Season 1, Episode 6: "A Fishful of Dollars"
Sept 14, 2014 11:06:00 GMT -5
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Post by Deleted on Sept 14, 2014 11:06:00 GMT -5
It’s 2:00am on Sunday… Time to get BIZ-ZAY!!!
Here, only six episodes into production, is Futurama as loose, confident, and hilarious as a show well into its second or third season. I’ve remarked before about how remarkably realized the world, character, and style have been from the start, but “A Fishful of Dollars” feels like a show that has already found its groove. It could play alongside episodes from any point in the show’s run, and even a true Futurama nerd would have a hard time pointing to anything marking it as such an early effort.
Of course, the one thing that would is the cold open (a device the series would later abandon almost entirely), which is a cute gag featuring robots whose torsos are inexplicably made of springs keeping Fry awake with the suggestive sounds of their squeaking -- although all they’re doing is enjoying a nice late-night game of Gin. Or possibly Go Fish.
The episode proper starts with a slumbering Fry experiencing the classic terror dream of being naked in school -- or, in his case, wearing only a pair of tighty-whities when he should have been wearing a pair of LIGHTSPEED! brand briefs, perfect for on the job or on the go! The dream, it turns out, is a paid advertisement, because in the future they can shove those directly into your unconscious just as easily as today’s advertising wizards can cram an ad for LIGHTSPEED! brand briefs for the discriminating crotch, right into unsolicited classic television reviews.
Full of rampant subconscious consumerist impulses, the whole Planet Express gang goes on a shopping trip to Alien Overlord & Taylor (perhaps my favorite gag name in the entire series), where Bender gets caught shoplifting, Leela gets a bioluminescent clown smile to, “Draw attention away from the… Eye… area,” and Fry finds that he’s too poor to afford the underpants of his dreams, since Visa has been gone for 500 years, American Express for 600, and still nobody takes Discover.
Take another look at these first couple minutes of the show: every detail clicks perfectly, accentuating the jokes, which seamlessly roll one into the next. From the impressively plausible hieroglyphs in the Ancient Egyptian Algebra class to the wealth of detail visible in the store, it’s a visual treat. Futuristic creations like a mirror that makes you appear more attractive, or shoplift-prevention drones gently tweak modern oddities, while Fry’s litany of places other than dreams where advertising is considered completely acceptable outright skewer them.
In order to bail Bender out of jail (“Ask about our generous brutality settlements!”), Fry goes to his old bank, where his account, full of ninety-three cents in the year 2000, is now, after a millenium of compound interest, worth 4.3 billion dollars (and yes, the math does work out - they have two PhD's in Mathematics on staff, you know). Fry initially spends his newly discovered wealth on indulgences for himself and his friends, but becomes obsessed with recapturing his lost "home" time when he learns that his favorite pizza topping, the anchovy, has been extinct for nearly 800 years. At an auction of 20th century relics, Fry not only purchases the only remaining can of anchovies in existence, but also everything else on the block, which he moves into a vintage 20th-Century apartment, to, “Pick up his life right where he left off:” watching re-runs of Sanford and Son in his underwear and getting down to Sir Mix-A-Lot. Ensconced in the comfortable familiarity he left behind when he was accidentally frozen, Fry turns his back on his friends, declaring things to be the true key to happiness (though Bender sadly notes that he’s a thing, too).
Only problem is, those oily little fish Fry won at auction hold the secret to a lubricant that could possibly put an end to the incredibly lucrative robot oil business -- the cornerstone of Mom Corp. So, enter Mom: we meet her as the “beloved” and “adorable” matriarch of Mom’s Old-Fashioned Robot Oil (“Mom, love, and screen door are registered trademarks of Mom Corp.”), and see her as a matronly “class act” bidding against Fry at the auction (though she seemed surprisingly cutting when announcing her bids). But when she returns to her office to plot to recover those anchovies, she ditches the mechanized Whistler’s Mother garb and transforms into a freaky, profane, catsuit-wearing cross between Cruella DeVille and Mr. Burns at his most cynical.
Mom, voiced by Tress MacNeille, is arguably one of the greatest characters created in the Matt Groening universe. From this first appearance, she is fully formed as a rampaging capitalist Id, a Daniel Plainview with teats. MacNeille’s voice alone, swinging between frail, grandmotherly sweetness and cigarette-flavored cruelty, stands alongside the best character work of any male voice actor, and easily belongs in the same pantheon as Harry Shearer’s Mr. Burns, or Billy West’s Zapp Brannigan. The hair, which John DiMaggio likens to, “A heart… Or a big butt,” on the commentary, is actually based on Coppola’s Dracula, and, to cartoonist Matt Groening, results in a character who looks a lot like Dr. Laura (whether Mom or Dr. Laura is evil - I mean, eviler - I leave for you, dear reader).
Screaming obscenities and brutalizing her three uniformed sons (in another wonderful moment in the commentary, producer David X. Cohen asks the others, “What, you don’t make your sons wear uniforms?”), Mom concocts a plan in which her three boys abduct Fry, take him to a reconstruction of his old pizza parlor, and, with the aid of Pamela Anderson’s head, get him to reveal the price of a cheese pizza and a large soda. That price is, Fry has not been shy of telling everyone, is the same as the pin number for his now multi-billion dollar bank account. With Fry penniless and evicted, Mom swoops in offering to buy his anchovies at a generous price… But Fry has discovered there’s something more important than money: his friends -- and they’re not worth a penny to him! What’s more, being unaware of the potential of anchovy oil as a world-beating technology, he plans on eating the last remaining can of anchovies, on a pizza, with those friends of his.
So, Fry shares the food he loves with the people he likes (all of whom except Zoidberg hate the food), the Anchovy is wiped from existence, and Mom’s Old-Fashioned Robot Oil safely remains the market leader in robot lubrication. Futurama’s themes of friendship and the families we choose for ourselves dovetails together with its cynicism about society at large, and the first truly classic episode of the series ends with a GRADE: A.
This Week’s Opening:
“LOADING . . .”
This Week In Futurama Signage:
Since I already mentioned the NNYPD’s “Ask About Our Generous Brutality Settlements”, mention will have to go to “20th Century Apartments: Now With Original Asbestos!”
Stray Observations:
- There are, as I mentioned, treasures in almost every frame and line. I’ll try to limit myself to the best and leave the rest to you in comments.
- “Do you remember a time when women couldn’t vote, and certain people weren’t allowed on golf courses? Pettridge Farm remembers!” - one of Fry’s vintage commercials
- Leela: “You can’t sit here in the dark listening to classical music!” Fry: “I could if you hadn’t turned on the lights and shut off the stereo!” - Fry, being surprisingly logical
- “Now I’m off to some charity B.S. for knocked up teenage sluts.” - Mom, in a nutshell
- I love the little detail of Larry massaging Fry’s throat and whispering “good boy” after his brothers shove a sedative in his mouth.
- Brilliant detail: the “set” of Pannucci’s Pizza doesn’t have a ceiling, just like most TV and movie sets (Citizen Kane excluded). Also makes for a brilliant use of the recurring up-angled shots the episode uses a great deal.
- The animation of Igner talking through the dress he has on to play “Pamela Anderson’s Body” is hilariously creepy.
- Speaking of which, Pamela Anderson is the show’s first guest star! She’s wonderfully game, mocking her own supposed ditziness (“Line!”) and then laughing maniacally along with Mom’s sons after getting Fry to spill his PIN number.
- Brilliant meta-joke mocking 20th Century TV technology, as Amy laments that on the vintage set Fry bought, you wouldn’t be able to make out her obscene tattoo… Which, of course, we, with our primitive TV’s, also can’t make out.
- So many more instances I could list of just brilliant, brilliant comedy work in this episode. But this is already over-long, and next week we’ve got to deal with “My Three Suns” - and if memory serves, that’s not a very good one.
Here, only six episodes into production, is Futurama as loose, confident, and hilarious as a show well into its second or third season. I’ve remarked before about how remarkably realized the world, character, and style have been from the start, but “A Fishful of Dollars” feels like a show that has already found its groove. It could play alongside episodes from any point in the show’s run, and even a true Futurama nerd would have a hard time pointing to anything marking it as such an early effort.
Of course, the one thing that would is the cold open (a device the series would later abandon almost entirely), which is a cute gag featuring robots whose torsos are inexplicably made of springs keeping Fry awake with the suggestive sounds of their squeaking -- although all they’re doing is enjoying a nice late-night game of Gin. Or possibly Go Fish.
The episode proper starts with a slumbering Fry experiencing the classic terror dream of being naked in school -- or, in his case, wearing only a pair of tighty-whities when he should have been wearing a pair of LIGHTSPEED! brand briefs, perfect for on the job or on the go! The dream, it turns out, is a paid advertisement, because in the future they can shove those directly into your unconscious just as easily as today’s advertising wizards can cram an ad for LIGHTSPEED! brand briefs for the discriminating crotch, right into unsolicited classic television reviews.
Full of rampant subconscious consumerist impulses, the whole Planet Express gang goes on a shopping trip to Alien Overlord & Taylor (perhaps my favorite gag name in the entire series), where Bender gets caught shoplifting, Leela gets a bioluminescent clown smile to, “Draw attention away from the… Eye… area,” and Fry finds that he’s too poor to afford the underpants of his dreams, since Visa has been gone for 500 years, American Express for 600, and still nobody takes Discover.
Take another look at these first couple minutes of the show: every detail clicks perfectly, accentuating the jokes, which seamlessly roll one into the next. From the impressively plausible hieroglyphs in the Ancient Egyptian Algebra class to the wealth of detail visible in the store, it’s a visual treat. Futuristic creations like a mirror that makes you appear more attractive, or shoplift-prevention drones gently tweak modern oddities, while Fry’s litany of places other than dreams where advertising is considered completely acceptable outright skewer them.
In order to bail Bender out of jail (“Ask about our generous brutality settlements!”), Fry goes to his old bank, where his account, full of ninety-three cents in the year 2000, is now, after a millenium of compound interest, worth 4.3 billion dollars (and yes, the math does work out - they have two PhD's in Mathematics on staff, you know). Fry initially spends his newly discovered wealth on indulgences for himself and his friends, but becomes obsessed with recapturing his lost "home" time when he learns that his favorite pizza topping, the anchovy, has been extinct for nearly 800 years. At an auction of 20th century relics, Fry not only purchases the only remaining can of anchovies in existence, but also everything else on the block, which he moves into a vintage 20th-Century apartment, to, “Pick up his life right where he left off:” watching re-runs of Sanford and Son in his underwear and getting down to Sir Mix-A-Lot. Ensconced in the comfortable familiarity he left behind when he was accidentally frozen, Fry turns his back on his friends, declaring things to be the true key to happiness (though Bender sadly notes that he’s a thing, too).
Only problem is, those oily little fish Fry won at auction hold the secret to a lubricant that could possibly put an end to the incredibly lucrative robot oil business -- the cornerstone of Mom Corp. So, enter Mom: we meet her as the “beloved” and “adorable” matriarch of Mom’s Old-Fashioned Robot Oil (“Mom, love, and screen door are registered trademarks of Mom Corp.”), and see her as a matronly “class act” bidding against Fry at the auction (though she seemed surprisingly cutting when announcing her bids). But when she returns to her office to plot to recover those anchovies, she ditches the mechanized Whistler’s Mother garb and transforms into a freaky, profane, catsuit-wearing cross between Cruella DeVille and Mr. Burns at his most cynical.
Mom, voiced by Tress MacNeille, is arguably one of the greatest characters created in the Matt Groening universe. From this first appearance, she is fully formed as a rampaging capitalist Id, a Daniel Plainview with teats. MacNeille’s voice alone, swinging between frail, grandmotherly sweetness and cigarette-flavored cruelty, stands alongside the best character work of any male voice actor, and easily belongs in the same pantheon as Harry Shearer’s Mr. Burns, or Billy West’s Zapp Brannigan. The hair, which John DiMaggio likens to, “A heart… Or a big butt,” on the commentary, is actually based on Coppola’s Dracula, and, to cartoonist Matt Groening, results in a character who looks a lot like Dr. Laura (whether Mom or Dr. Laura is evil - I mean, eviler - I leave for you, dear reader).
Screaming obscenities and brutalizing her three uniformed sons (in another wonderful moment in the commentary, producer David X. Cohen asks the others, “What, you don’t make your sons wear uniforms?”), Mom concocts a plan in which her three boys abduct Fry, take him to a reconstruction of his old pizza parlor, and, with the aid of Pamela Anderson’s head, get him to reveal the price of a cheese pizza and a large soda. That price is, Fry has not been shy of telling everyone, is the same as the pin number for his now multi-billion dollar bank account. With Fry penniless and evicted, Mom swoops in offering to buy his anchovies at a generous price… But Fry has discovered there’s something more important than money: his friends -- and they’re not worth a penny to him! What’s more, being unaware of the potential of anchovy oil as a world-beating technology, he plans on eating the last remaining can of anchovies, on a pizza, with those friends of his.
So, Fry shares the food he loves with the people he likes (all of whom except Zoidberg hate the food), the Anchovy is wiped from existence, and Mom’s Old-Fashioned Robot Oil safely remains the market leader in robot lubrication. Futurama’s themes of friendship and the families we choose for ourselves dovetails together with its cynicism about society at large, and the first truly classic episode of the series ends with a GRADE: A.
This Week’s Opening:
“LOADING . . .”
This Week In Futurama Signage:
Since I already mentioned the NNYPD’s “Ask About Our Generous Brutality Settlements”, mention will have to go to “20th Century Apartments: Now With Original Asbestos!”
Stray Observations:
- There are, as I mentioned, treasures in almost every frame and line. I’ll try to limit myself to the best and leave the rest to you in comments.
- “Do you remember a time when women couldn’t vote, and certain people weren’t allowed on golf courses? Pettridge Farm remembers!” - one of Fry’s vintage commercials
- Leela: “You can’t sit here in the dark listening to classical music!” Fry: “I could if you hadn’t turned on the lights and shut off the stereo!” - Fry, being surprisingly logical
- “Now I’m off to some charity B.S. for knocked up teenage sluts.” - Mom, in a nutshell
- I love the little detail of Larry massaging Fry’s throat and whispering “good boy” after his brothers shove a sedative in his mouth.
- Brilliant detail: the “set” of Pannucci’s Pizza doesn’t have a ceiling, just like most TV and movie sets (Citizen Kane excluded). Also makes for a brilliant use of the recurring up-angled shots the episode uses a great deal.
- The animation of Igner talking through the dress he has on to play “Pamela Anderson’s Body” is hilariously creepy.
- Speaking of which, Pamela Anderson is the show’s first guest star! She’s wonderfully game, mocking her own supposed ditziness (“Line!”) and then laughing maniacally along with Mom’s sons after getting Fry to spill his PIN number.
- Brilliant meta-joke mocking 20th Century TV technology, as Amy laments that on the vintage set Fry bought, you wouldn’t be able to make out her obscene tattoo… Which, of course, we, with our primitive TV’s, also can’t make out.
- So many more instances I could list of just brilliant, brilliant comedy work in this episode. But this is already over-long, and next week we’ve got to deal with “My Three Suns” - and if memory serves, that’s not a very good one.
