They’re back baby! After ten years away, Futurama has returned for its (depending on who you ask) eighth or 11th season, now on Hulu (or Disney+ if you’re outside the States.) Being Matt Groening’s consistently best cartoon, the new season has a lot to prove, and it tackles that skepticism head on in its premiere, with a meta story where Philip J. Fry becomes a vegetable trying to finish bingewatching the soap opera All My Circuits, forcing Leela and Bender to revive it to keep him alive.
1. It’s Been 23 Years?!
Despite the temporal shenanigans in the previous series finale, the show’s writers and producers still decided to set the premiere in 3023, more or less matching the real-world and in-universe gap since the show’s 1999 debut (when Fry got stuck in the cryogenic chamber that froze him until December 31, 2999.) This realization is what leads Fry (who’s roughly 38, ignoring every temporal paradox on the show) to decide to bingewatch every TV show ever made, as he feels he hasn’t accomplished anything in life. It was an immensely relatable feeling, speaking as someone who was nine when Futurama started airing, and still doesn’t have a partner, kids, or his own home. That said, Fry’s been on some really amazing adventures hasn’t he? He may still be a delivery man working for his brother’s descendant, but he’s saved the world a lot (though, then again, he is missing his delta brainwave.)
2. Vocal Fry
Going in, I was keenly aware Billy West, who turned 71 this year, is not as young as he was when he started voicing Fry, Farnsworth, Zoidberg, and Richard Nixon (who returns at the end of this episode.) He definitely sounds slower and huskier as Fry, and to a lesser extent as Farnsworth (although it’s not as noticeable with him, since the Professor was already old as hell.) The rest of the cast sound about the same, with the exception of Phil LaMarr as Hermes Conrad, who sounds a little lower; in any case, all of this is justifiable thanks to the characters ageing with their actors, and their performances remain as stellar as ever. (Especially John DiMaggio, who threatened to not return as Bender to get his colleagues a pay rise, which brings us to…)
3. Holy Crap This is Topical
It is hilariously depressing how this landed smack dab in the middle of the WGA strike, and now the SAG-AFTRA strike. Calculon (who I honestly forgot died) is brought back from Robot Hell to revive All My Circuits, in an eerie echo of actors’ worry about studios owning their likenesses for A.I. purposes, while the writers and director are literally worked to death keeping up with the demand for episodes from Leela and Bender. (Including Cody Ziglar, who just spoke out about his lack of residuals from Disney in real life!) Fry fast-forwarding through the show also recalls a controversy a few years back over Netflix offering the option to watch footage at more rapid speeds, so I certainly found it amusing for that reason. Groening’s shows have always bitten the hand that feeds (The Simpsons mocked Fox all the time), but I can’t imagine anyone realized just how visible the situation would be when this premiered.
4. Soap Opera Ending
As well as the industry, the episode had good fun poking at TV shows themselves, between the self-deprecating jokes about how many revivals All My Circuits has had, and The Scary Door bit mocking Black Mirror for just being a modern Twilight Zone. It was pretty perfect that the episode concluded with a fake out over Fry’s death, given the whole premise revolved around him watching a soap opera, and that the kicker was that he’d emerged from his vegetable state two days before because it had gotten so bad that he decided to do some reading instead – you know a show is bad when Fry would rather read a book!
5. It’s Good to Be Back
This episode seemed like it was first and foremost addressing the fans who felt the series ended on such a strong note (at least twice now) that it didn’t need to come back, what with the meta narrative about reviving a show that’s been canceled repeatedly, culminating in Fry’s testimony before Nixon about how it’s good for shows to end, and for fans to take a break. I imagine some of them would find this annoying and pandering, but it was a fun satire that boded well for this trip down memory lane. In a way, seeing the show blatantly tackle such a current issue made it feel like it’d grown up with me, as if I were now present in the writers’ room, and as a result, it felt even more like coming home to all these characters I’ve loved since childhood.
Continued belowBonus Thoughts:
– I know it’s 2023, but I was still pleasantly surprised to see Calculon be portrayed as bisexual.
– Wait, Slurms McKenzie is alive!? (OK, admittedly barely.)
– Poor Milwaukee Shakespeare Festival.
Join us for a look at the second episode in a couple of weeks time in our Boomb Tube column, which goes live every Monday afternoon. In the meantime, please check out this deep dive by YouTuber Johnny 2 Cellos, whose video essays on various cartoons I enjoy greatly, particularly his breakdown of the new opening credits. I myself will be dancing along to the theme music (seriously, I know it’s just a homage to Pierre Henry’s “Psyché Rock,” but what an underrated bop.)
