The Futurama is here!

Hey there, Ryan here. I am the newest contributor to the Palantir blog.  For my first blog I figured I would take a few minutes talking about my favorite animated series, Futurama.  For this post we will stick to the first volume which covers episodes 1-13.  First for those that do not know, a little bit about the series itself.  This series takes place, for the most part in the year 3000 and onward.  It follows the adventures of a pizza delivery boy from the year 2000 by the name of Phillip J. Fry, a foul mouthed robot named Bender, and a one eyed alien named Leela. It was created in part by Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons.  OK so that's the basics, bottom line, very funny.  Now for volume 1 specifically. I have always enjoyed intelligent humor and that is one area in which Futurama does not disappoint. In fact, due to a few of the writers having math degrees, there are jokes that have went beyond my own understanding and only by either looking up the reference online or watching the commentary can I understand and appreciate. Thankfully most of the jokes do not take a math degree to understand but some of the jokes do take a bit of thinking in order to really get.

Probably my favorite episode in this volume is episode 9 "Hell is Other Robots, where Bender attempts to put "his sinful life behind him," and introduces the Robot Devil.  This episode guest stars the Beastie boys and contains a "musical extravaganza" that is as clever as it is catchy.  As for the commentaries, they are I must say, OK at best.  You do get some interesting facts from them, however, a large portion of the time is spent with them simply being silly, which can get kinda annoying when they past by the one part of the episode you wanted to know about with them laughing about what they just said.  As for the box art, that is pretty good.  each of the 3 DVD cases in the set are actually one long picture which you can see if you put them side by side and they contain snippets from most, if not all, of the episodes.  So there we go, I'll be back later with the other volumes/movies. For those that prefer a straight numbering system, to summarize.

Volume 1:
episodes: 9/10
box art: 8/10
Commentary: 5/10 

Until next time,

So long, and Thanks for all the Fish.