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1ACV06: A Fishful Of Dollars
First UK airing: Sky One, 8:00pm, 26-10-99
"I'd better put on a monocle!"
One of the reasons why Futurama
appeals to me so much is that it's not only an exceptionally
funny comedy, it's a science fiction comedy -- and this
allows story situations that are well out of the sitcom norm
without having to crowbar surrealist elements into the plot.
'Fishful', however, could easily have been an episode of The
Simpsons.
Futurama is the only
show on TV where saying that could have any negative connotations.
Which shows how good it is...
Think about it. Swap Fry for Homer, 1000 years of
compound interest for a lottery win, Mom for Mr Burns, and a
can of anchovies for some MacGuffin that could put his nuclear
power plant out of business. You've got the same story, just
with slightly different specifics. A lot of the jokes could be
adapted in moments to serve OFF's purposes, and you could probably
even work Pamela Anderson in there without much trouble.
To my mind, the best Futurama
episodes have been the ones that couldn't be done on any other
show (with the possible exception of Red Dwarf*, but frankly
the last couple of seasons of that have stunk). 'Fear Of A Bot
Planet' and 'When Aliens Attack' both had me laughing uncontrollably,
and I'm really looking forward to 'Put Your Head On My Shoulders'
(which at the time of writing is about six weeks away). Yet they
all work within the show's 'reality' -- which is where The Simpsons
has started to show cracks in recent years, by becoming so bizarre
that the average day for Springfield's residents wouldn't look
out of place in an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon.
In a nutshell, Futurama
is a fantasy environment where reality intrudes for comic effect,
while The Simpsons is the other way round -- and lately, the
fantasy in The Simpsons has been more dominant than the reality.
But anyway. Even below-par Futurama
is better than 99% of everything else on TV, and the crew's shopping
expedition, Ted Danson's skeleton and Mom's fat suit all raised
a laugh, even if the story behind them wasn't all that special.
Since Mom is due to return, I hope that the writers manage to
make her something more than just a distaff Monty Burns.
Rating: 
*An aside -- in 1996, I interviewed
the cast and creator of Red Dwarf VII, where they told me to
my face that it would be without a doubt the funniest thing on
TV, better than Friends and The Simpsons combined. I'd just like
to take this opportunity to state for the record that they're
a bunch of lying bastards. And Craig Charles has really bad breath.
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