A new season of the animated series Futurama is expected to be released soon on the streaming service Hulu. There is some disagreement as to which one it will be. However, what is certain is that it will once again be an incredibly funny and absurd tale of future space adventures.
Futurama as a cultural phenomenon
On July 29, a new batch of Futurama episodes will begin airing on streaming service Hulu. What the count will be this season, versions diverge. Someone writes that it will be the twelfth already, according to another version it will be only the second half of the eighth. Figuring out which option is the right one is extremely difficult, and not really necessary.
After all, this fantastic animated series has long been a distinct cultural phenomenon. Its story began back in the late 1990s, when the creators of The Simpsons (which was already ridiculed for years to come) came up with the idea to film the same thing, only about the distant future and focus on comedic play on various sci-fi ideas.
The general style of The Simpsons was retained, but the characters were created completely new. The first episode aired on March 28, 1999 on Fox. It was about an ordinary pizza delivery man, Philip Fry, who received an order from a cryo-lab, found himself in a chamber to freeze biological samples, and woke up 1,000 years in the future.
Everything that sci-fi writers can imagine awaits him there: flights to other stars and galaxies, robots, aliens, incredible technology. Fry quickly recovers, finds his distant relative Professor Farnsworth and makes new friends, with whom he subsequently experiences many incredible adventures.
Almost from its launch, the series was rabidly popular, so, it was continued for new seasons. In total, from 1999 to 2003, as many as 72 episodes were released. These episodes seem to cover absolutely all the topics that exist in world of fiction and even ridicule the present a little bit.
But eventually, the series was shut down. Fans were very upset and asked for a continuation, because at that time the world of science fiction and the theme of the space future was already perceived by many through the prism of Futurama. Therefore, in 2008 a new season from the same authors appeared, only on Comedy Central channel. This time the series lasted until September 2013. There were 68 more episodes.
Fans were excited, however, the producers decided that there was nothing more to say about the distant future. Futurama was closed, and they announced that definitively, however, the supporters were not satisfied.
Another ten years went by. A few single episodes were released during that time, but fans wanted a sequel. And in 2023, Hulu finally released a new season. It again received positive reviews, and now everyone is once again waiting for the sequel.
What to expect from the new season?
From the very beginning, the series didn’t try to come up with something completely new, but played with various themes well known from sci-fi. Even Fry’s initial idea of getting into the future stretches back to past centuries. Rip van Winkle and Urashima Taro came to their own descendants centuries before the creators of The Simpsons decided to put the pizza delivery guy in a cryo-chamber. In modern fiction, this theme has been widely known since When the Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells. By the way, this novel was published exactly 100 years before the first episode of Futurama.
As for the seasons of the series themselves, they simply don’t have a cohesive plot, only individual elements of it. Each series is a standalone story that plays off some fantasy theme and often more than one.The creators of the series don’t make some unique world of their own. This is a stereotypical fantasy future in which all fantastic ideas have been realized. That’s why it looks so eclectic. And the predilection for absurdist humor makes it impossible to tell at all whether there’s a coherent logic to the events there or not.
So saying exactly what everyone expects from the new Futurama is both difficult and easy. The authors could come up with literally anything, and it would fit perfectly into the reality of the series. The main thing is that these are quality fantasy ideas that will be played out with unfailing humor.
The most interesting thing about Futurama is that the real future could very well be in its style. It may indeed turn out to be eclectic and absurdist enough that if we tried to describe it, we would not even be able to define it if we were looking forward to utopia or dystopia. Because if we really implement all the fantastic ideas that exist at the moment, the result can not be described other than with humor.
