eep! i'm naked!
eep! i'm naked!
<11.01.2025>
i want to make rewatching futurama my little new years tradition. futurama in my humble opinion objectively the best animated series from "adult" category and it always makes me warm and cozy. so, what I'm going to do here is to analyze and interpret and stuff like that and it might turn out interesting! and of course futurama spoilers (duh)
pretty good, it gives a lot to expand on IN FUTURE. theres some great episodes i though would appear later (for example with nibler or robot hell), but there's no extremely good episodes.
well first episode is one of the most important ones, since its establishes our three main characters and their desperate loneliness: Fry who at first was glad to abandon his old life but quickly starting to miss it, Leela who has no family and no home planet, and Bender, about whom not much known but i thnk it's safe to say he had never had any meaningful relationship in his life. And so those three with wonderful characters meet eachother and become coworkers. pretty solid start. also one interesting that ng:
at first i wanted to write this epsode off as a lighth first adventure, with it's own little problems without anything grandiose. to be honest it's there too, but i noticed something quite interesting. but first about characters introduced here, which of will have at least few interesting episodes - doctor zoidberb, emy and hermes, which are also important part of the crew buut they didn't had any of their own episodes yeat so i won't focuse on them. what i want to focus on is the concept of the episode. i don't know if it was intended by athors or not (i have a feeling that i will say that quite often) but i think is is an allusion on the world where post-modern is dominated, where there are any symbols left lacking of any purpose or sense. what do i mean by that : on the moon they built a giant amusement park and everyone already accepted the fact the moon is just a rock with some silly rides. no one from main cast feel traveling to the moon like anything speciall. no one but fry. for him, like for person from 20th century, moon is something far and mysterious, and this lunar park feels fake, it has no "real" moon. and even after he and leela ride "educational" ride, turns out everyone forgot how the moon landing happened. so fry drives rover off the rails, "breaking post modern barriers" (i know sounds extremely pretentious). after a few shenanigans whic endangered lives of fry and leela, they got to the moon shuttle and leela isnt empressed by footstep of dead guy and plastic flag and just want to get safe inside shuttle. and only when she sees reflection of earth with the landscape of moon in reflection of frys helmet she finally understands him, also breaking free from post modernity. a lot of it is a bit of stretch and listening to the authors commebtary confirm there were not even a hint of that, but i had fun thinking about it. promise i wnt think so hard on next one
good episode which shows bender, despite all his vulgar and in your face nature, as a gentle person robot who can get hurt, who has no one in his life but fry, who are ready for living with his friend to cut off his eek! anthena!
also theres a little kick about house problem in us, and specifically in new york, but its such a week kick that i dont think that i can say anything about it.
episode introduces two often returns ng characters - zap and kif, and the really important creatyre - nibbler. alsoo epsiode shows leelas love to weak creatures, which played with her REALLY bad joke through brannigan (and this love for weak also lead to some problems in the future). and also the thought that fuel for interplanetary travel is those funny creatures fecies is kinda funny until you understand that we are basically riding the bones of dinosaurs, which a similar level of silliness.
tgis episode is about classical political move "make people angry at some group to distract from real problems" at first i wanted to call all of the chapeck 9 (robots planet) fascist, however i don't think that we have enough information to say that for sure - we don't know their material conditions of existing such society, maybe those robots do have a reason to fear a humans, even if now it is hyperbolized in local media. plus we don't even know their economic system, although knowing that they have a shadow government that rules everything i have a bad feeling. oh and also this epsiode shows how team values bender that they risk their life saving him despite the fact he was whining about humans the whole episode.
very interesting episode for several different reasons. first -it's predicted 'epidemic' of nostalgia. (although maybe it was already case in the 1999?) anyway, fry is ready to spend ridiculous amounts of money just to feel himself in past, where grass was greener than the most green color imaginable. and despite all of that friends at the end are much important for him, since he doesn't care he got all the money stolen, he just happy that he still has friend he can share anchovies with, which he bought wor insane amounts of money, even overbeting mom. by the way about mom - shes also interesting and important character. cruel and calculated, who prettend to be soft and fluffy on peoplr, i think that thanks to here i became skeptical of corporations as a kid.
i tried to get about what was episode, and when i started writing about it i was pretty desprate and almost wrote it off as something meaningless. and then it hit me - you shouldn't interpret water emperors (not emperors of water, but emperors from water) literally, but as a some allusion on ""free"" market competition, with its eternal consumption of each other, where every emperor rules for a week until the stronger one comes and drinks the weaker one. once again, not the meaning intended by authors but hey. oh also its nice to see that leela even though she can be angry about her coworkers, she will help them regardless.
well it's pretty straightforward epsiode with green message - don't delay with solving problems or else it will be too late. well and of course new york had and still has a big garbage problem, where it's laying in mountains in the bags on the streets, although lately they AS I HEARD desided to put plastic garbage cans
another great classic episode with amazing song, which i also thought would be in later episodes. if you think about it this concept is really interesting - religious robots, but as i more thought about it, then i thought that it's not so different from human religions.. we also know perfectly well what processes created us, and we know, of course not perfectly but i would say pretty well how our organism works, and yet nothing from this as any science is able to proof or disprove the existence of god, since hes beyond our understanding by definition. although robot hell turned out a reall thing (does that means thers a robot god? (actually yes but in waaay later seasons)) in general robots in futurama are interesting phenomenon, that they are canonicaly don't have a freedom of choice and yet they can act freely and be judged.. but to be honest a lot of things in futurama can change future world rule to better suit satire, interesting story or, sadly, on offs jokes, what i accept but when i notice something like that my little internal pedant is dying a little more. UPD : after i watched a christmas episode with author comments turns out the robot can be built like this, for example tin timmy with eternally broken leg is built like this by other robots, so it means that they practically can look like they have a free will and yet just follow their program since there's so much in design variations. and also i understood that show had a loot of writers and probably not all of them follow on little details of story or little jokes and such. by the way this episode also made me think that the devil may be not so bad, since he torture sinners and by doing so he enforce god's rules. turns out that the devil is a gods servant in Judaism, although in Christianity he's a little evil trickster, who god allows to do evil things to tes their childrens faith. although my fren told me that also it can be interpreted as a free will of humans to make mistakes and sin.
futurama has a bit wonky season order, so not to stretch it for eternity about next seasons i will write in next years of futurama rewatches, plus this year i found version with authors commentaries and it was a lot of fun to listen about all the behinds of scenes of creating of animated series, but it was hard to think about the epsiodes despite the fact i know them almost by memory.
