Futurama is back, again. It's a show I've 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:persisted with through ♉all of its highs and lows, and while the season 12 premiere was enjoyable enough, it also highlighted 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:how much the show has lost its way. Between dying, returning, dying again, being bounced around networks, and failing to evolve with the cartoon sitcom, Futurama has lost its way a little. Even Hulu/168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disney Plus calling it season 12 highlights this confusion, amid debates about whether the movies 'count as seasons', whether half seasons are actually two short seasons, and so on.
The most recent episode of Futurama, The One Amigo, is all about NFTs. Remember them? The passing trend has, well, passed, and now Futurama is woefully out of date. The episode couldn't really decide how hard it wanted to stick the boot into NFTs, getting tangled up in how confusing they and their ownership can be, rather than going for broke with the fact they're ugly cartoons that scammed very stupid people out of their life savings.
Futurama Has Too Many Modern Cultural References
This lack of any real viewpoint on NFTs beyond them being a thing that exists and is vaguely futuristic is part of the reason the episode falls flat, saved only by Bender's expedition to Mexico. However, even that had been done better in Lethal Inspection, which tied Hermes to Bender's origins, and the idea of old robot gods worked better in Amazon Women in the Mood, better known as the 'snu snu episode'.
But it's not really a matter of how well the show tackles NFTs. It's that it’s tackling NFTs at all. In the post-movie years, Futurama has tackled NFTs, streaming binges, vaccines, the Birther movement, Proposition 8, and the iPhone, the last of which was the only vaguely interesting take on any of these with the use of the eyePhone, a phone that is hammered into your eye socket. In the original run, storylines were more of the 'Harlem Globetrotters have their own planet now and they invade Earth to play basketball so we're doing a Space Jam parody' variety.
Futurama is at its best when it is throwing out weird concepts and using the future to allow them to seem normal. Sewer mutants. Alien lifeforms. The Robot Devil. And so on. It is not supposed to be a parody of the modern day, it is a parody of futurism itself. It was extremely rare for the show to take modern day issues, add 1,000 years onto them, and do a straight parody. And in the case of The One Amigo, it's not even that. NFTs are played as if they're a new invention in Futurama's world, despite them being 1,000 years old at that point.
Clearly, this trend is set to continue, and that's just what Futurama is these days. The next episode is called Quids Game, and features the crew being forced to play childhood games to the death. A Squid Game parody gets a little more leeway than NFTs, because a) it has a far longer cultural staying power and b) fight to the death is a lot more timeless, but it still speaks to a writer's room who are looking to current events for inspiration. That can be dangerous territory for any cartoon once you add in the time from script to screen and our short attention spans, but for a show with the endless possibilities as Futurama, it's woefully wasteful.
Enough of the jokes still land (especially the ones not concerned with riffing on new stories), and the characters have a charm that keeps me watching. At 22 minutes a week, I'm with Futurama until the end of the line. I don't know how much life this show has left, but it has died and died and died again in style, and when it finally burns out for good, I want a front row seat. Until then, I'll look past its flaws as best I can.
Premiering in 1999, Futurama is an animated sitcom from Simpsons creator Matt Groening. It takes place in New New York of the year 3000, and initially ran for four seasons before being cancelled. It was revived in ꦿ2008 for a further three seasons, with an eighth season premiering in summer 2023.
