Saturday Morning Fun Pit

I can't understand the negativity of some other reviewers here and won't try.

This episode, that I'm watching as I type and have seen before, is brilliant. It so nicely parodies the dreck of Saturday Morning tripe that I grew up with. If not using children's programming to to sell products (Purpleberry Pond), teach lessons via half baked junk (G.I. Joe) they just present a mediocre 'mystery' (Scooby Doo) or adventure that took no effort to think out or write. This episode of Futurama skewers that with plenty of laughs and tongue in cheek references and yes, a few flat out digs at the cliches. For instance, in the Scooby-Doo segment, when Fry and Bendi-Boo run into a room in a hallway of many doors, they don't come out. How often has this gag been beaten into the ground but rarely is it funny (though South Park did a great job of dumping on it!).

Animation, like all TV, can run the gamut of brilliant to nauseatingly bad and sadly, most of the low end over the decades has been aimed at kids. Though this episode is for grown ups, it's the stuff we were subjected to as kids that it makes fun of and I applaud it. Too bad Futurama is now part of the past, because I feel it could have produced plenty more of these critiques of the garbage as it did so well here.

I thought this was one of the better episodes of the season. Funny and clever, it does a great job poking fun at the shows their featuring and some of the reactions parents had to them around that time.

It was abundantly clear a couple seasons before this drek ever hit the airwaves that Futurama should have been relegated the the pastarama. Not the first series to spoof poopy-doo but one of the worst attempts at it for certain. As mentioned, it should have been done a couple seasons earlier as actual GOOD ideas weren't present in the latter seasons. Matt and co are phoning it in for the paycheck. Hanna-Barbera should litigate this atrocity as harmful to their IP even if it's done as humor. Believe me, there is nothing funny about this episode or any preceding it by two years or any afterwards. The shark was jumped so long ago, the shark has since died of old age.

I knocked off the tenth point solely because the framework for the episode, featuring Nixon's head toted around by the headless Agnew, was not incredibly creative. However, quite obviously, the point of the episode lies in the three cartoon parodies, and brilliant parodies they are. I won't go into the uttermost detail of every joke and pun, but--for those who are old enough to remember (mind you, these cartoons date from the late 1960s through early 1980s)--the parodies brilliantly capture the quirks and chestnuts of "Scooby-Doo," "The Smurfs," and "G.I. Joe." Funniest of all was the first of these, where Bender is cast in the role of everyone's favorite Great Dane, and Fry (cast as shaggy) tends to crack drug-related jokes. From the setting in an impossible forest--in which, of course, someone's relative owns a facility to which the team has been invited--to the one-liners deriving from, "And I would've gotten away with it, too, if not for you meddling kids," and the chase in and out of a zillion-door corridor (accompanied, of course, by a cheesy late-1960s "rock" song), I found "Bendee-Boo" to be a nonstop laugh riot. Bravo, Matt Groening and David X. Cohen!

Ugh. This final season of Futurama (hopefully this is the final season) is easily the worst of the lot. An episode like Saturday Morning Fun Pit, done right, could be brilliant. As it is, it looks like another long-running sitcom running out of ideas, similar to another animated series created by Matt Groening. The idea is that modified versions of Futurama characters can be used to tell three short stories, not unlike Naturama. This time they spoof old cartoons. That might seem like a good idea- Futurama has had some respect for the cartoons that came before it, as clips of the classics have appeared in the title sequence.

First off, the concept of the episode is a bit inexplicable- Nixon and the once-again revived Agnew watch Saturday morning cartoons, which for some reason feature the Planet Express crew. How did this happen? How did our heroes end up in cartoons? This is something that at best should have been an Anthology of Interest episode, but for some reason the writers never saw fit to make an Anthology of Interest III. And why is it Nixon watching the cartoons? Is it just supposed to be funny that Nixon would watch cartoons?

The best segment is the Scooby-Doo parody, probably. There are some funny moments in the beginning of the segment, but Leela's remark that the laugh track doesn't correspond to anything funny, a stab at Scooby-Doo, is big talk from a cartoon that hasn't been funny in some time. Most jokes fall flat- Bendee Boo saying "Ri'm ran ralcoholic!" is supposed to be funny because it's said in a funny voice, and the villain saying he's mentally ill is supposed to be funny for some reason.

The other segments depend on the viewer being familiar with The Smurfs and GI Joe, which I imagine are too old for a good number of Futurama fans to remember. Someone points out how much they repeat the word purple, and that's supposed to be funny. The GI Joe cracks its one joke about cartoon censorship and keeps repeating it. Every act of this episode overstays its welcome, and coming to the end is a relief.