I was pretty upset by the way Fox kept moving the program around and pre-empting it, often when a game ran late. It's not so much that Futurama was a bad fit for Fox, but my understanding is that on the second go-around Groening learned his lesson from The Simpsons and kept much more of the IP related to the Futurama characters for himself...
I suppose it is a bit excessive (given that I so rarely play with the figures), but I have a fairly complete set of Futurama characters (though I never did break down and buy Zap Brannigan or Kif).
Anyway, after four seasons' worth of episodes (stretched over five years), Fox cancelled Futurama.
I was simultaneously not surprised and devastated. It did help that I would have started watching the reruns on Adult Swim around that time (and I even bought a poster off of Ebay!), and I regularly bought the DVD sets (mostly imported from the UK, as the extra features were usually a bit better).
Somewhat incredibly after 5 years, Comedy Central renewed the show. While I own all the movie-length episodes on DVD, I don't think I've watched them in their entirety. One of these days I definitely will have to watch Futurama: The Lost Adventure, which was basically the insets from a Playstation game (which I own but haven't played all the way through -- perhaps a theme is emerging). Anyway, it is a bonus feature on The Beasts with a Billion Backs.
I probably have seen all or nearly all of Seasons 6-7. It is possible I held off from watching the final, final episode (Meanwhile), since I really ought to watch that last, after making sure I've seen the other ones in sequence.
While it has gotten extremely quiet lately, I do head over to Gotfuturama from time to time. That's where I learned about a Nerdist podcast that is essentially a radio episode featuring the original voice cast.* But there really has been so little Futurama news, and with Groening now focusing on Disenchanted it is unlikely there will ever be anything more on this front. In general, the second wave of Futurama episodes was solid, with some outstanding episodes, though of course some folks carp and say that it shouldn't have been brought back. Nay, I say.
Throughout this period, there was also a run of comics, from Bongo Comics (formed by Groening), and it was somewhat comforting to be able to read the comics (imagining the cast doing the voices) when the show was on hiatus. I was a fairly regular reader for a long time. Even when I was in England I picked up a few, though they had an odd oversized format compared to the States. I did buy a few back issues on my return, but was not as obsessed with making a complete collection. At any rate, I have a fairly complete collection from issue #1 to #62 with a few gaps. But I did kind of lose interest somewhere along the way. It looks like at issue #82, they decided to try to move away from a print version to some kind of an app that would load the comic onto your phone. They had two issues like this, but it can't have been a big success, and it looks like Futurama comics came to an end with issue #83 in Sept. 2017. They then reprinted #82 and #83 as Futurama Annual #1 (perhaps wishful thinking, as Annual #2 is nowhere to be found). While none of the local shops had Annual #1, it is still possible to find on-line without too much effort, so I ordered a copy for old times' sake.
With the folding of the comic book series in 2018, I think Futurama has finally reached the end of the line, but it was a pretty great run while it lasted. As Bender would say, ¡Hasta la vista, chumps!
* This seems to have vanished from the Nerdist podcast, but probably is still floating around on Youtube.
No comments:
Post a Comment