speaker
But anyway, I just really liked how this one was a solid anthology like we've seen in the past, but it really did something new with having that story, larger story kind of frame it and provide a reason why we were having this kind of off kilter episode.
00:12:42
Speaker
But moving on from episode nine, we get to episode 10 titled all the way down. And again, I just really can't sing the praises of these last two episodes enough, but this final episode, especially considering that this is not the season finale or the series finale. Again, we do know that there are more episodes on the way. I thought this was a
00:13:00
Speaker
Great way to at least enter this break that we're gonna have and leave us all with something to really kind of like chew on intellectually Which you know some of my favorite episodes of Futurama Dove does do Anyway, and this one professor Farnsworth creates a simulation of their universe represented as low-res voxel models which causes the planet Express crew to wonder if they are living in a sip in a simulation and
00:13:27
Speaker
again this is just the concept and like you know futurama again is not the first one to play with this idea of like are we living in a simulation certainly the matrix is mine that's rick and morty has certainly touched upon it but just the way they go about it's uh it's kind of like trippy in in a way like uh
00:13:47
Speaker
it seems pretty definitive. And Professor Farnsworth says as much like, no, we're not living in a simulation. We have these rules that govern our world and all that. And then that's when Amy kind of chimes in like that's a lot like the programming of the simulation that you created. And then we just have like, you know,
00:14:06
Speaker
these three simulations happening simultaneously, pardon the repetition of simulator. But it gets trippy to that point where you start to see the lower level simulations get to that point where they're saying and doing the exact same things that the real, quote unquote, real world's doing. So it really makes you think about the fact that
00:14:33
Speaker
Futurama itself is a show. And while it's not necessarily a simulation, it is something that was created and has a framework and a structure. So it really did a good job of kind of like getting me in that headspace of like questioning like,
00:14:48
Speaker
Or am I living in a simulation? And I don't believe that personally to be the case, but I can't really argue definitively one way or another. So I love stuff that just really gets my brain working like that, which so many great episodes of Future Amadeh.
00:15:05
Speaker
All right, so yeah, like I said, I wanted to make this one pretty quick, but I encourage those of you that are out there. The reason I did this one solo is just because Futurama is one of my favorite shows and I was a little impatient. I couldn't wait for Zuhair or my co-host to watch it, which I do not blame them because there's so much content out there to watch. But if you are like me and have been consuming Futurama rabidly or Hulu-Rama,
00:15:32
Speaker
and have some thoughts, I encourage you please send an email to Animation Deliberation Podcast at gmail.com, or you can check us out on any social medias, just search Animation Deliberation, you'll find
Engagement & Contact Info
00:15:43
Speaker
us. And if you like what we're doing here, you know, like, subscribe, share the show, give us a rating and review. And thank you as always for tuning in and stay well, and that's T-O-O-N-I-N.
00:15:56
Speaker
Thank you for listening to the Animation Deliberation Podcast, a proud member of the Strandepanda Network. If you would like to contact us, you can email animationdeliberationpodcast at gmail.com or follow us on Twitter at animationdelib1. For this and other great shows, you can visit Strandepanda.com or join the great community that is the Strandepanda Chat Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash svchat. Tune in next time and remember, stay well.