Futurama

Wait, aren't those still prevalent issues or are they actually dying down? I know sites like Pixiv are crawling with AI-generated art and some people I know in real life still talk about bitcoins and ChatGPT. (I keep telling them those are bad news, but I guess they'll have to learn it the hard way.)

Pagetopper.

So, wonder how long the timeskip for the new season will be? Will it be shortly after season 7 or 10 years later in real time? Considering everyone still looks the same as before in the scenes in the trailer, I doubt it'll be that big a time skip.

Or maybe it is a big time skip, but everyone's been hit with some sort of anti-growth hormone ray.

the calendar in the trailer showed the year was 2023, but they did get deaged and also they died except their heads at the beginning of the comedy central run, and also future medicine is really good with 50 being the new 30. and they could have just gone into another wormhole.

NFT and crypto had a huge crash last year and everyone moved on to AI art for a season, then seem to have gotten bored with it once they figured out that the hands and teeth are weird.

Aging is just weird in Futurama in general - you would expect Cubert and Dwight to look at least in their early 20s, but they still looked like teens by the end of the Comedy Central run.

Yeah, that's what you get for insisting to modernize a setting but not being willing to change ages too much.

They don't really have to modernize anything because it's the future...

Reminder that Maggie Simpson has been a baby for over 30 years now.

I don't mean modernize in that sense, I mean relating it to the real life present day.

Besides, it's not like you can't update a future setting to be more in line with current technology. Whatever future writers imagine is always based on the technology of the present, and when the present changes enough, then that futurist vision becomes equally outdated. This is how we get Zeerust.

Edited by Redmess on May 21st 2023 at 6:44:34 PM

What they're getting at is that, there's no reason they couldn't just have the show be set perpetually in the year 3000 - since it's an imaginary future, it can reflect the present day without needing to actually move forward in time.

Of course, then we'd have only gotten one Christmas episode ...

Oh yes, absolutely.

And no, we could easily have gotten more. It's hardly unprecedented for a cartoon (or live action sitcoms, for that matter) to have multiple christmas/halloween/yearly event episodes without the year changing.

Edited by Redmess on May 21st 2023 at 7:29:52 PM

Fry: Wait, I thought we already celebrated Christmas this past year.
Farnsworth: Don't be stupid. There's still timezones that haven't celebrated it yet.
Fry: Oh, okay. ...how many timezones are there again?
Leela: 360, one for each longitude.
Fry: I think I remember that from my time.

Though, I suppose it's pretty easy to handwave away no one aging. The adult characters can just have really good futuristic medicine keeping them young-ish (same way the Professor can live to be 180).

As for Cubert and Dwight, it'd be entirely in keeping for this show to reveal that Cubert repeatedly runs away from home, and rather than go looking for them, the Professor just pops a fresh Cubert out of the cloning tank. And has maybe offered Hermes the same deal with Dwight.

The "Venture Bros." gambit.

Which is strange, because Futurama does acknowledge status quo changes.

Only when they feel like it, though.

Just like most comedies.

The most accurate thing is that Futurama acknowledges the passage of time and that the story of every episode has happened, but the reset button is hit after most every episode and the status quo will largely remain the same. The only thing that has been fundamentally altered from the first season is some character relationships like Fry and Leela or Amy and Kif.

@ Raven Wilder: Or maybe they spend a lot of the time at Applied Cryogenics as a tax dodge

I mean, this is a setting where you can casually cryogenically freeze yourself so if they want to explain how some characters don't age they could go "oh, they've been in the freezer tubes to wait until a cure for space-itis". Oddly enough only episode actually had freezing to wait for a cure as a plot point

Edited by RJ-19-CLOVIS-93 on May 22nd 2023 at 4:01:56 AM

There's also the reveal of Leela's origins and parents, and Nibbler actually being an intelligent being from an ancient civilization.

I was talking more episode to episode, otherwise there is a lot of little changes such as Nixons re-election and Farnsworth reuniting with his parents. They've done surprisingly little with Nibbler/Nibblonians and the Brain Spawn, despite being supposedly some of the oldest beings in the universe. You would think they would be involved with "Into the Wild Green Yonder" given its underlying premise of the Encyclopod.

How many cryogenic facilities are there supposed to be, anyway? I don't think we ever see more than the one room with about half a dozen tubes.

I thought the Brain Spawn were all but killed.

I was surprised seeing how little they used Nibbler in the revival - think he only really appeared in episodes that could be counted on one hand (speaking role anyway).