Futurama back from dead again Futurama is to return with 26 new episodes, six years after Fox first cancelled the animated show. Comedy Central, which previously commissioned four feature-length specials, will begin screening the new half-hour shows of the animated series on US cable TV next year, following the agreement of a deal between Fox and Comedy …
but it bloody ruins my complete series box set though. The recent specials were sold as films, even though they were shown as half-hour episodes on TV, so the box set claim of "complete series" was just about holding on! This completely buggers it! Ah well, what do I care...
FUTURAMA IS BACK BABY!!!
I actually liked the programme - I thought it had some good plots. Plus Leela was quite fit!
However, the real reason that they are bringing it back? The same reason that we see so many other "sequels" and "remakes" - they are running out of fresh ideas. In addition, the men in suits don't want to take a chance on new formats in case they tank.
327 channels and nothing on.
Who said the movies weren't that funny? They were atrociously, heartstoppingly unfunny, is what they were.
I tried to sit through the first one, and halfway I realized I hadn't laughed, grinned nor vaguely smiled up to then --- it was just a set of cruder reruns of older jokes, with some efforts at slapstick, as if some suit thought "a dash of S P will perk up this thing; ah screw that, let's just have people falling down stairs". Even if the rest were comic masterpieces, on average it would be bad... I dunno, don't have the time to waste, they've all credit burned up (while I'm an owner of a boxed-set first four series), and flicks removed from my LoveFilm queue.
Huzzah!
just hope they're better then the mini movies. first one was good for a chuckle but the others seemed like they had the same non existant dry wit that the simpsons has been peddling for a few years.
futurama was funny in its day and still is now. i hope it remains so!
"she's built like a steakhouse but handles like a bistro"
...it bit their fat dull meatridden butts.
Yee-ha, once again clueless Fox execs are guided to the light by the actual desires of the people. Hope that catches on over here, who knows we may even get some good TV out of it
go Beneder, go Bender
(mines the one with the finglongerer in the pocket)
the movies speak volumes about the class the new series will run at... stale and boring is putting it lightly...
as for the firefly whiners... that show should never have been put on the air. the movie was like sitting through every movie ewe boll ever made back to back... all in 90 minutes... i feel humanity is far worse off for ever knowing of it's existence...
Brilliant news. As for the movies, the format was messed up, and that was the main problem... each time they had to make a complete 90-minute movie that could also be broken up into 4 distinct and seperate 22 minute episodes. End result - bit of a mess, the stories didn't flow well at all as a movie and the episode breaks were stark (think of the xmas episode slap in the middle of the first movie).
I still liked the movies (third one was the only really terrible one), and it certainly can't hold the crown for "worst comeback ever"... that award has already been claimed by Red Dwarf.
Futurama's humour is fast-paced and isn't well-suited to anything longer than 22 minutes... storylines just can't be sustained for longer than that, scripts rely on running gags more than you might realise, and those get tiring if spread out over 90 minutes.
The show was really going places in it's 4th tv series, hopefully we'll see a return to that. Much happier to see Futurama back than yet another Seth McFarlane show.
I think Serenity was a very poor introduction to Firefly. I watched the movie and thought it was pretty obvious why the show was cancelled, then recently decided to give the series a chance anyway and it was much, much better than the movie. Not sure it's quite as good as some of the fans would have you believe, but the pilot is a far better hour and a half of entertainment than the movie was.
On an unrelated note, I see that I am Ben 42 now. Does that make me the answer to all Bens?
Sarah, how many eye(s) do you have? No offense intended, just checking... because you see, I happen to be the last male of an ancient one-eyed race and I wondered if you'd be interested in living in a castle for the rest of your life...
OK, no need to kick me in the kidneys, just hand me my polymorph coat...
Agreed on Serenity. I think the problem is that the show was cancelled after just one 'trial' half season, then when Wheedon got the chance to make the movie he tried to cram too much into it, so it was all penetration with no foreplay. The characters in firefly were very good and at the point it was cancelled we had barely begun to explore them and their backstories (but what we had seen was great). The movie just felt incoherrant as there was no time to continue gradually building the characters, they had to try to finish a story in a couple of hours when the entriety of the first season we had seen was basically just a prologue.
The result was that people that had not watched the series did not really care about the characters and for those that had it was far too abrupt an ending.
I'm not sure if the COULD bring Firefly back without ruining it further... The movie has effectively buggerred up all the plotlines that were being carefully woven in the first series.
If they can get back on form that is... I loved Futurama and although I've only watched one of the movies (Beast with a billion backs) I found it to be a disappointment. Still I'm going to stay optimistic on this until proved otherwise.
@Ben 42: I quite enjoyed Serenity - it was what got me to watch the series, I will say however the movie is far more enjoyable and worthwhile if you have seen Firefly. Oh and you aren't the answer to all Bens, you are the answer to the ultimate question of Ben ;)
I still think there are Firefly stories. I want to know what was the back story for Shepherd Book was, and I'm sure that there were plenty of war stories for Zoe and Malcolm.
Did the comics add anything to this?
B5 is finished. The story is finished (as JMS intended, although slightly out of sequence), and the spin-offs do not stand up against the original.
The B5 spinoffs don't stand up because the production values were so low because the studios refused to put the investment in the programs, B5 was made for about $700,000 an episode, so JMS was producing a whole season's worth of programs for the price of the ST:Voyager pilot (approx $21M).
Imagine what B5 would have been like with that sort of budget. Crusade bombed partly for the same reason, excessive use of blue screen.
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