Talking Futurama - Fear of a Bot Planet
Added 2018-04-06 07:00:00 +0000 UTCGood news, everyone! The Planet Express crew is heading to Chapek-9. Bad news: It's a planet populated entirely by robots who will kill humans on sight. While Bender finds a lot in common with his robot brethren, Fry and Leela have to go incognito or risk getting murdered in the nightly human hunt! Grab a mug of searing hot resin and listen in—you might just learn the true meaning of Robonakkah!
Comments
Just a quick heads-up, this episode isn't tagged with "talking futurama," so it's very hard to find! I had to click on the $5 patron tag and scroll all the way down to it. Just fyi since I thought you had skipped it or something!
Walker Reynolds
2018-10-17 18:57:19 +0000 UTCMy reading of Bender in the beginning of this episode is that he's just wrong about the state of the world or exaggerating to play a victim, going the extra mile to find ways to be lazy, much like he would later make up holidays to get out of work. The creators definitely weren't trying to say everyone who complains about oppression is seeing it where it doesn't exist, but if anyone would try to take advantage of that rhetoric it would be Bender.
Dylan Martin
2018-04-21 20:51:19 +0000 UTCOH. I remember this (I was out of high school by then, but I remember this guy). I believe it was Cassie Bernall's dad.
Anita
2018-04-12 13:24:10 +0000 UTCWe had a school assembly in high school where a father of one of the victims of Columbine came to speak to us. He claimed that his daughter had prophetic dreams and presented us with drawings which he said proved that she had known the shooting was going to happen and that she was a martyr. The whole thing was strongly religious in nature and ended with him urging us to turn away from violent video games and movies. In class I openly questioned the appropriateness of such obvious religious sermonizing, the validity of the fathers claims of prophetic vision, and the scapegoating of violent media. Of course I was told that I seemed like the kind of kid who would do a school shooting.
Sadie Carter
2018-04-12 02:54:57 +0000 UTCConversations around violence and shootings in school have been a strange topic for me. I grew up in a city and high school where gang violence had been prevalent since the 80s. News that someone was stabbed or shot was not news, simply the background of our lives. Everyone knew to drop to the ground when you heard shots. So Columbine happens, and suddenly it's a national tragedy. It was horrible, of course, but I could not help but think, "So now you care?" The day of Columbine we were really terribly jokey about it until English class where our teacher expressed her thoughts on the news and cried. She told us, "Why can't you be good to each other?" The situation has improved since then and it seems like a better place to live since I was there, but these experiences color my perception of post-Columbine takes on school violence.
Victor Romero
2018-04-09 20:07:09 +0000 UTCRe: Matty jays comment, I'm a mellenial one year younger than you from the Philly burbs as well, but on the pa side, and I got to play outside till sundown. We would just walk for miles in the woods everyday and it was totally fine. So there were at least a few of us after you who got that sweet sweet childhood freedom.
Andrew Giachetti
2018-04-09 11:58:28 +0000 UTCSorry to hear that story about your time in high school Bob!! I wasn't in high school until the mid-00s, but I had a similar situation happen. There was a bomb threat at my school. Someone threatened it on a short lived message board the school operated. I was one of the people who replied to it, I probably replied with a Simpsons ref or something. The cops came to my house a few days later and interviewed me, made me load up my email and show them. Anyway, some must have seen the cops at my house because a nasty rumor started about me and a kid that everyone treated like a Columbine type. It was some weird shit where the kid was planning to shoot up the school and I was gonna help but I fucked it up or something? Thankfully, anyone that knew me knew it was bullshit but it was almost like everyone asking Hank if he was the one who blew up the Mega-Lo-Mart for a while with people in other grades...
Daran
2018-04-09 01:48:17 +0000 UTCI think you fellas missed the joke on the baseball scorecard: the home team is The New New York Yankees and the lead off batter is named Costanza because in later Seinfeld seasons George worked for the Yankees. Likewise, “Maris” is a nod to Roger Maris who famously hit 61 home runs as a Yankee in 1961, a record which held up until September 1998 - seven months before this episode aired! Depending on the production schedule he may have still held the record when this episode was written/animated.
Diamond Feit
2018-04-08 08:05:25 +0000 UTCHank, I pity you. You obviously have not had the greatest brand of hot dogs in the world: Vienna Beef! Or you could go to a place that serves Chicago Red Hots. (P.S. Portillo's is good too!)
Paul L
2018-04-08 00:19:02 +0000 UTCYeah, hearing WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW twice so soon is a little odd (but not a huge gripe as you said). I like Tom's suggestion below of using Bender's hilarity unit line for that jingle, and that way world of tomorrow can still be at the start.
Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag
2018-04-07 22:37:39 +0000 UTCThe propaganda of arguing that the lugnut shortage is the result of humans eating them really echoes the moral panic and fear-mongering of any state that would rather provide a scapegoat than actually solving its issues, which is pretty fitting for an episode that came out the same day as the Columbine massacre. -- Henry and Bob's stories of how high school got shittier after Columbine is angering, ESPECIALLY Bob's - that's complete and utter bullshit that should (logically) have gotten the school's staff fucking crucified. If ANYTHING, treating a potential school shooter as a pariah and bullying him / kicking him out of the school would only encourage his plan more. What part of not letting you attend anymore would prevent you from just going over there and following through on a plan? Elementary & high school boards / educators / staff have no fucking idea how to handle bullying in any capacity, to this day. While teachers and staff don't blame media as much these days since they recognize it's a cultural and gun issue, I have to hope they also don't ostracize and bully nerds/outsiders because they think they're potential shooters (even though as Bob said, it's asshole bullies who become shooters).
Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag
2018-04-07 22:35:52 +0000 UTCGreat show! I'm glad y'all keep bringing Matthew Jay back. I've never seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so the robot scream freaked me out as a kid (and still kind of does now). It's funny how y'all brought up those Looney Tunes drag looks, as RuPaul tweeted this this week: <a href="https://twitter.com/RuPaul/status/981711656160919552" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/RuPaul/status/981711656160919552</a>
Michael Hashizume
2018-04-07 20:20:19 +0000 UTCIt had been years since I had revisited this episode, so it was surprising to see the not-exactly-subtle social commentary that flew over my head as a kid. The mixed metaphor stuff actually reminds me a lot of Zootopia (from Futurama’s Rich Moore, among others), which similarly had a form of racism that was uncomfortably kind of justified within the context of the film. When the “predators” are in fact predators, what are you trying to communicate?
Justin Hemenway
2018-04-07 13:40:22 +0000 UTCI feel like the Bender line in this episode where he says 'That activates my hilarity unit' would make for a snappier 'line of the show' jingle than the current one.
Tom
2018-04-07 00:02:30 +0000 UTCAnyone else think Matthew’s spongebob and Janice sounded exactly the same??
Nick Quintero
2018-04-06 22:38:06 +0000 UTCApril 20th 1999 was my seventh birthday. I remember seeing news coverage during my party and having a mini-existential crisis where I realized birthdays were insignificant.
Jake VanGundy
2018-04-06 22:18:17 +0000 UTCRight at the top, the closest thing I have to a gripe: is it weird to anyone else to have the show start with "Welcome to the world of tomorrow" only to replay the exact same clip less than a minute later for the news segment? I feel like there has to be a lot of clips that would work for that segment (with or without Morbo). Anyway, such a fun episode (of both Futurama and TF). I really liked the Columbine talk at the beginning, actually. I'm about the same age as Bob and Henry, but as far as I can recall, nothing weird/paranoid/tragic happened at my high school in the wake of the massacre. The closest thing was when my dad singled out one of my friends, who was every bit as much of a nerd as me and my other friends except he was much more into computers than anime. The guy LOOKED nerdier on the surface than the rest of us and my dad asked if he might shoot up my school. I think of "Duhh, that's for sure" and "Quiet, Jimmy!" every time I see a scene with a council of elders in fiction.
Brian Rude
2018-04-06 21:27:45 +0000 UTCIm not a weirdo for keeping score at baseball games! you're the weird ones! Nyeh!
mavrick
2018-04-06 14:48:56 +0000 UTCNothing like a good old chat about baseball's racist past. Ever hear of Pumpsie Green? Probably not, but if you did it's only in the context of him being the first black athlete signed by the Boston Red Sox in 1959, the last team to integrate thanks to their famously racist owner, Tom Yawkey. Green was mostly a bench warmer and pinch runner, so he wasn't signed because he was awesome or anything but as a way to just remove the stigma of not having a black player on the team. Yawkey owned the team for much of his life, and like most community figures who have money, he managed to do some good with it like starting the Yawkey Foundation, but for many that doesn't make up for the fact that he was a bigot. Right now in Boston there's actually ongoing debate about finally changing the name of the street that Fenway Park is located on, Yawkey Way, to something other than a street named after a racist. The Red Sox, no longer owned by anyone affiliated with the Yawkeys, finally came out last year and said they want it changed, but of course it has to be needlessly complicated to actually do it. And just like I imagine what happens down south every time a city discusses removing some racist monument, a bunch of threatened white folks show up to town hearings because for some reason it offends them to change the name of a street.
Joe Hodgson
2018-04-06 14:09:04 +0000 UTC
