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1ACV05: Fear Of A Bot Planet
First UK airing: Sky One, 8:00pm, 19-10-99
"I will eat and digest you all
with my system of mighty organs!"
I have some rather geekish tendencies. Hey, don't
act surprised -- it says it right on the site's logo and everything.
Computers, videogames, science fiction, robots, gadgets, 1950s
B-movies... all these are high on my list of things that interest
me. Which probably explains why I've got the time to put a site
like this together instead of whooping it up around town with
a gang of meathead friends every night, but never mind.
With that in mind, there was probably no way that
'Bot Planet' could have been made any more appealing to me. It's
official -- geeks walk in Hollywood, and they're on Futurama's
writing staff.
The best thing is that the episode still worked just
fine even for non-geeks, because the writers made sure that having
played Berzerk or heard a Mac booting up were not essential requirements.
The gags and references were coming almost as fast as in an episode
of MST3K.
The blernsball stuff was okay, though probably better
suited to American audiences -- if you're English, baseball is
better known as rounders, and it's played by little girls. On
the plus side, I couldn't help agreeing when the Y3K people told
Fry that baseball had been abandoned for being too dull (which
it is -- too bad the writers on Deep Space Nine didn't agree),
and loved Zoidberg's demand for some food "crawling with
parasites": cut to him eating a hot dog.
Once the crew set off to make their delivery, though,
I almost lost track of all the jokes because I was laughing too
much. Transformers, Tetris, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, "Kill
the humanoid!", the Mac judge, the sound effect of the trumpet,
and a whole load of other stuff. Like I said above, even if somebody
might not get the specific reference of a joke, they were still
presented in a way that was funny. In some ways, Futurama
is taking a similar tack to Frasier; there are always some jokes
that are aimed at a minority of the audience (highbrow culture
in Frasier, geek stuff in Futurama),
but the context in which they're presented makes them funny to
everybody. You don't have to have a knowledge of fine wines or
Eighties arcade games to enjoy a particular gag, but if you do
it makes the joke even funnier.
Sure, the show was basically just a parade of gags
that did very little new with the characters. But when the jokes
are this funny, they can get away with it.
Rating: 
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