Comedienne's Second TV Show Canceled This Year
'Red Widow' Gets The Axe
Futurama: A Big Piece of Garbage
by Joel Keller, posted Jul 23rd 2006 8:08PM
(S01E08) This episode had more laugh-out-loud moments for me than any Futurama episode up to this point, which is saying a lot. But this is also a pretty important one in the history of the show, for a number of reasons: 1) This is the first story were we hear a lot more from Farnsworth besides the ritual "Good news, everyone!"; 2) This is the first time we meet his arch-rival, Dr. Ogden Wernstrom; and 3) This is one of Al Gore's favorite episodes.Well, we don't know about item 3 for sure, but given it's environmental theme, it's not that much of a stretch.
In the DVD commentary for the episode, David Cohen and Matt Groening mentioned that they try to do one environmental-themed episode per season. This, obviously, is the first of them. But it's ok if you confused it with other environment-centric episodes; for instance, I thought this was the episode that Gore used a clip from this in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, but I was wrong. But I'm not the only one that was confused, especially after Gore's movie, as we seein this week's edition of:
Billy West's Take: I liked that one. I think that's the one that had global warming in it or no? Where someone was explaining global warming?
JK: I don't know... I'll have to go back and look at that one.
BW: I do too. I just saw the clip (from Gore's movie), so I think everything is that now (laughs).
What I like about the episode is that it doesn't beat you over the head with the message. Yes, people in the 20th and 21st centuries throw out a lot of garbage. But instead of tsk-tsking us over it, writer Lewis Morton decided to show it in the form of a big ball of 20th century garbage threatening to hit New New York. And there's nothing serious about a big ball of garbage (especially one with a mountain of Bart Simpson toys... when Bender pulls the string on one, it says, "Eat my shorts." So Bender eats its shorts and purrs in Homerian fashion, "Mmmm... shorts.").
Of course, the other story is about Farnsworth feeling he's hit the wall at 149 years of age. He's still an inventor, but he's a forgetful one. 100-year-old whipper-snappers like Wernstrom are ready to take over, and Farnsworth just won't have it. I mean, without his Smellescope, no one would have found the big ball of garbage, right? So, he may be a doddering old fool who can't remember to get out of his slippers in the morning, but he still can be a scientist. And he's less of a jerk than Wernstrom, anyway.
Some notes:
- Loved Fry's garbage generation skills. "This picture of your wife. Pure garbage," he tells Mayor Poopenmeyer (heh... I wrote "poop") as he explains how to create garbage.
- Too bad I didn't see this episode before interviewing Billy West. I would have praised him for his retching skills. He does it twice: once as Fry and once as a man from Neptune who encountered the garbage ball.
- Dave Herman is a genius for more reasons than his voice. He's the "designated hitter" of the show. He doesn't have a regular character; he just does whatever voices are needed. Here, he does Wernstrom and Poopenmeyer (heh... I just wrote "poop" again). To voice actors like West, that's "the toughest assigment to have... It's like every week you've got to figure out how to create a character that's not established." And he's the guy who brought the term "no talent ass-clown" into the lexicon. Talk about a talent.
- Notice in the pictures of a younger Farnsworth, his coke-bottle glasses only look about an inch thick. The 149-year-old Farnsworth's specs are much thicker.
- This is the first time we see newscasters Linda and Morbo. Linda continues to do local news happy talk while Morbo just keeps on insulting the "puny" humans. I love how, after Linda does a report on an injured kitten, Morbo just says, "Kittens give me gas."
- Yes, that's really Ron Popeil's voice playing Ron Popeil's head.
- Maurice LaMarche does Morbo's voice. In the commentary, Cohen said that in this episode, they put a harmonizer on LaMarche's voice to get it low enough for Morbo. After that, though, LaMarche just did the voice naturally. Wow.
Fransworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Fry: Oh. What's it called now?
Farnsworth: Urectum.
16 Comments