Season 1, Episode 9, "Hell Is Other Robots" (A)
Oct 5, 2014 1:49:35 GMT -5
Arthur Dent, Electric Dragon, and 2 more like this
Post by Deleted on Oct 5, 2014 1:49:35 GMT -5
Who would've thought Futurama would really get reviewed? And that it would be in the comments section of the AV Club!
Futurama was remarkably well-formed from the start, with a clear comedic sensibility, a quick grasp of its core characters and their relationships, and a solid emotional core. While that’s not always much of a rarity, particularly in drama, comedies have a habit of taking longer to gel, as writers and performers develop chemistry and a sense of what the audience responds to. Not that doing so in a drama isn’t also a challenge, but when you’re attempting to make people laugh, a silent audience becomes a critique and condemnation no drama ever has to cope with.
As thoroughly developed as it was from the start, we’ve seen that Futurama wasn’t immune to some stumbles, or looking down dead-end paths in search of a successful formula. Most notably, in “Fear of a Bot Planet” and “My Three Suns”, one of the original concepts for the show, “visiting a strange new world each week”, actually failed to serve the show’s strengths, and are highly dependent on just how clever and entertaining those strange worlds are. In other early episodes, Leela threatened to be as thinly written as many comedy heroines, reduced to a variant of the “nagging mom” or “put-upon-housewife” archetype (or worse, in “Love’s Labours Lost In Space”, the “Rachel”).
It’s actually Leela’s characterization in “Hell Is Other Robots” that made me realize why this episode, even more so than “A Fishful of Dollars”, feels like the first truly classic, defining twenty-two minutes of the series. Although she plays a secondary role in this Bender-centric episode, we get to see her as a fully-formed and unique character. There’s three things she clearly loves: Her friends, being a professional, and being violent. If we’d seen that combination before in a comic leading lady before, do let me know, because my research has come up short. She takes her job as a pilot seriously, but now we also see that she’ll happily take a friend stealing and whoring to put an end to his proselytizing, but also, out of guilt and concern, rescue that friend from Robot Hell by beating the Robot Devil over the head with a solid gold violin.
The narrative efficiency of Futurama at its best is really something remarkable to behold, and the sense of making a real, event-filled journey through time and space in a mere twenty-two minutes was already a hallmark of the show (“A Fishful of Dollars” and “Space Pilot 3000” are two earlier examples). By that measure, this installment is firing on all cylinders. It takes less than two for a Beastie Boys concert to lead to Bender hooking up with an old friend who’s an amplifier for the band, heading backstage, succumbing to peer pressure, getting high on electricity, and having launched us headfirst into the main storyline.
Bender’s addiction to abusing electricity (a sort of “drug abuse” that lets the show do far more than network censors would ever allow with actual human abuse of actual drugs) results in conflict, nearly killing his friends, and finally having a crisis of conscience that leads him to take up religion and become as eerily straight-laced as a Mormon youth missionary. This “new” Bender, almost the diametric opposite, behavior-wise, of the Bender they knew and loved, drives his co-workers and friends nuts, leading them to seduce him back into the sleazy behavior he turned away from. However, violating the tenets of his new religion gets Bender dragged off to an actual, factual Robot Hell, leading his friends on a chase through seaside New Jersey, an elaborate musical number, and a confrontation with the Robot Devil that could teach Charlie Daniels a thing or two.
All that, in only twenty-two minutes. The creators of Futurama chart the fall, redemption, and then - just to do Dante one better - another, subsequent fall of Man. Or Robot, at least. It’s a heady rush that the show is only able to pull off because of the confidence it shows in its audience, never pausing to explain things for any slower viewers, instead counting on them to take the show’s universe on its own terms. In a lot of ways, this tone is set by Fry, who occasionally questions, but readily accepts, whatever the future throws at him. It would have been very easy to make Futurama a typical Rip Van Winkle story, but Fry takes the weirdness of the future with a shrug that’s half ignorance, half apathy, and half joy in being liberated from his crummy 20th century life.
But none of that really matters if we don’t get plenty of jokes on our narrative journey, or if the jokes don’t land. Thankfully, Futurama manages to hang an expertly crafted set of jokes on each plot point, scatter a few around between them, and sees them delivered by a cast gifted at finding the right reading. The talent in the cast goes beyond just the core characters/performers - the supporting players and guest stars also knock it out of the park in this episode.
Phil LaMarr, one of the show’s utility performers, for instance, manages to create a memorable bit character as Preacherbot, and turn almost every line into an occasion for laughter with his combination of sanctimony and unnecessary “ah” syllables appended to most words. It’s a bit incongruous to see a religion named Robotology take after the grand tradition of African-American churches with flamboyant preachers and call-and-response preaching, but it’s so gleefully, sincerely weird that it goes beyond mocking any one faith, or even any two.
The standout star of the episode, however, is Dan Castellaneta, better known to most as the voice of Homer Simpson. His Robot Devil is an instantly iconic character, possessed of the showmanship of a vaudeville impresario and the ethics of a congressman (perhaps one of the ones who passed the Fairness In Hell Act of 2275). It’s wonderful, the way his voice swings between business-casual recitation, reading boilerplate and pushing brochures, to the leering, lecherous glee of tormenting others and putting on showstopping musical numbers complete with pyrotechnics straight out of Van Halen. For all the gems in this episode, I think there’s no line in it more hilarious than the Robot Devil declaring in a bored tone, eyes rolled, that if they lose a fiddle contest with him, they’ll only receive a, “Smaller, silver fiddle,” before leaning in, eyes narrowed and practically licking his lips, to add, “Also, I guess I’ll kill one of you… Uh…. (pointing at Fry) Him!” Fry’s terrfied exclamation, followed by one at an even higher pitch when Leela, without reservation, says, “We’ll do it,” is just the icing on the cake.
But what lifts this into the pantheon of great Futurama episodes, deserving of an “A” even knowing the full measure of what it will later produce? Though it’s welcome that they finally got around to Leela, and centered an episode around Bender, the show’s shown no lack of ability at character building and emotional connections. It’s already shown the density of storytelling it could couple with density of jokes. No, what lifts this above and beyond, other than the conceits of Robot electricity abuse, Robotology (to say nothing of Oprahism and Voodoo being mainstream religions), and a Robot Hell that is, unsurprisingly, in New Jersey, are two things:
One: This musical number
www.hulu.com/watch/4509
(if PB isn't showing the video, link is here: www.hulu.com/watch/4509 )
Two: The Fry ‘Fro
I don’t think you can argue with that.
GRADE: A
This Week’s Opening:
“Condemned by the Space Pope”
This Week In Futurama Signage:
CARN DOGS
Stray Observations:
Coming up next week: Thanks to Fox’s scheduling mistreatment of the show, we’ll already be diving into broadcast season two, on "A Flight To Remember". If memory serves, that’s the “Titanic” one.
Futurama was remarkably well-formed from the start, with a clear comedic sensibility, a quick grasp of its core characters and their relationships, and a solid emotional core. While that’s not always much of a rarity, particularly in drama, comedies have a habit of taking longer to gel, as writers and performers develop chemistry and a sense of what the audience responds to. Not that doing so in a drama isn’t also a challenge, but when you’re attempting to make people laugh, a silent audience becomes a critique and condemnation no drama ever has to cope with.
As thoroughly developed as it was from the start, we’ve seen that Futurama wasn’t immune to some stumbles, or looking down dead-end paths in search of a successful formula. Most notably, in “Fear of a Bot Planet” and “My Three Suns”, one of the original concepts for the show, “visiting a strange new world each week”, actually failed to serve the show’s strengths, and are highly dependent on just how clever and entertaining those strange worlds are. In other early episodes, Leela threatened to be as thinly written as many comedy heroines, reduced to a variant of the “nagging mom” or “put-upon-housewife” archetype (or worse, in “Love’s Labours Lost In Space”, the “Rachel”).
It’s actually Leela’s characterization in “Hell Is Other Robots” that made me realize why this episode, even more so than “A Fishful of Dollars”, feels like the first truly classic, defining twenty-two minutes of the series. Although she plays a secondary role in this Bender-centric episode, we get to see her as a fully-formed and unique character. There’s three things she clearly loves: Her friends, being a professional, and being violent. If we’d seen that combination before in a comic leading lady before, do let me know, because my research has come up short. She takes her job as a pilot seriously, but now we also see that she’ll happily take a friend stealing and whoring to put an end to his proselytizing, but also, out of guilt and concern, rescue that friend from Robot Hell by beating the Robot Devil over the head with a solid gold violin.
The narrative efficiency of Futurama at its best is really something remarkable to behold, and the sense of making a real, event-filled journey through time and space in a mere twenty-two minutes was already a hallmark of the show (“A Fishful of Dollars” and “Space Pilot 3000” are two earlier examples). By that measure, this installment is firing on all cylinders. It takes less than two for a Beastie Boys concert to lead to Bender hooking up with an old friend who’s an amplifier for the band, heading backstage, succumbing to peer pressure, getting high on electricity, and having launched us headfirst into the main storyline.
Bender’s addiction to abusing electricity (a sort of “drug abuse” that lets the show do far more than network censors would ever allow with actual human abuse of actual drugs) results in conflict, nearly killing his friends, and finally having a crisis of conscience that leads him to take up religion and become as eerily straight-laced as a Mormon youth missionary. This “new” Bender, almost the diametric opposite, behavior-wise, of the Bender they knew and loved, drives his co-workers and friends nuts, leading them to seduce him back into the sleazy behavior he turned away from. However, violating the tenets of his new religion gets Bender dragged off to an actual, factual Robot Hell, leading his friends on a chase through seaside New Jersey, an elaborate musical number, and a confrontation with the Robot Devil that could teach Charlie Daniels a thing or two.
All that, in only twenty-two minutes. The creators of Futurama chart the fall, redemption, and then - just to do Dante one better - another, subsequent fall of Man. Or Robot, at least. It’s a heady rush that the show is only able to pull off because of the confidence it shows in its audience, never pausing to explain things for any slower viewers, instead counting on them to take the show’s universe on its own terms. In a lot of ways, this tone is set by Fry, who occasionally questions, but readily accepts, whatever the future throws at him. It would have been very easy to make Futurama a typical Rip Van Winkle story, but Fry takes the weirdness of the future with a shrug that’s half ignorance, half apathy, and half joy in being liberated from his crummy 20th century life.
But none of that really matters if we don’t get plenty of jokes on our narrative journey, or if the jokes don’t land. Thankfully, Futurama manages to hang an expertly crafted set of jokes on each plot point, scatter a few around between them, and sees them delivered by a cast gifted at finding the right reading. The talent in the cast goes beyond just the core characters/performers - the supporting players and guest stars also knock it out of the park in this episode.
Phil LaMarr, one of the show’s utility performers, for instance, manages to create a memorable bit character as Preacherbot, and turn almost every line into an occasion for laughter with his combination of sanctimony and unnecessary “ah” syllables appended to most words. It’s a bit incongruous to see a religion named Robotology take after the grand tradition of African-American churches with flamboyant preachers and call-and-response preaching, but it’s so gleefully, sincerely weird that it goes beyond mocking any one faith, or even any two.
The standout star of the episode, however, is Dan Castellaneta, better known to most as the voice of Homer Simpson. His Robot Devil is an instantly iconic character, possessed of the showmanship of a vaudeville impresario and the ethics of a congressman (perhaps one of the ones who passed the Fairness In Hell Act of 2275). It’s wonderful, the way his voice swings between business-casual recitation, reading boilerplate and pushing brochures, to the leering, lecherous glee of tormenting others and putting on showstopping musical numbers complete with pyrotechnics straight out of Van Halen. For all the gems in this episode, I think there’s no line in it more hilarious than the Robot Devil declaring in a bored tone, eyes rolled, that if they lose a fiddle contest with him, they’ll only receive a, “Smaller, silver fiddle,” before leaning in, eyes narrowed and practically licking his lips, to add, “Also, I guess I’ll kill one of you… Uh…. (pointing at Fry) Him!” Fry’s terrfied exclamation, followed by one at an even higher pitch when Leela, without reservation, says, “We’ll do it,” is just the icing on the cake.
But what lifts this into the pantheon of great Futurama episodes, deserving of an “A” even knowing the full measure of what it will later produce? Though it’s welcome that they finally got around to Leela, and centered an episode around Bender, the show’s shown no lack of ability at character building and emotional connections. It’s already shown the density of storytelling it could couple with density of jokes. No, what lifts this above and beyond, other than the conceits of Robot electricity abuse, Robotology (to say nothing of Oprahism and Voodoo being mainstream religions), and a Robot Hell that is, unsurprisingly, in New Jersey, are two things:
One: This musical number
www.hulu.com/watch/4509
(if PB isn't showing the video, link is here: www.hulu.com/watch/4509 )
Two: The Fry ‘Fro
I don’t think you can argue with that.
GRADE: A
This Week’s Opening:
“Condemned by the Space Pope”
This Week In Futurama Signage:
CARN DOGS
Stray Observations:
- My God, I could write an entire review and dissection just of that musical number… And not just because I’m a homosexual! Instead, just watch it and let it speak for itself. Also, the comments. Knock yourselves out.
- Possibile tortures on the Robot Roulette wheel in hell: Parboil, Deep-Fry, Fricassee, Saute, Bake…. And “Pleasant Massage”.
The transport tubes in Bum Town have, well, bums sleeping in them. And, in a lovely detail, are cracked and patched with “Mom’s Old-Fashioned Tube Patch”. - This is the first time that Hermes displays his irrational hatred of Dr. Zoidberg, blaming him for the rising electric bill, and cutting costs by eliminating the salt water cooler.
- In a wonderful detail that nods to one of the classic problems of cartoon logic, we see a crate of “Replacement Robot Legs & Thighs” sitting by him when we first see Bender whole and seemingly unharmed after previously having had his bottom half melted and fused to the ship.
- Only two of the Beastie Boys were able to record for this episode: Ad-Rock and Mike D. Since MCA has passed away, we’ll never get the chance to see him on any iteration of Futurama that is, was, or ever will be.
- Now I made myself sad.
- Although they tell Fry they now have seven albums in the year 3000, they’re actually up to eight already.... If you count “The Mix-Up” (which is an instrumental album). Otherwise, Futurama presciently nailed the number of albums the Beastie Boys will have made by the year 3000. Or 4000. Or ever, because MCA is dead.
- Aww, now I’m even sadder!
Coming up next week: Thanks to Fox’s scheduling mistreatment of the show, we’ll already be diving into broadcast season two, on "A Flight To Remember". If memory serves, that’s the “Titanic” one.