Let John begin masturbating…

[Phil]

…now.

Personally, I think it’s a lovely cover (though I’m probably appreciating it for different reasons than John will…) and I can’t wait for this film. Bender’s Big Score was great (flawed, yes, but great) and the preview I’ve seen of this one looks like it’s going to be phenomenal (for two reason, basically: David Cross, and lotsa Zapp).

Amazon has the preorder going already, but they don’t have this cover art. (And, honestly, is this not just gorgeous?) I grabbed it from a German site I can’t read. (Marleen? Up for some translating…?)

Topic

[John Hoare]

ohjesuschristhelpmeiosdoiasoisioj. I do love it when they make Leela a 50s/60s SF heroine.

BBS. is finally coming out next month in Region 2. Should have just imported it…

[Jonathan Capps]

> David Cross, and lotsa Zapp

I love you for telling me this.

[penny]

>ohjesuschristhelpmeiosdoiasoisioj. I do love it when they make Leela a 50s/60s SF heroine.

What like Barbarella?

[Mr Flibble]

Thankfully The Beast With a Billion Backs is out in Region 2 just a week after Region 1, so I can buy it here rather than importing it.

I can’t believe BBS isn’t out over here yet…

And as for the Barbarella thing – that whole episode is just great.

[Phil]

>I do love it when they make Leela a 50s/60s SF heroine.

It’s actually kind of funny that the show didn’t do things like this more often, since very early cinematic sci-fi is such a big part of Futurama’s pedigree.

Not that I mind even a tiny bit, since I’m glad the show was so good at finding its own identity to the start, and didn’t just become sci-fi parody, or Matt Groening’s Jetsons. Still strange, though, that you didn’t see this kind of thing more frequently in the merchandise or anything.

[TheLeen]

Site says

“Endlich melden wir uns wieder mit Neuigkeiten zur?ck und diesmal mit dem neuen Cover zum 2. Futurama-Film “The Beast With A Billion Backs”:

Zur Erinnerung: Der Film soll am 24. Juni in den USA erscheinen. Es gibt allerdings Ger?chte, die besagen, dass der Film hierzulande sogar am 06. Juni erscheinen wird (wir berichteten). Allerdings hat FOX noch nichts offizielles dazu gesagt, bleibt also abzuwarten.”

~

“Finally we have some news, this time the cover of the second Futurame film, ‘The Beast With A Billion Backs’.

Remember: The movie’s due in the US on June 24th. There’s rumours saying that here (Germany…) it’s going to be released on June 6th already. However, no official word from FOX yet, so we have to wait and see.”

~

Awesome cover. Nice nice nice.

[Phil]

Marleen: thanks!

[penny]

I look forward to watching this one…the last one was good apart from the fact some git spoiled film a bit, by telling part of the storyline which is revealed near the end.

[pfm]

From the title I was sure this was gonna be a George & Mildred thread…

[Smeg4Brains]

I watched BBS the other day. I have to say I was rather unimpressed. Yea, it was funny but it dragged on too long. Just as you think it is going to end it manages to last ANOTHER FUCKING HOUR!

[Phil]

>Just as you think it is going to end it manages to last ANOTHER FUCKING HOUR!

Um…when did you think it was going to end? When Fry returned to the year 2000 and Bender showed up to murder him?

That wouldn’t seem to me to be a very natural sort of ending. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say it was kind of…you know…a beginning.

[Jonathan Capps]

Let EVERYONE begin masturbating…

[Phil]

Yep! This is the preview included with my copy of BBS (a Best Buy store exclusive, evidently, which I think is pretty rotten…)

Looks great, doesn’t it? Here’s hoping the David Cross villain in this film has a bit more personality than the nudists in BBS…I’d hate to see Cross wasted like Bob Odenkirk was when he appeared. (Excellent though that episode was, why did they even bother to bring Odenkirk in for that? Save him for a character who actually gets to do things!)

[Phil]

For those of you who don’t know, this episode is being written by Eric Kaplan, who is probably second only to Ken Keeler in quality of Futurama writing. His previous episodes:

“Hell Is Other Robots”
“Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?”
“A Bicyclops Built for Two”
“Parasites Lost”
“I Dated a Robot”
“Jurassic Bark”
“Three Hundred Big Boys”

Truly a talented guy, and a great choice to assign the film to.

[Ben Paddon]

Awesome. it’s pretty much guaranteed to be better than BBS, then. BBS was fun, but it wasn’t great – not to mention the fact that the temporal shenanigans crapped all over two of the series’ most touching moments.

[Jonathan Capps]

I couldn’t disagree more, Ben. Well, I could… but I thought BBS was about as good as Futurama has ever been. It might have affected the Seymour moment a little, but I can’t think of any past continuity that it really crapped on.

Plus it was written by Ken Keeler and David X. Cohen! They absolutely and completely can DO NO WRONG.

[Phil]

I don’t think it craps all over the two most emotional moments at all…it just kind of rewrote them. Seymour was pining for Fry to come back from the North Pole, rather than the future, and the fact that Yancy missed his brother in Luck of the Fryrish doesn’t mean he has to STILL miss him for those scenes to have had impact. We saw one side of what happened and then Fry managed to go back and prevent it…it doesn’t change the emotional weight of the original, just the causal repercussions.

Think of it this way: Fry realized how much his brother missed him and went back in time to put it right (among other things). That’s touching in itself, no? I don’t think Yancy needs to suffer continuously for that previous episode to hold its own…

Not that I’m disregarding your point…if it truly ruins those episodes for you then I understand you being frustrated. But I have a high regard for both of those episodes, and this film didn’t undo any of the emotion for me at all.

[Phil]

>Plus it was written by Ken Keeler and David X. Cohen! They absolutely and completely can DO NO WRONG.

David X.: correct.

Ken Keeler: The Principal and the Pauper. But otherwise, correct.

[Ben Paddon]

Yancy’s son is still named Phillip, despite the fact that Fry went back and lived a life in the past. The sentimentality behind Yancy giving his son the name is gone.

Seymour’s death is utterly ruined – the cause of his fast-fossilization is revealed, which is by all accounts very nice, but it does ruin the end of Jurassic Bark for me. Seeing Seymour rest his head and slip away is one of the most touching moments of any television show from the past twenty years.

The writing in BBS just didn’t seem up to scratch. The “Paradox-free time travel” thing didn’t quite work for me. There’s some really, really sharp dialogue in there (Al Gore’s stint as a taxi driver is particularly memorable) but it doesn’t hold a candle to some of the better episodes of the series. And they use the “me, Bender” joke far more in the film than they ever did in the series – it killed the joke. It’s not funny anymore. BBS is not the worst Futurama has ever been, but it’s far from the best.

BwaBB looks like it’s going to be a lot better, though. I really can’t wait for this’n to come out.

[Ben Paddon]

Of course, I’m not saying those episodes are now completely unwatchable for me. I watched Jurassic Bark the other say and I still get salty-eyed at the end. But it just feels like that particular bugget of Futurama continuity has been irrevocably shanked.

[John Hoare]

Ken Keeler: The Principal and the Pauper. But otherwise, correct.

I’m no massive Simpsons fan, so take this opinion with the large pinch of salt it probably deserves – but for what it’s worth, out of the episodes of The Simpsons I’ve seen, I really really liked it. I know it’s not a loved episode by a lot of people – but Keeler’s defence of the episode makes perfect sense to me.

[Phil]

>Keeler?s defence of the episode

Do go on!

[John Hoare]

I hesitate to link to Wikipedia for this, but it’s a direct quote from the commentary, so it should be OK – it’s Ken Keeler’s main pullout quote from the Concept section.

[Phil]

Ah, okay. See, that’s basically what I figured he was going for. (If it was even his own idea to begin with…the odds are fairly high that it wasn’t since, as I understand it, the Simpsons episodes are often assigned to writers other than the one who pitched the idea.) And I did want to like it, because I agree with what he’s saying, and I don’t think that it was even a bad idea to do that to *a* character.

But the thing is…Principal Skinner…okay. The other characters may not have been close to him. Agreed. But he’s one of the best-developed secondary characters on the show, and he’s always had a place in my heart as a favorite. So many of the characters (by design, mind) are just stereotypes, so it’s nice when someone like Principal Skinner turns up, because he feels more like a real, rounded character.

He may not have meant much to Springfield, but the reaction to this episode shows how much he meant to the viewers.

Had they done this with Disco Stu, or the Sea Captain, or Sideshow Mel or something (ie: a character who doesn’t mean much to the townspeople NOR the viewer), I don’t think there’d have been any real reaction at all from the viewers. Some might dislike it, but there are least wouldn’t be such a widespread temptation to forget it ever happened.

Also, Skinner is one of the secondary characters that, by that point, we’ve been asked to pity. The show had already made several attempts to align us emotionally behind that character, so it’s a bit unfair for that same show to make us all feel like asses for doing so.

As an aside: I was dating a certain girl when this episode aired and she thought it was a great episode. We broke up soon afterward.

[Phil]

Look!

>Ken Keeler himself said, “I am very proud of the job I did on this episode. This is the best episode of television I feel I ever wrote.”

If ever we needed more evidence that the artist himself is the least equipped to judge his own work…I mean, think what you will about this episode, but how on Earth does it compare to the absolute brilliance of his work on Futurama?

[John Hoare]

To be honest, I need to see the episode again before I can comment – all I can really remember is liking it at the time. I’ll just sit down with the DVDs from the beginning at some point – I’ve worked my way through Futurama now, so The Simpsons should be next. Maybe the show will suddenly click with me from liking it, to loving it – I’m hoping it does.

Anyway, you’re right about arists usually not being the best person to judge their work. Although it’s interesting how “best” doesn’t always equal to “most loved”, whoever is judging the work. Hippies, whilst brilliant, certainly isn’t the best sitcom ever made – and yet I feel an affection for it that I don’t with other shows that are objectively better and more important…

[Ben Paddon]

I don’t hate The Principal and the Pauper, but it’s hardly a classic.

[Pete Part Three]

I can only think of a handful of episodes past the eighth season that I genuinely love. This isn’t one of them.

[Dave]

The Principal and the Pauper is a strange one. I have no problem with it. If Lister had really had turned out to be a Series 3000 Mechanoid in Out Of Time, we’d have all felt justifiably pissed off, but Skinner/Tamzarian is still the same character he was form his first episode. The people of Springfield prefer him to the original.

If the fact that Bart has been ten for 19 years fits into the internal logic of the show, and the reset button is widely acknowledged within the show this is the episode with the show takes the audience into its confidence that the show depends on the reset button.

It’s a winkfest.

[Phil]

>this is the episode with the show takes the audience into its confidence that the show depends on the reset button.

I still think it could have been handled much, much better. The “reset” button is highlighted just fine in Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie, and in the previous season the whole, “Don’t worry! We’ll never see this character again I promise!” thing has already been overused (Poochie, Frank Grimes, Shari Bobbins, Rex Banner…).

I don’t know. Part of me wants to like it if only because it DOES attempt to do something interesting with the concept of “a character.” I just wish they’d decided to do that with one that wasn’t already a functional, perfectly-well developed one already.

Ah well. Season nine definitely did usher in the concept of “skippable Simpsons episode,” it’s just a matter of which qualifies for which people.

[Phil]

>I?ll just sit down with the DVDs from the beginning at some point –

Nothing against the earliest of Simpsons stuff, but I’d actually recommend starting with season four or five and working forward from there, dipping back occasionally into the first seasons.

There’s excellent stuff there, don’t get me wrong, but the gag-rate took a while to increase, the voices/animation took a while to come together, and the writing was sometimes pretty spotty.

There’s really no reason to START with season one, at this point, as the characters are well-enough known to even casual television viewers that you won’t need much orientation before plunging into the episodes. So you might as well dive right in to the absolute best the show had to offer.

My two cents.

[Zombie Jim Undead]

Funny…I was never a fan of season 1 of the simpsons but caught one on telly the other day…

And it’s a very different show but very good. Compared to later seasons it’s a pretty straightforward comedy…nowhere near as mulit-layered. But it has lovely character stuff and it’s surprisingly bleak / dark in places.

[peas_and_corn]

>There?s excellent stuff there, don?t get me wrong, but the gag-rate took a while to increase, the voices/animation took a while to come together, and the writing was sometimes pretty spotty.

One of the reasons why the first two seasons resonate with me is that they have heaps of sad moments. After getting the DVDs and watching without commercials, I got a little teary with some of the more emotion packed episodes. There were episodes with heart, something that only appears occasionally (such as in “he loves to fly and he doh’s”).

[John Hoare]

I’m going to have to start with Season 1 Phil… because I’m an anal idiot who has to watch things from the beginning, even though I know it doesn’t matter.

But if I get Season 1 and I’m not enjoying it, I’ll skip ahead to a later season for a bit and then return to it.

[Phil]

Yeah, don’t get me wrong, season one is still good, but it’s got to be the weakest of the first eight, by quite a lot. The quality kicks up HUGELY for season two (for the most part). It’s still great stuff, but very slow moving, and very different.

Peas and Corn is right about the emotional stuff, but I still tend to prefer the later emotional episodes (Mother Simpson, for example, or the adorable–and surprisingly touching–A Fish Called Selma) where it’s just as heartfelt but still manages to be at least ten times as funny.

They really struck the right balance of emotion/comedy somewhere in the course of seasons two and three, and it stayed pretty constant for the rest of the run. Too much in season one is either emotional OR funny…the show got better at managing both as time went on.

And then, just as suddenly, became horrible at doing either.

[Phil]

Also: Eric Kaplan wrote the “Girlfriends” episode of Flight of the Conchords. This movie is gonna rockkkkkkk.

[Jonathan Capps]

> Also: Eric Kaplan wrote the ?Girlfriends? episode of Flight of the Conchords. This movie is gonna rockkkkkkk.

Excellent!

In other news I’ve been going through the Futurama commentaries recently and they’re even more of a joy than I remember. I certainly didn’t remember David Cohen’s story about leaving the show for 5 days before coming back, for instance!

[Jonathan Capps]

Since we’ve mentioned FotC, I may as well post my absolute favourite song of theirs:

[Ian Symes]

Is that the kind of thing that you think you might be in to?

[Ridley]

With the Simpsons I was surprised looking at the episode guide just how clear the line for me is when the quality has a sudden drop: 4/5 episodes into season 10 (not counting the Treehouse of Horror).

Unless those earlier episodes were made with season 9, it was a bit strange to see Lard of the Dance and Bart the Mother (which doesn’t seem to be liked by many people for whatever reason) in the same group as Mayored to the Mob, Viva Ned Flanders and Thirty Minutes Over Tokyo.

And for the record I liked Principal and the Pauper. ;) While continuity and character development isn’t really a factor for me in watching the Simpsons, I do think Sideshow Bob’s story should have ended with Brother from Another Series. And I would have been very happy if Russ Cargill had been Hank Scorpio instead.

[Ben Paddon]

A friend of mine said it quite aptly some years ago – The Simpsons went from being a brilliant animated sitcom to being a sub-par cartoon.

[Phil]

A review of the DVD set already!

http://www.screenjabber.com/futurama_beastbillionbacksDVD

Spoilers, obviously…I didn’t read it…just looked at the rating and did some SLIGHT skimming of the section on extra features. It’s hard not to read the plot summary, but I’m sure it’s worth going into the film as fresh as possible.

Some great (and not entirely spoileriffic) screen grabs at that site are worth attention, too.

[Author]

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