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Talking Futurama - The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings
🕑 Added 2024-04-08 04:00:31 +0000 UTCAfter six long years of Talking Futurama, we've finally reached the end of its original, tragically short 72-episode run. And this seeming series finale goes all out by providing long-awaited closure to Fry and Leela's will they/won't they storyline while also giving viewers perhaps the first original opera written for an animated sitcom! So listen in as we explore the first of several Futurama finales, and journey back with us to the cursed year of 2003—when we didn't know more adventures were four short years away.
We may have reached the end of the Fox era, but Talking Futurama is far from over. Join us next month as we venture even further into the world of tomorrow!
Comments
Katie Tattersd
Phantom Planet's eponymous album is their best one. Seriously, been listening to it for years.
St. Leibowitz
But Bender is wrong; the Devil being caught in his own schemes is irony. From the Oxford English Dictionary Irony 2- a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.
Ben
2600 of us?! We could form a whole Atari!
Joshua Marchant
I've always enjoyed that this episode works whether or not you know it's a finale, which I didn't when I first saw it in reruns on one of New Zealands free-to-air channels. I had a similar experience watching 'A Star is Burns' and having no idea Jay Sherman wasn't a Simpsons original character. Compare that to the subsequent crossovers and would-be finales that you could never mistake for 'just another episode'.
Christmas Ape
Apart from everything else, this episode remains classic just for introducing two of the best lines one could use in snarky online criticism: the Robot Devil's rant about characters announcing how they feel, and Zoidberg's “Your [X] is bad, and you should feel bad!” I would like to start finding ways to work “Greatest Opera of All Time Sucks!” into my repertoire as well. This also reminds me that I miss hearing Dan Castellaneta do voices in cartoons other than The Simpsons.
Harry Boucher
I‘ve been so excited for this episode! From what I can remember, it appeared directly after the Simpsons on Sky 1 in the UK as part of their 6pm animation block (albeit several years later than in the US), and I always loved it for giving me the inspiration for my first and (thankfully) only band. Three friends and I formed ‘Idle Playthings’ towards the end of what UK schools call Year 10 (9th grade in the US). We unilaterally agreed that our onstage patter would be delivered in the same terrible UK accent that Castellaneta’s Robot Devil uses. We ‘learned’ 3 songs - Weezer’s ‘Perfect Situation’; The White Stripe’s ‘Seven Nation Army’; and an original composition called ‘The Grumpy Snail’ where we basically shouted various pop-culture quotes into various microphones. Tragically, we all grew apart over the following summer and met various boyfriends and girlfriends, and the band disbanded, but the legacy of ‘Idle Playthings’ lives on in our hearts. Maybe, now, it’s finally time to get the band back together. Thanks for a particularly great episode, guys! A fitting end to this part of the Futurama story.
