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3ACV16: A Leela Of Her Own
First UK airing: Sky One, 7:00pm, 19-5-02
"Professor, please! Society's
never going to make any progress until we all pretend to like
each other."
Baseball. It is boring, isn't it? Admittedly
not as dull as cricket, but I can easily understand Fry's delight
at finding out in 'Fear Of A Bot Planet' that it'd been jazzed-up.
Pity it wasn't here, though. The madness of blernsball
seen in 1ACV05 has been reduced to basically 'baseball on a string',
and like 'Future Stock' last week, this could have been a Simpsons
episode -- all it needed was to swap Leela for Marge (or Lisa,
if they wanted to make it Little League). There was a definite
'seen it before' feeling to the story, which wasn't helped by
the fact that the whole business with the Cygnoids was extremely
reminiscent of the Babu Bhat episode of Seinfeld (the one where
Jerry tries to offer helpful advice to a Pakistani immigrant
about his new restaurant, with disastrous results). Strike one!
Not helping matters was the over-abundance of references
to American sport. Referring back to Seinfeld, it came as a great
surprise to me when I found out that George Steinbrenner was
a real person, so the more involved jokes travelled about as
well as all those gags about Slurms McKenzie. So the Mets are
crap. That's as may be, but the only person in Britain I know
is a Mets fan is pop impresario Jonathan King (who is somehow
to blame for 'Who Let The Dogs Out?', I understand), and as he
recently got sent to prison for child molestation I doubt he
would have seen the show to get the joke. Strike two!
Finally, while there was the odd good joke (the black
bar generator, Leela's fans asking to have their autographs made
out to 'eBay') they were few and far between. Even some of what
would normally be snappy sight gags (the bees, the Frisbee spaceship)
seemed dwelled on for too long, leaving potential laughs trailing
off into a vaguely embarrassed silence. In all, very much a minor
league episode. Sterrrrike three! You're out!
Rating: 
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