Don’t Fear the Reaperbot

Those who get tweets from @ccinsider already know this, but Futurama has just been signed to another season!!!

That’s ON TOP of the 13 episodes still left on this season’s contract, scheduled to begin airing on June 23, 2011.  The next season will also be 26 episodes, which makes for an awful lot of futuristic space-antics!

Without question, Futurama is the smartest show on television (other than perhaps “Into the Wormhole”, but we’re talking about two completely different things here).  I find it amazing how many people think the show is really dumb and comparable to the other stuff one might find in a cartoon sitcom.  But honestly, if you consider the really brilliant way the writers inject social or academic commentary into all the episodes I think you’d agree with me that there just aren’t many programs that can display that PLUS humor on so many levels.  And yeah, I know right now some of you are thinking about the intelligent writing in BSG, Firefly, How I Met Your Mother, or House; but I would wager that none of those shows have writers with advanced math and science degrees!

(Okay, maybe Firefly — someone will have to find out for me.)

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Edit:  So something I just thought of that should have been included in the first place…  A while back I was with a couple of friends of mine, Tristan and Trey, and we were looking at a very cool-looking laser shining on a CD for a class science demo.  For some reason that I can’t pull out of my memory now, Trey says, “Wow.  It’s like there’s a whole universe in there.”  To which I immediately mutter, “Baby, there’s a universe in all of us.”  Now, I haven’t been around true Futurama fans very much in some time, and normally the people I am around would just ignore my obscure mutterings as a humor that only I would find funny.  But this simple moment was made awesome when Tristan followed up with, “Get a job!”  The three of us laughed very hard, while the group before us just stood awkwardly by waiting for us to get on with it.  It is in these moments that I’m reminded that this show isn’t just a series of one-liners, but that it is a work — when taken in its entirety — that has constructed a culture of nerd-dom consisting of people who feel connected by the the characters and landscape of this fictional future.  Any similarities to the fans of Star Trek isn’t lost on me, it’s just that a single line from Trek doesn’t usually draw a company of people to want to start reciting lines to each other.   Any one piece of Futurama reminds us of the community that Matt Groening and David X. Cohen envisioned and then created.  I am so glad that it was resurrected, and I hope it will continue to air for many years to come.

And I’m also grateful for friends like Trey and Tristan who keep me laughing!

Best. Cake. Ever.

A pic of Jeremy’s wedding cake wound up on collegehumor.com!  Since it was submitted by “JT”, we’re all suspecting it was Jenny who did it.

http://www.collegehumor.com/picture:1941944

Luck of the Fry-ish!

So yesterday I discovered a few hundred feet from my house a patch of four-leaf clovers.  You read that right… an entire patch of four-leaf clovers!  Don’t believe me?  How about this?  Those may not look all multi-leafed, but they are.

Better?  Good.  Now — here comes the exciting part! — overall we found several dozen five-leaf clovers, and maybe 15 or so six-leaf clovers,

and then THIS!

Count ’em, suckers!  That’s seven leaves …all on the same stem! And from what I understand about leprechaun magic, one of my kids will have a son who gets to go to Mars.  Sha-pow!

There’s one leaf that’s been chewed up a bit by some bug, but other than that all the leaves are fairly congruent.  That means that they’re almost too big for all of them to be seen at once.  In fact, I had to count them three times before I was sure I wasn’t counting one leaf twice.

Now to figure out how to preserve this thing in a necklace or something.

Good News, Everyone!

FUTURAMA IS BACK!

Wooooooooo Hooooooooo!

Everyone, Safety Dance! … do do DO DO do do do DO DO, do do DO DO do do do…!

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According to ew.com, Fox Executives have announced that they have ordered 26 new episodes to be aired on Comedy Central for 2010.  There was some rumor of it on Collider.com a couple of days ago, then yesterday TVSquad.com announced that the rumor was confirmed and that 13 episodes had been ordered.  And finally this evening the official announcement came that production for a whole season is in full swing and Matt Groening and David X. Cohen are already busy on the project.  Casting is now underway.

Groening said, “We’re thrilled Futurama is coming back. We now have only 25,766 episodes to make before we catch up with Bender and Fry in the year 3000.”

The studio claims Futurama‘s solid performance on DVD and in reruns on Comedy Central as the reason for its rebirth.  But I have to wonder what really changed their hearts…

The Wild Green Yonder

Oooooooooo!   You know what this post is about, don’t you?!?!?

The final Futurama DVD is being released on February 24, and from the reviews I’ve read from the pre-release screening at the NY Comic-Con, it could be the best of the series.  There’s a very good write-up about it over at io9.com. Here’s a snipet:

And as always, since the Futurama writing team is stocked with more Harvard math majors than Texas Instruments, there’s a couple of science references clearly meant for about .01% of the audience. Personal favorite: a space-zamboni buffs the rings of Saturn, while a sign in the background reads “Mind The Keeler Gap.” That being the 42-kilometer wide gap in Saturn’s A-ring, not a nod to Futurama/Simpsons scribe Ken Keeler. Hey guess what, Keeler majored in Applied Mathematics at Harvard University!

When a beloved series ends it leaves a gaping hole in the hearts of its fans.  Occasionally this prompts the creators to step out on a limb and produce some extra content that runs in the theaters.  There are many examples — Star Trek, X-Files, Twin Peaks, Powerpuff Girls, Star Trek again, Cowboy Bebop.  Would Scooby-Doo fit on that list?  How about Batman?

Anyway, the masterminds behind Futurama chose to instead produce movies that went direct-to-DVD, probably a good move since they had several full-length scripts in the works.  If they were going to do a one-shot, like the Simpsons movie, then the theaters would have definitely been the way to go.  But I don’t think movie-goers would have supported more than a couple of trips to the theater, especially considering how forgetful Bender’s Game was.  So rather than start one in the theater and then looking like it had been a failure by releasing the others to DVD, the folks in charge did the right thing by putting each of these gems straight into the DVD market where they can stand on their own and can become underground classics — which in many cases makes them even more popular in the future than traditional money-makers.

So awesome!  I really hope this one lives up to the hype and gives us a lot of quality lines to quote to our geeky friends that’ll confuse all the ‘normal’ folks who really should just give up and go back to their Biggest Loser obsessions and Friends reruns.  Go geeks!