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Sci-Fi Media Television Entertainment

Futurama Rumored To Return On Comedy Central 259

Posted by kdawson from the good-news-everyone dept.
avajcovec points out a brief note on Collider.com that Comedy Central has ordered 13 new episodes of Futurama. Quoting: "Though still technically a rumor at this point, word is that 'Futurama' production offices have already opened and that casting is about to move forward. This should be a welcome surprise to fans of the show who have already gone through the series' cancellation and resurrection as direct-to-DVD movies."
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Futurama Rumored To Return On Comedy Central More

Futurama Rumored To Return On Comedy Central

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  • Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:28AM (#28263077)

    Good news everyone!

  • "Have you ever tried just turning off the TV (Score:5, Funny)

    by Norsefire ( 1494323 ) * on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:28AM (#28263083) Journal
    sitting down with your children

    and hitting them?"

    • Re:"Have you ever tried just turning off the TV (Score:5, Funny)

      by Kratisto ( 1080113 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @06:39AM (#28263417)

      Oh great! A lesson in history from Mr. I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!

    • Bender should not be allowed on television, according to Fathers Against Rude Television (FART).

    • how about hitting the programming team at Comedy Central?

      They still deserve several dozen whacks to the back of the head for cancellation of MST3k to put on dreck like Craig Kilborn's version of The Daily Show.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by modmans2ndcoming ( 929661 )

        which lead directly to Jon Stewart's Daily Show and the awsome spin off, the Colbert Report.

        In all, it was a good move.

      • MST3K was at least able to continue on the (so-called) Sci-Fi channel. Of course, they cancelled MST3K* around 1999, but these days, all the principals of that classic show are doing what they do best in other formats: Rifftrax, The Film Crew and especially Cinematic Titanic.

        We get the riffs we love and they are no longer beholden to that evolutionary cul-de-sac known as network executives.

        * Probably needed more room on the schedule for no-budget horror films. Yes, the Sci-Fi channel has been involved in

        • * Probably needed more room on the schedule for no-budget horror films.

          But that was the beauty of MST3K. Actually made No-budget horror films ENTERTAINING.

  • Brought to you by: (Score:4, Insightful)

    by derGoldstein ( 1494129 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:29AM (#28263085) Homepage
    Brought to you by: Torgo's Executive Powder! "a million and one uses!"

  • Good news (Score:2, Funny)

    by illumastorm ( 172101 )

    Good news, everyone! The site is already not loading.

  • Casting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tokerat ( 150341 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:39AM (#28263133) Journal

    Though still technically a rumor at this point, word is that 'Futurama' production offices have already opened and that casting is about to move forward.

    Let's hope it's all the original cast. Wrong-sounding Muppets where no picnic, either (to paraphrase Family Guy).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 )

      Even if they do. You can get use to it. Unless you get uptight about some odd natural order of thing that are not natural or in order. Why does TV and Movies break their own cannon, well to keep the current story more entertaining. Oh no they changed actors, we for God sake try to pretend that this is the same person, and don't try to explain it in some odd way. Ill bet you will be much happier. And just enjoy the show and live the rest of your life.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Svippy ( 876087 )

        Sounds unlikely they are going to change actors though.

        All of the actors are still very much alive, and not to mention are still very interested in Futurama, so doubting the return of the actors is not very justified.

        But even if they can't get an actor back, remember what the writers of The Simpsons did when Phil Hartman died? Yeah, they retired his characters, in his honour.

        Billy West, for instance, who voices Fry, Farnsworth, among others, have since the release of Into the Wild Green Yonder (well, and b

        • That was my thought, they had a huge hit with it and will likely get well paid for the new episodes. On top of that from what I gather the most important voice actors seem to all have enjoyed working on Futurama.

          So more likely than not it's going to hinge upon actual availability.

      • Even if they do. You can get use to it.

        You're right that you get used to it. Anyone who's watched the show from the beginning is, in theory, proof of this. The cast itself may not have changed, but if you listen to one of the first episodes back-to-back with one of the later ones, you can definitely tell that the voices changed slightly over the course of the show as the actors found the right voice for each character.

        But that was a gradual change over the course of the show. If a brand new voice were to suddenly take over for one of the ch

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by sorak ( 246725 )

      Though still technically a rumor at this point, word is that 'Futurama' production offices have already opened and that casting is about to move forward.

      Let's hope it's all the original cast. Wrong-sounding Muppets where no picnic, either (to paraphrase Family Guy).

      Of course, Meg Griffin has been voiced by three different actresses (not counting the ones used for singing), so it wouldn't necessarily be the kiss of death for the show.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Of course, Meg Griffin has been voiced by three different actresses

        Teenager's voice changes? Well, that never happened before.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ari_j ( 90255 )
        That works for some characters, but Futurama is unlikely to be anything close to as good without a few of the key voice actors. It's not just the voices, it's the five completed seasons of being in character for all those characters that they cover. Each one of them has perfected those voices, which is not a quick task even for the best voice actors you can find (arguably, a list starting out with four or five members of the Futurama cast).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SEWilco ( 27983 )
      If you don't like some of the characters just watch for the ad in Variety and tell your favorite cartoon characters to go to the casting call.

  • Absolutely wonderful (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jarlsberg ( 643324 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:44AM (#28263159) Journal
    As long as they get the original cast and no restrictions imposed on the show with regards to somebody thinking about "the children" :)

    • Re:Absolutely wonderful (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lord Bitman ( 95493 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @08:07AM (#28263865)

      Some of the best jokes in the show were only there because of the censors forcing re-writes. What do we get the moment they have some wiggle-room? Bender's Big Score. I may hate censorship, but these writers don't seem to work well without it.

      • I wish people would stop badmouthing Bender's Big Score, I for one liked it a lot. Complaining because years of wait increased the expectations is completely unfair. Sort of like all the nits that are convinced that Vista was a horrendous mistake.

  • Cut and Paste (Score:3, Insightful)

    by EdIII ( 1114411 ) * on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:46AM (#28263163)

    I have a feeling that after a few days we will be able to cut and paste entire scripts from episodes from all the posts... Just a weird feeling...

    P.S - Casting? Uhhhh, that's been done. Long time ago. If they change the voices, that would be a bit too much. They did not change the voices for the movie, why the hell start now?

    • I have the entire transcript (except film 4) as a set of fortune databases, and an email-random-quote-autoresponder :)

  • If you get cancelled, voted back on petitions, re-released as direct-to-dvd and get back on TV you can stay no matter how crap most of your episodes are. I truly love Seth MacFarlane's shows but some of it is just: meh (and that's a gross overstatement). Even more so after they got back on the air. The Futurama movies were twice as long as they should have been. I would have liked 45min episodes much better.

    Blackjack and Hookers or we are all doomed ... DOOOOOOMED.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by daniel_mcl ( 77919 )

      Admittedly, "The Beast with a Thousand Backs" or whatever it was called did more to creep me out than to amuse me. That being said, as a literary critic I can't agree with the assertion that a single second of any episode of "Family Guy" could be classified as "meh." For thousands of years comedy has not developed past Aristophanes -- indeed, fewer than a hundred years ago the great cultural historian Edith Hamilton compared the popular entertainment of the previous generation to his oeuvre. The cutaway

      • Re:Let's hope the Family Guy effect holds true (Score:5, Insightful)

        by meist3r ( 1061628 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @06:14AM (#28263289)

        For thousands of years comedy has not developed past Aristophanes -- indeed, fewer than a hundred years ago the great cultural historian Edith Hamilton compared the popular entertainment of the previous generation to his oeuvre. The cutaway scenes in Family Guy represent the first departure from classical comedy I've ever been aware of. In my (professional) estimation Seth McFarlane is the single most important writer in the English language since the time Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Blake.

        So there's that.

        Oh so you haven't heard? I was under the impression that everybody had heard that latest news of a certain avian variety.

        And just to break your stride ... there are several episodes that are just un-funny. Just because you cut to something completely apeshit crazy during a sketch doesn't mean it's fun to watch or entertaining. Yes I go "what the fuck?", yeah I think "that was brilliant" but I don't laugh. If I see a joke and go "That was good" but no smile ever crosses my face ... it's not that good. I've seen every episode of Family Guy and American Dad ... high, drunk and completely sober. Some of them are just awfully bad. Painfully predictable and can't be saved by a two second cutaway to a giant chicken beating a guy. Then again ... the entire last season of Simpsons didn't have more than a handful of good jokes in it. Maybe I'm getting a little overfed and/or spoiled.

        As for the Futurama movies I thought most of the plot was too irrelevant and merely spooned in to stretch it out to 90 minutes format on all four occasions. Had they told two distinct stories per 90 minutes instead of shoe horning all of them into one I thought it would have been much more enjoyable but who am I to argue. Still love the movies.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by duguk ( 589689 )

          Oh so you haven't heard? I was under the impression that everybody had heard that latest news of a certain avian variety.

          Meist3r, What are you talking about?

          *giggles manically*

          • Oh so you haven't heard? I was under the impression that everybody had heard that latest news of a certain avian variety.

            Meist3r, What are you talking about?

            duguk, wait! Don't...

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ari_j ( 90255 )
          Have we been watching the same Family Guy? Which episode are you referring to where there's a two-second clip of the chicken fight saga? I don't recall one less than a minute.

      • You must have missed Laugh-In.

      • Re:Let's hope the Family Guy effect holds true (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Lord Bitman ( 95493 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @08:13AM (#28263893)

        Family Guy's use of cut-away humor is the same tired old "Let's insert a random fantasy!" crap that's been going on in every prime-time |/FOX\| comedy, and to a large extent many comedies on other networks, since at least Ally McBeal. (Why was Arrested Development cancelled? the cut-away humor was done in flashback/callback form, rather than fantasy)

        Funny things can happen in cut-away humor, but the cut-away itself is lame.

        • Re:Let's hope the Family Guy effect holds true (Score:5, Insightful)

          by arb phd slp ( 1144717 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @09:23AM (#28264545) Homepage Journal

          Family Guy's use of cut-away humor is the same tired old "Let's insert a random fantasy!" crap that's been going on in every prime-time |/FOX\| comedy, and to a large extent many comedies on other networks, since at least Ally McBeal. (Why was Arrested Development cancelled? the cut-away humor was done in flashback/callback form, rather than fantasy)

          Funny things can happen in cut-away humor, but the cut-away itself is lame.

          This was painfully obvious to me in the first few weeks of [adult swim] after the switch to Family Guy from Futurama. The cutaways have funny things in them, but the show as a whole is inferior to Futurama is so many ways. It's just so forced.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Sj0 ( 472011 )

          Your post has made me madder than that time Jesus told me off!

          (Wait, we had a clip for that, didn't we? No clip? Ok then.)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Spad ( 470073 )

        Have you *seen* Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy?

        I lost the will to live after about 5 minutes of terrible attempts at humour.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by mrsquid0 ( 1335303 )

        > In my (professional) estimation Seth McFarlane is the single most important
        > writer in the English language since the time Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Blake.

        Well now we know. Seth MacFarlane is the hypnotoad.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by robert899 ( 769631 )
        In my (professional) estimation Seth McFarlane is the single most important writer in the English language since the time Shakespeare...

        Is that you Seth?

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Hatta ( 162192 )

        The cutaway scenes in Family Guy represent the first departure from classical comedy I've ever been aware of.

        They did the exact same thing in Parker Lewis Can't Lose. I'm no scholar, but I'd find it hard to believe that's the first time it's been done.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sootman ( 158191 )

        The cutaway scenes in Family Guy represent the first departure from classical comedy I've ever been aware of.

        Six words: "And now for something completely different."

  • Direct-to-DVD "movies" (Score:3, Informative)

    by IBBoard ( 1128019 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:54AM (#28263209) Homepage

    They may have been "Direct-to-DVD", but I don't think it took them long to then go "and onwards to Sky TV as multi-part episodes". I know there aren't many Futurama episodes, but Sky seem to have played the "Direct to DVD" ones more than normal!

  • Into the Wild Green Yonder (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rik Sweeney ( 471717 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @05:58AM (#28263239) Homepage

    I wonder if it will continue from where Into the Wild Green Yonder [wikipedia.org] left off.

    • *warning: spoilers!*

      That would be very interesting, and challenging. Futurama has created an entire world of content that keeps re-appearing, so that veteran viewers get a lot more out of watching an episode in season 4 than a new viewer. It relies, heavily, on in-jokes and references (and they do it well, IMO). If they now have to send the cast of characters somewhere completely new, will we have a show without Morbo and Nixon?... At least Kif managed to jump onboard right at the end.

    • Holy crap I missed that one!

      Hope it's better than "beast with a billion backs".

    • <spoilers>

      I would think so. That was the whole point of that ending, to give them either a final conclusion (the crew is dead, or basically gone from our universe), or an easy way to back out of that conclusion.

      Remember, they went through a wormhole earlier in the plot (the final hole of the golf course), and it only took them a "short" distance away, so they can pretty much pop up anywhere and go back to business as usual. There's no need (as someone else mentioned above) to 'reboot', or have them in

  • The movies didn't work (Score:5, Insightful)

    by abigsmurf ( 919188 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @06:13AM (#28263285)

    From the first film they seemed to get progressively worse, both in terms of story and in terms of jokes. I know they had fewer writers working on them but the jokes weren't as snappy the plots didn't flow properly (Benders Game was the worst for that) and they relied too much on references to previous jokes and stories, one of the worst things about post season 10 Simpsons was how insular the humour became.

    If it was because they struggled to fill the running time than a new series could be brilliant. If it's because the current writers aren't a patch on the original team, it could go the family guy route of being stale almost immediately after it returned to screens.

    • The interesting thing about the movies is that if they were vetted by a good editor, they could have clipped them into a very good half-length features. Bender's Big Score could have been great if they shaved off around 30 minutes of "filler". Unfortunately, as you said, Bender's Game was really weak, it barely had enough good material for a ~40 minute feature.

      • Agreed, I think Futurama works best in the short form. The best episodes are like complete mini-movies, and the requisite trimming is probably what made them so good. This also made some of the geeky references more subtle, as you had to be quick to notice them.

    • Re:The movies didn't work (Score:4, Interesting)

      by VShael ( 62735 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @07:31AM (#28263653) Journal

      it could go the family guy route of being stale almost immediately after it returned to screens.

      I'll agree that Family Guy was a shadow of its former self, once it returned from cancellation.

      It took some time, but the show *has* returned to something like it's former levels of comedy though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 )
      Not only were they missing a bunch of their better writers, but they were trying to do feature length movies, which Futurama just isn't well-suited for. It was almost as bad as the Aqua Teen Hungerforce movie (great in 15 minutes chunks, torture for a full 90 minutes).

      • Not only were they missing a bunch of their better writers, but they were trying to do feature length movies, which Futurama just isn't well-suited for. It was almost as bad as the Aqua Teen Hungerforce movie (great in 15 minutes chunks, torture for a full 90 minutes).

        Don't like it? WALK OUT!

  • A new season of the show could represent good news, assuming that the writers still have sufficient material not yet exhausted. The movies had a lot of potential but just seemed not to translate to movie length well. Part of the problem with having movie length episodes was that it constrained the writers to working with overarching plots. Less comedic punch, under utilized, diluted characters and greater reliance on cheap gimmicks. The show just works better in 23 minutes. On the downside, the last season

  • For fuck sake... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GeorgeStone22 ( 1532191 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @06:36AM (#28263393)
    Kill the simpsons already.

  • Too late (Score:5, Funny)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Tuesday June 09, 2009 @07:55AM (#28263791) Homepage
    How many years has it been? By now, all the actors will be older and they won't look the part. It will be worse than Harry Potter or Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.
  • It shall be obliterated when the invasion fleet reduces your puny civilization to ashes! Now let's go to entertainment news. *Mary Heart look-alike laughs vapidly*
  • 10. Chump
    9. Chumpette
    8. Yours
    7. Up
    6. Pimpmobile
    5. Bite
    4. My
    3. Shiny
    2. Daffodil
    1. Ass

  • Comedy Central took Futurama away from Adult Swim who faithfully aired it for years in syndication. Adult Swim fans were the sole reason Futurama was revived. Adult Swim doesn't seem to get one bit of gratitude from Comedy Central or Fox. I love Futurama, but I'm not going to turn my back on Adult Swim and reward Comedy Central by watching it anymore. If I get withdrawals, I'll just Netflix it.

  • wow (Score:2)

    by Coraon ( 1080675 )
    this show has more lives then zombie Jesus.

    • this show has more lives then zombie Jesus.

      Don't be ridiculous... zombies aren't even alive, they're just... undead...

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