Hobos, Onions, and Futurama

Coming up with stuff to write about is difficult for me. Writing itself isn’t inherently difficult; it’s just that all of my creative writing talent tends to get directed towards Moron County. I had a couple of ideas rolling around, but dismissed them all just as quickly, as they involved research, and I’m not really in the mood to do that this week. So, I did what I always do in situations like this, and asked one of my friends to give me a writing prompt. Specifically, I asked my former college roommate Mr. Spiffy (real name unnecessary for the purposes of this article). He gave me this little gem to work with:

“So, last night I went on my first date in six months, and the first in even longer that the girl was actually attractive. It took a little while for the conversation to get rolling, and once it did, a hobo wearing three necklaces and a sleeveless turtleneck - in June - walks up complaining that he's "lost his onion," and derails the conversation while capturing her attention for 20 minutes. And he was drinking water - at a bar. Dirty, smelly hobo hippie.

Okay, maybe it wasn't 20 minutes. Maybe it was only 2 or 3. But it's the principle of the matter, you know?”

Then, before he answered, I remembered that Futurama was coming back, and I could do a blog post about that. So I will. But I wanted to include this story because I thought it was funny.

So, Futurama’s coming back. Comedy Central renewed it for 26 episodes, to air sometime in 2010.

Believe it or not, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, ever since its premature cancellation in 2003, I have always been under the impression that any Futurama is better than no Futurama. This attitude came to a head when I actually rented the horrible Futurama videogame, which was about as good as most licensed games (which is to say, it was a festering turd). Then the Simpsons, which had admittedly been on a slow decline in quality that I was intentionally oblivious to since high school, started getting noticeably bad. Then Family Guy got uncancelled, and it is, in my opinion, one of the worst things on television (American Dad is okay, though).

Then it was announced that there were Futurama movies coming out. I was excited and terrified at the same time. But that terror was unfounded. Bender’s Big Score was everything the show was and more (and I’m still looking for an mp3 of the “Trinity going to war” song, so if someone can hook me up in the comments, that’d be sweet). Then Beast with a Billion Backs was alright. Then Bender’s Game was… well, flawed, but still better than most stuff on television these days. Then Into the Wild Green Yonder was excellent and, in my opinion, wrapped up the series perfectly. Yes, the entire cast were wanted fugitives at the end, but I think that’s a perfectly suitable ending for a Matt Groening cartoon.

But now that it’s back, I’m not sure. My reasons for this are many.

As newspaper comics, the Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy illustrate, fictional media has an inherent best-by date where, if it doesn’t end, it starts to go bad. Granted, a lot of these examples can be explained away by reasons that have nothing to do with longevity. Most newspaper comics that suck are not drawn by their original creators, and are in fact done by a committee of octogenarians that understand newspaper censorship standards more than real life (except for Garfield, whose creator is just out of ideas, and Marvin, which is created by the souls of the damned). And South Park and Family Guy have just become highly transparent soap boxes for the libertarian Matt Stone and Trey Parker and the hyper-leftist-atheist Seth MacFarlane respectively, which I’d have no problem with if it weren’t at the expense of humor.

Simpsons, however, has gotten bad in the sense that Garfield has. It’s out of ideas, and is now just an empty shell of its former self. The characters are now buffoonish, one-dimensional caricatures of themselves (due to a process TV Tropes refers to as “Flanderization”). In fact, Simpsons has gotten so bad in its later years that it’s starting to undermine what it’s already accomplished. Plots are getting rehashed (a Simpson has become a co-owner of Moe’s Tavern more times than I’d care to count), and every episode for the past twelve years has had a special guest star. It’s beginning to reach the point where voicing a character (or yourself) on the Simpsons is the equivalent of getting a tattoo in the celebrity world. It’s what all the cool kids are doing, and in a few years it’ll make you look like a jackass.

My fear is that Futurama will become just like this. There’s also the fear of political leanings trumping comedy, but Futurama has shown itself resistant to that in the past. Sure, there’s an environmentalist message here and there (“Crimes of the Hot,” Al Gore’s appearances in “Bender’s Big Score,” “Into the Wild Green Yonder” and its entirety), but the show kept its humor through all of those. No, the bigger concern is that it’ll become like the Simpsons. However, there’s hope.

Futurama has an established continuity. Things change from episode to episode. Sure, episodes are self-contained, but there’s a storyline that holds things together. Simpsons lacks this, which means that unlike Futurama, everything is ret-conned at the end of every episode. This prevents character development, which leads to characters getting Flanderized. American Dad also has elements of this, which makes it suck less than Family Guy (the fact that Seth MacFarlane has ironically moved his politics from American Dad to Family Guy helps too).

So, I believe there’s hope for Futurama. I’m trying to be optimistic about it. Problem is, I was also optimistic about Family Guy when it came back. So you can see where I’m concerned.