Word: futurama
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Should the most biting joke in an animated comedy about Manhattan in the year 3000 be that the city's airport has been re-named the John F. Kennedy Jr.? Probably not, but we don't get much more than that in Futurama, the latest from Simpsons' creator Matt Groening. The show lacks the vision of The Simpsons, the snappy rhythm and the kind of far-reaching humor that keep it dizzyingly smart even after a decade on the air. Is there anything good to say about Futurama? Sure, it's better than Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza...
...showing more gusto than Bart Simpson's home network. Between now and March, Fox will launch three high-profile animated sitcoms: The PJs, newcomer Seth MacFarlane's Family Guy, and the long-awaited Futurama, from Simpsons creator Matt Groening. "People expect us to be different," says Mike Darnell, the wire-haired programming impresario responsible for Fox's "shockumentaries" (World's Deadliest Swarms, When Good Pets Go Bad). "They can find live-action sitcoms everywhere else. They don't have to come here for them...
...interim Fox has literally gone back to the drawing board. Darnell and Fox chairman David Hill insist they didn't set out to become the Animation Network, that the confluence of three new cartoon programs is sheer serendipity. Groening has been developing the millennium-timed Futurama for years, and The PJs was signed up months before MacFarlane arrived with Family Guy. But it's also true that The Simpsons, King of the Hill and Darnell's shockumentaries score best with young male viewers, who are much coveted by advertisers but increasingly hard to tear away from their Sony PlayStations...
...York world's fairs. The '39 fair was the work of the country's first and last great generation of designer-promoters. The son et lumiere theatrics were unabashed. Raymond Loewy designed an exhibit called "Rocketport of the Future," and Norman Bel Geddes' "Futurama," the most popular exhibit, was a scale model of a perfect, antiseptic cityscape. "Strange? Fantastic? Unbelievable?" asked the Futurama narrator. "Remember--this is the world...
GENERAL MOTORS' Futurama suffers in comparison with its famed 1939 exhibit. The reason perhaps is that the future has come upon us so hard and so fast that the once-incredible magic of what's next now seems all too believable...