Talking Futurama - The Route of All Evil

It really is sad that the Simpsons can't make jokes about Disney plus. I remember one of my favorite jokes from a later Simpsons episode was Homer responding to Ads in before a movie by saying " if I wanted to pay money to watch ads I would subscribe to Hulu Plus", which was directly making fun of the service that was hosting Simpsons episodes of the time

Covey M.

I LOVE Futurama now, but when it was originally broadcast, and fox made it so hard to find, I just wasn’t regular. When I finally saw this episode, I just ended up thinking, “Well, I guess this show just isn’t for me.” I didn’t hate this episode, I just … didn’t think it was funny. All I could think was, why are they doing kids? Kids don’t even belong in this show except as some kind of Tiny Tim pinch line. Glad they got past these characters.

RyoGeo

We love kid characters like Bobby Hill because he's well-observed and very funny. In this episode Dwight and Cubert have zero personality and are just vehicles for easy kiddie jokes. - Bob

Talking Simpsons

Yeah for Simpsons episodes I'm usually harsher on them than Henry and Bob but it seems like I'm a easier on Futurama episodes. I liked this one and Buggalo better than them. I mean it's not great but I thought it was fine

I agree that it’s way less irritating than Henry and Bob think it is, but as children-haters it makes sense that that is coloring their opinion.

Krystal

I only watch Futurama to keep up with the podcast, so this episode is as far as I am in the series but… I really liked this episode. It’s one of my favorites so far. It’s also the only one I’ve watched twice (although I did rewind Zapp singing “Leela” several times). I just think it’s really cute. However, I understand that most people don’t watch Futurama for cuteness!

Sabrina

I might be in the minority when it comes to this episode. Not in the sense that I think it's good, it is quite likely the worst of the Fox era, but I like the more infantile approach taken with Cubert. Yes, it doesn't really mesh with him being a genius, but maybe having his mind blown at the end of his debut episode caused him to pull a 180 in his attitude. It strikes me as similar to when The Simpsons portrays Lisa as more of a kid at times which I'm always onboard for or when the kids of South Park get to behave like actual kids rather than sociopathic adults.

Joe Hodgson

I don’t know if it has been specifically stated, but the blobs in this episode seem like an homage to space mutants from The Simpsons.

Matthew Salisbury

In my hometown it’s been the same crazy cat lady delivering papers on foot for years I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kid do it

C'mon guys, at least feign interest in the math, physics, and topology j̴o̴k̴e̴s̴ references.

Drew Waranis

I'm surprised no one has done a Futurama mod for Paperboy based on this ep.

Bennett Billard

Further paper boy comment Comment I had a paper route. when I was 10 years old. In 2007 delivering papers was decidedly not a kid’s job anymore. But I really wanted to have money of my own, and probably got the idea from cartoons that this was the only job I could have at my age. So I talked about wanting a paper route for months, and eventually my mom found one with a lesser local paper. I delivered a little over 250 papers across several neighborhoods. It was one of the large routes that this paper had on offer. The papers arrived on Thursday morning. I’d wake up two hours early to fold the papers up and shove them in little plastic bags. After school my mom would drive me around in her minivan and I’d toss the papers from the window. There would be a few subdivisions where I’d get out of the car with the papers in a tote and take them up to people’s front doors. There was never a bike involved because parts of the route were separated by highway. I made a little under 75 bucks a month. And when you consider the gas my mom’s 1999 Plymouth Voyager burned through, the profit margin was pretty low. Luck for me, my mom was nice enough to let me keep the money. I quit after about a year and bought a laptop. Which I had to share with my siblings. But looking back, when I consider what my mom put into this, that seems fair enough. I really hope paper deliverers are paid better these days, because at this point there’s no way there’s any kids left doing this.

I have to quibble a bit with your suggestion that a "death of newspapers" joke would have made sense to be written in 2000. In fact, US newspaper advertising revenue peaked in 2001 (in inflation adjusted terms) before starting a precipitous slide that would take out 3/4s of that annual revenue by 2014 (see https://slate.com/business/2014/04/decline-of-newspapers-hits-a-milestone-print-revenue-is-lowest-since-1950.html). Online newspaper ads made up only a small sliver of that difference. Daily US newspaper circulation peaked a few years earlier but didn't begin to really crater in real terms until the late aughts (https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/6/14/75-years-of-us-advertising). I have this information perpetually at the top of my mind because that peak in 2001 was the very year I started taking journalism classes in college. Back then print newspapers were still seen as the paragon of the form and "online journalism" at my school was a single elective course where the instructor barely knew HTML. I could see the beginnings of the changes coming via the rise of the Internet (and Craigslist) even at that point, but for the news industry and the general public in 2000 it seemed like newspapers were at the height of their influence and money-making potential.