Futurama back from dead again Futurama is to return with 26 new episodes, six years after Fox first cancelled the animated show. Comedy Central, which previously commissioned four feature-length specials, will begin screening the new half-hour shows of the animated series on US cable TV next year, following the agreement of a deal between Fox and Comedy …
Brilliant news. As for the movies, the format was messed up, and that was the main problem... each time they had to make a complete 90-minute movie that could also be broken up into 4 distinct and seperate 22 minute episodes. End result - bit of a mess, the stories didn't flow well at all as a movie and the episode breaks were stark (think of the xmas episode slap in the middle of the first movie).
I still liked the movies (third one was the only really terrible one), and it certainly can't hold the crown for "worst comeback ever"... that award has already been claimed by Red Dwarf.
Futurama's humour is fast-paced and isn't well-suited to anything longer than 22 minutes... storylines just can't be sustained for longer than that, scripts rely on running gags more than you might realise, and those get tiring if spread out over 90 minutes.
The show was really going places in it's 4th tv series, hopefully we'll see a return to that. Much happier to see Futurama back than yet another Seth McFarlane show.
I think Serenity was a very poor introduction to Firefly. I watched the movie and thought it was pretty obvious why the show was cancelled, then recently decided to give the series a chance anyway and it was much, much better than the movie. Not sure it's quite as good as some of the fans would have you believe, but the pilot is a far better hour and a half of entertainment than the movie was.
On an unrelated note, I see that I am Ben 42 now. Does that make me the answer to all Bens?
Sarah, how many eye(s) do you have? No offense intended, just checking... because you see, I happen to be the last male of an ancient one-eyed race and I wondered if you'd be interested in living in a castle for the rest of your life...
OK, no need to kick me in the kidneys, just hand me my polymorph coat...
Agreed on Serenity. I think the problem is that the show was cancelled after just one 'trial' half season, then when Wheedon got the chance to make the movie he tried to cram too much into it, so it was all penetration with no foreplay. The characters in firefly were very good and at the point it was cancelled we had barely begun to explore them and their backstories (but what we had seen was great). The movie just felt incoherrant as there was no time to continue gradually building the characters, they had to try to finish a story in a couple of hours when the entriety of the first season we had seen was basically just a prologue.
The result was that people that had not watched the series did not really care about the characters and for those that had it was far too abrupt an ending.
I'm not sure if the COULD bring Firefly back without ruining it further... The movie has effectively buggerred up all the plotlines that were being carefully woven in the first series.
If they can get back on form that is... I loved Futurama and although I've only watched one of the movies (Beast with a billion backs) I found it to be a disappointment. Still I'm going to stay optimistic on this until proved otherwise.
@Ben 42: I quite enjoyed Serenity - it was what got me to watch the series, I will say however the movie is far more enjoyable and worthwhile if you have seen Firefly. Oh and you aren't the answer to all Bens, you are the answer to the ultimate question of Ben ;)
I still think there are Firefly stories. I want to know what was the back story for Shepherd Book was, and I'm sure that there were plenty of war stories for Zoe and Malcolm.
Did the comics add anything to this?
B5 is finished. The story is finished (as JMS intended, although slightly out of sequence), and the spin-offs do not stand up against the original.
The B5 spinoffs don't stand up because the production values were so low because the studios refused to put the investment in the programs, B5 was made for about $700,000 an episode, so JMS was producing a whole season's worth of programs for the price of the ST:Voyager pilot (approx $21M).
Imagine what B5 would have been like with that sort of budget. Crusade bombed partly for the same reason, excessive use of blue screen.
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