richard_wright

Not, I hasten to add, the punishment inflicted by the strangely drawn participants of this anime, but the torture of having to listen to yet more irritating, whiny dialogue thanks to the geniuses behind the English dub who seem to be aiming at a 6 year old level. And if you think that's bad, wait till you see the animation, all 5 frames of it. Disney this is not, and calling it substandard would be a kindness. The plot is as follows: Overlong, boring fight scenes. Cut to overlong, boring bonding scenes. Then it's back to the fight. Now bonding. And then.. you get the picture. You might feel sorry for the people involved in this mess, that is until you find out they made 291 twenty five minute episodes of it. That means that either a) they were in it for the money and didn't mind having this on their CV (how sad) b) they had no taste and thought they were involved in a multi-part story to rival Lord Of The Rings or c) They were complete morons. I'll leave it up to you to decide..

Well it's official. Futurama is cancelled. I can't say I'm that upset as I have been anticipating it for a while now, but it still hurts that a show with so much potential has been flushed down the crapper the way it has. Only Cartoon Network, who brought the show from Fox and shows all the earlier episodes, seems to have treated it with the respect it deserves.

Futurama was conceived in 1999 as a potential successor to that long-running animated classic, The Simpsons. The same creator, Matt Groening had created a show which seemed simple on the outset, but overflowed with sci-fi references and highbrow gags, as well as being superbly animated and with a cast of characters the viewer could genuinely care about. Things looked up from the start with high-ratings and much critical acclaim, but it didn't take long for the initial success to turn sour thanks to an argument between Groening and Fox considering the content of the show, which resulted in a spate of pre-emptions and re-scheduling. Ratings soon fell as people didn't know what time their favourite show came on or whether it was still on at all, and Fox took advantage of that by announcing in 2002 that the show was on definite hiatus with no new episodes being made for the time being. This position might have been justified if the programs that replaced Futurama in it's timeslot had garnered superior ratings, but those pretenders barely fared better than the show they had desposed. The only possible explanation is that the replacements were cheaper to produce than an animated show, or maybe they were worried that it wouldn't have the staying power of a brand name like The Simpsons. However, our yellow skinned family has been on the slide for a while now, and Futurama only being four years old still feels relatively fresh and perhaps would have been a contender for the crown with a bit more advertising, but Fox again didn't seem remotely bothered and just hung out the show to die. Another quality program, Family Guy suffered the same fate while another undeserved survivor, King Of The Hill, stumbles on like a dead duck. What a crazy, sad world we live in.

With the event of reality TV providing an inexpensive easy ratings winner, the future for decent programming looks even bleaker as intelligent, funny shows such as this get swept aside for another attempt to make a star out of some talent-less wannabe. Fortunately, Futurama will never die, the availability of all 72 episodes on DVD will see to that, but you can't help but feel that they barely scratched the surface of this universe: there were more stories to tell, more adventures to be lived, but that will never be now, thanks to TV executives after a quick buck. What will happen to Fry, Leela, Bender etc? Only a million fanfics and the imagination of the Futurama-loving nation can answer that. On TV I'm afraid this space voyage has come to an end, and there is nothing left to do but to say goodbye and hope that the unaired 8 or so episodes will be shown sooner rather than later. What a waste of a brilliant concept.