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Futurama (1999)
Better Than The Simpson's
The Simpsons is a great show, don't get me wrong. It has served us well for many years, if by "us" you mean the fun-loving and mirthful among us who bask in its satiric wit on a weekly-nay, nightly, if you count the incessant syndicated reruns-basis. Matt Groening's flagship show is the third-longest running comedy in the history of television, animated or otherwise. (It falls behind Saturday Night Live, which can only be killed by sunlight, beheading, or a stake through the heart, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and I'm sure there's a moral there somewhere.) It revels in both the absurd and the mundane, skewering every part of American suburban life. It's endlessly amusing and eminently quotable. But on March 28th, 1999, when Futurama first aired, a great deal of my love for The Simpsons transferred to Groening's latest work.
Futurama never really caught on the way I thought it should. The reasons are more or less self-evident. One, the Fox network never really believed in the show. They premiered it after The Simpsons on a Sunday night, moved it to Tuesdays, then later moved it back to Sunday nights but stuck it in the 7:00-8:00 hour against CBS's behemoth 60 Minutes, which while that didn't necessarily mean that its primary demographic was off watching Morley Safer's hair not move, it did mean that it was going to appear to perform poorly in the Nielsen ratings, which is all advertisers and network suits care about.
Two, it has a decidedly geeky tone to its humor. I thought geeks watched TV, but I guess they don't. Maybe they had trouble finding the show - but I doubt any geek who saw an episode ever missed one afterwards.
Three, it was too smart for the average audience, which ties into number two. I think too many people dismissed the show as just a Simpson's rip-off or an all sci-fi spoof show. But it really was much much more than that. It was pretty high level satire, that aimed at everything from our political government to Flash Gordon.
Four.well, there doesn't really need to be a four here. Those two were enough to sound its death knell. Sure, you could still catch a new episode as late as July 2003, if you're paying attention. But the is dead now, so buy the DVDs.
You really have to wonder how a show with humor this esoteric, this geeky, made it to the air at all. I suppose Futurama was hitting the air around the time the Internet exploded into the public consciousness.
The first episode in 1999, "Space Pilot 3000," is perhaps the weakest of the lot, but I don't expect much else from a pilot since it has to introduce the concept of the show (delivery boy sleeps 1000 years, wakes up in future) and the major characters (though we don't get most of them until the second episode), all in one short half-hour. The second episode, "The Series Has Landed," doesn't fare much better. It tries very hard to demonstrate that the future is just like the present, only in space. Things start heating up with the third and four episodes, "I, Roommate" and "Love's Labor's Lost in Space." The former involves Fry and Bender, the alcoholic robot, becoming roommates. It actually manages to make an Odd Couple joke funny long after Odd Couple jokes became inert and lifeless. And that is way it stayed for the rest of its run - Hilarious. It made old jokes funny again and created some of the craziest, most inventive, shows ever created.
The Simpson's is smart and funny, but Futurama is inspired. Futurama makes it look like Groening had been playing it safe all those years on The Simpson's. They had a family, Bart learned lessons, and there were too many happy endings - but Futurama broke all those conventions and gave us pure funny that was not hankered down with morals or families. It was just comedy bliss. It saddened me deeply when Fox cancelled Futurama. It made me incredibly happy when Cartoon Network started showing reruns, but then it saddened me deeply when I realized I don't have cable. But then it made me incredibly happy when Fox released Futurama on DVD.
Big Helium Dog (1999)
Where is the DVD?
It may be a stupid, stupid movie. Hell, it's so stupid it makes Dude, Where's My Car? look downright erudite. But Big Helium Dog can also be very funny, depending on your sense of humor. Me, I find it very funny. Here is a test. If setting your cat on fire is funny to you or if throwing your grandma down a flight of stairs to her death is funny to you --- then you will love this movie. If you love Jesus and like Cop movies - then this will be a good one for you as well.
I love that sort of humor, the strange little non-sequitur moments that show the filmmakers weren't trying to make something that everyone would "get." I'm talking about things like the animated sequence of the Knights of the Round Table being chased by an animated beast in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, only to be saved by the animator having a heart attack. Or the giant penguin Adam Sandler hallucinated about during his lowest moments in Billy Madison. Big Helium Dog is full of moments like that; in fact, the movie is little more than a clothesline upon which moments like that hang like soiled boxers. For me, that's a cinematic treat akin to fried cheese.
So I'm sure you're wondering why, if this is such a stupid (though funny) movie, why do I want it so badly? Two reasons. One, a friend once said that 'stupid-funny' is the ultimate test of a relationship. If you could find a woman who would watch Billy Madison or Monty Python with you, from beginning to end, without rolling her eyes, then she was a keeper. A movie with that kind of power should be available on DVD, period.
Two, every other crappy movie gets a DVD release. Every single TV series gets a DVD release. So where is this DVD? It has some pretty big names in it? Michael Ian Black of the TV show `ED' is in it and Director of Clerks, Kevin Smith, also makes an appearance as do some other very recognizable people.
Sometimes the DVD gods smile on the unlikeliest of films. Helium Dog needs to somehow manage a release, even if it is bare-bones, it needs a DVD presentation.