The whole thing is classic fish-out-of-water comedy and it provides plenty of opportunities for the characters to act like it (“You really don’t cook enough roasts, Leela.”). Carter like lunatic NCO who wants to eat in the latrine, the obsession with secrecy that leads to shipping President Truman in a wooden crate marked “Canned Eggs”, and the blundering ignorance of the top military officials who can’t understand a theft minded robot carcass or a lonely and annoyingly talkative crustacean. It didn’t need to be there, but it did check one more item off the “let’s cram stuff in” list, so I guess there’s that.īy contrast, in Roswell That Ends Well, we get an almost Simpsonized version of a post-war 1940s military base. The second was a quick and nonsensical reminder of one of Futurama‘s most memorable moments. The first was another interchangeable locale for Bender to be a jerk, which would be fine in a regular episode but feels, shall we say, a bit undercooked in a long promised crossover. The new spots, this mysterious horse track and (just for the hell of it) Panucci’s Pizza, were there as filler and fan service. There’s something we’ve never seen in either place: a robot from the future with really long arms!
The long established locales (Moe’s, Barney’s Bowlarama) don’t have anything left to offer, which is why all they could think to do in both was have Bender extend his arms. Springfield is a shell of itself at this point. The respective settings are just as divergent. While they can be secretly gay, get blown up in an atomic blast, sleep with their own time traveling grandson, and hear about how the implosion trigger functioned perfectly, the Simpson family has become so flat that they can do little more than repeat catchphrases, or, as the case may be, catch-actions: with Homer strangling Bart-clones being something they thought so funny that they twice did it repeatedly. Similarly, the entire Simpson family doesn’t possess nearly as much character as Fry’s grandparents. One of these gives you “glaven flaven” for fifteen seconds, the other gives you “Uh, it’s free” when Zoidberg thinks their experiment is a buffet, “the same deviled egg” during their old fashioned alien autopsy, and “The President is gagging on my gas bladder. Roswell That Ends Well has all the government scientists who become increasingly frustrated in their attempts to study and dissect Zoidberg. Simpsorama has the one-note remains of Professor Frink making lots of weird noises because that’s his catchphrase. Simpsorama has dull characters lurch from one unconnected situation to the next, never developing any kind of momentum (story wise or comedy wise).įor starters, just look at the characters we get to see.
But for an episode that goes and stays in (relatively) contemporary America, the best comparison is easily Roswell That Ends Well.īoth episodes put Fry, Leela, Bender and the Professor in fish-out-of-water situations, but Roswell That Ends Well not only gives them something meaningful to do along the way, it also puts them in an actually interesting place with actually interesting characters. They’ve looted ancient treasures, gone back to the American Revolution, and been in and around December 31st, 1999 more times than I can count. The Futurama gang has traveled back in time on several occasions and by several different methods, but usually when they do they manage to find something a lot more interesting than in Simpsorama. “Choke on that, causality!” – Professor Farnsworth
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