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Dec. 20 – Futurama – “A Tale of Two Santas”

Original air date December 23, 2001.

It was right here in this spot one year ago today that Futurama‘s “Xmas Story” was inducted into the very prestigious Christmas Spot Top 25 Christmas Specials of All-time. Well, it was named as such a few years prior, but last year is when it got the full write-up treatment. And while I selected that Christmas episode for inclusion, it really is a toss-up for me over which Futurama Christmas special I enjoy most: “Xmas Story” or its sequel “A Tale of Two Santas.”

“Xmas Story” is our introduction to Christmas in the year 3000. Philip J. Fry (Billy West), the time-displaced protagonist of the series, gets to learn how much Christmas has changed over a thousand years and we, the viewer, get to experience the same. Turns out, a robotic Santa Claus had been invented several decades prior to that story which went crazy. Its standards for niceness were too high and thus everyone was deemed naughty. Santa, apparently no longer content to hand out coal to naughty children, decided that it would prefer to kill the naughty instead making Christmas one of the worst days of the year.

That tidbit about Santa is basically just a third act story in that episode. Prior to that, the episode is a bit more light-hearted with some conventional Christmas episode drama and it’s purposefully done that way to highlight the drastic change in tone once Santa shows up. This sequel episode, which took a long time to see the air, doesn’t dawdle and instead gets right to Santa. Seeing that the robot is the big source of conflict for the holiday and the most unique aspect of Future Xmas, the episode doesn’t see a reason to delay the robot’s arrival until the final act once again. Though Santa is going to be put on ice, as it were, for a sizable portion of the episode.

“There were no survivors.”

The episode begins in a typical manner. Our tagline is “This episode performed entirely by sock puppets.” which is a damn lie! The snippet of an old, public domain cartoon just before the Planet Express ship crashes is some screaming, black, dog character (Bosko? – Yes, according to Wikipedia it’s Box Car Blues which is a Bosko short). When the episode begins, we find the Planet Express crew watching television, a familiar sight on Futurama. The news is on and our lovely anchor, Linda (Tress MacNeille) is sharing a story about a futuristic version of a Polar Plunge. You know, those charity events where people dive into frigid waters at Christmas time sometimes dressed in festive attire? Well, in this version the people are jumping into a river of ammonia and we get to see it happen live on television! As Morbo (Maurice LaMarche) informs us after, there were no survivors.

Lock your kids in the closet and say goodbye to your pets – there’s no stopping Santa’s brutal rampage each year.

It’s now time to hear a holiday message from the head of Walter Cronkite (Frank Welker). He is here to offer up a warning about Santa Claus. As he details the danger this menace presents, we’re treated to images of the robot’s exploits from the prior episode. The message is concluded with Cronkite telling the viewer, “Remember, I told you so.” And as he finishes, the screen gets covered by planks of wood. Hermes (Phil LaMarr) is apparently pretty frightened by the prospect of Santa to the point where he feels the need to cover the television. Fry is fine with it since he’s tired of this wood show. We cut to the crew trying in vain to install the fireplace cover to keep Santa at bay. The Professor (West) is there to scold them for taking too long saying he only has a few years left to live and doesn’t want to spend them dead! Leela (Katey Sagal) encourages Fry and Bender (John DiMaggio) to push harder prompting Bender to say, “Oh? Push!” Once the robot is pushing instead of pulling the giant shield slams into place causing Fry and Leela to get tossed aside.

This basically the “Season’s Greetings” of the year 3001.

With the shield in place, the Professor seems no happier. Declaring they’re doomed, he takes a seat and remarks he’s thankful that he installed some blast shields for shutters. He presses a button on the chair and we see his idea of defensive shutters are more like the shields on the 1989 Batmobile. Steel plats cover the entirety of the Planet Express building. Unfortunately for Amy (Lauren Tom), no one told her the Professor was going to be activating them as she was busy boarding up the windows. The blast shields knock her off of her ladder. There were no survivors. Actually, she’s fine, I just couldn’t resist going back to Morbo for a second. Once the shields are in place, we can also see the Professor’s holiday greeting spelled out in Xmas lights on the roof of the building: Trespassers Will Be Shot.

Naturally, the crew has to undertake a mission that will surely endanger their lives.

The Professor shouts a challenge to Santa calling him a cadaver junkie in the process. Even so, with the shields in place the Professor surmises that they’re all likely to make it through the holidays alive so long as they’re not dumb enough to leave the very spot they occupy. Fry, Leela, and Bender all cheer at this declaration, until the Professor remarks that they have a delivery to make: letters to Santa addressed to his death fortress on Neptune. We cut to the Planet Express ship leaving the building, getting some of its landing gear stuck in the blast shields which are very eager to close up. On the ship, the three seem to be in decent spirits and Fry is even reading some of the letters to Santa. One is from a little girl (credit to MacNeille, but I would have guessed it was Lauren Tom) expressing her desire to not want Santa to bring her any gifts this year because the bicycle he shot at her from his bicycle gun really hurt. She’s still sporting a cast in the cutaway. Leela remarks, “How awful! Let’s read another!” The next one is from a little boy (MacNeille) and he’s writing to ask Santa for a coffin for his grandfather. He goes on to point out that Santa choked him with a chestnut last year and his corpse is really starting to stink. The camera even pans to poor, dead, grandpa in a shadowy corner.

These elves are a pretty sorry looking bunch.

Fry is dismayed at all of these letters. Xmas was a time for bringing families together in the 20th century and he wants to bring that kind of Xmas back for the people of this era. Bender questions who would be willing to do such a thing and Fry confirms that they are! Leela is in agreement as the ship speeds towards the north pole of Neptune. Upon landing, we meet the Neptunians of Jolly Junction which looks more like a war zone than a happy, Santa, village as the sound of gunfire and barking dogs fills the air. The Neptunians are dressed like elves and seem to always come in pairs which are always holding hands. A welcome party, as Leela dubs it, comes over to greet them. The first one (West) offers to sell them a kidney while his companion (David Herman) invites Fry to punch him for a buck. Leela refers to them as elves which is when they explain they’re Neptunians (I think Elzar is one too, a four-armed alien race, basically) that are just small because Santa doesn’t feed them. His companion then grabs Fry’s hand and makes him slap him demanding a dollar in return.

At least they have something to look forward to.

As the gang walks through Jolly Junction we get to see how the elves live. It’s not pretty. Some are being massacred by wolves while another pair is trying to stab each other with broken bottles. When the crew walks past a house with two Neptunians each holding a baby (the babies are in turn holding hands) they beg for any morsel of food that they could provide. When Fry points out that they live in a gingerbread house, one of the elves retorts “Hey! It’s food or shelter – not both.” Fair enough. Bender calls them lazy and assumes that they should have money from all of the toy making that goes on. Just the mention of toys causes all of the elves within earshot to gasp and raise their heads. A helpful one points out that the toy factory has been closed for years since Santa judges everyone to be naughty. We see the closed toy shop which has a “Coming Soon: Crack House” banner on it. Fry has his blood angried up at this and vows to shove his foot up Santa’s chimney! He informs the elves that he just needs directions on how to get into Santa’s ice fortress. The first elf to greet them volunteers and his companion takes one look at their hands which are joined together and remarks, “Aww, phooey!”

On Neptune it’s eat or be eaten.

The eager elf and his unwilling companion lead the crew into Santa’s fortress as promised. They’ve hidden them in the sack of letters they’re to deliver and stuck them in a sleigh. This allows the elves to transport their guests past Santa’s traps, which are basically buzzsaws designed to take out anyone taller than an elf and some guard dogs (Welker) who bark “Jingle Bells.” A poor, wayward bird comes into lethal contact with one of Santa’s lasers which drops at the feet of the elves. The pessimistic one remarks, “An omen?” while the more cheerful of the two just shouts, “Dinner!” and stuffs the carcass into his pocket.

He seems excited to bask in the world’s naughtiness.

We cut to inside the fortress to find Robot Santa (DiMaggio, taking over the role from John Goodman) seated at a large console. It’s apparently his way of spying on the people of Earth to see who is being naughty and who is being…naughty. He’s viewing two robots from the robot mafia wailing on some poor guy in the street. Santa declares that beating up a shop owner for protection money is very naughty, but that not paying the mobsters their protection money is equally as naughty! Satisfied with himself, Robot Santa changes the display and it’s Scruffy, the janitor, seated on a stoop doing nothing. He runs his finger across the underside of his nose and Santa accusingly shouts “I saw that!” and appears to write Scruffy’s name on the naughty list. His standards really are set too high, there wasn’t even any nostril penetration!

Leela is the type to think she has the solution to a problem that’s plagued humanity for generations.

Santa is interrupted by the elves delivering the sack of letters. Santa is angry they failed to knock reminding them he could have been watching something really naughty on his device (“I get New Orleans on this thing!”). The elves, clearly terrified, apologize and run off before Santa can say anything else. Inside the letter sack, Leela informs the others of her plan to confuse Santa with a logical paradox and issues a warning to Bender. The three emerge from the sack and Santa is understandably surprised. He whips out a very large gun preparing to blow them away, but surprisingly responds in kind when Leela asks him to stop. He listens as she introduces her paradox (while Bender covers his ears and hops up and down) which claims that Santa is designed to punish the naughty, but is too naughty, and therefore he should have to destroy himself. The robot’s head begins to smoke and spin before finally exploding. Wow, that was easy. Why didn’t anyone think of that before?

Maybe all of the explosive stuff was in the back?

Because Santa had a head built with paradox absorbing crumple zones – that’s why! A new head just pops up to take the old one’s place forcing Fry and Leela to bail. Bender, because he was covering his ears, is a bit slow to pick up on what’s going on, but upon seeing Santa pointing his massive bazooka his way he gets the right idea to run. Santa fires as the trio duck into an elevator and the doors close right on the missile. It’s stuck there, blinking and beeping, while the elevator goes down. The tip of the warhead gets cut off, but we soon see Fry, Bender, and Leela emerging from the elevator at the base of the mountain, only Leela is carrying the explosive for some reason. She pauses, remarks “Wait! This is what we’re running from!” then tosses it back into the elevator. Fry hops onto a toboggan with Bender behind and Leela in the rear. They just sit in place with Fry shouting “Faster! Faster!” The bomb in the elevator then explodes and the force of the explosion sends the crew shooting down the mountainside.

No one gets away from Santa Claus!

The trio go fast enough down the mountain that they’re able to avoid the many security towers raining gunfire down upon them. They zoom through the elf town even passing by the pair that helped them sneak in tossing a bunch of snow up in their wake which covers them. At least the bird they were roasting on a spit was spared! The crew crashes into the Planet Express ship and frantically races abord to try and get the hell out of there. As Leela tries to take off, the ship refuses to respond. She doesn’t understand the problem, but we soon cut to outside the ship and see Santa has a grasp of the rear thrusters. The situation seems dire, but the burning engines cause the ice below Santa to melt. He slips into the water and when Leela powers down the engines the water immediately refreezes burying Santa up to his chin in ice.

Looks like they fall ass backwards into a way to imprison Santa.

The crew comes out to survey the situation, as do the elves. With Santa literally on ice, Xmas can go on as it was always intended! Fry announces that he can be the one to deliver the presents, but Santa scoffs at him and points out that no human could deliver billions of toys in a single night. Fry objects and argues Evel Knievel could, but Bender chimes in that only a robot could do it. Then he realizes that by pointing that out he’s basically volunteered himself and regrets it immediately. The elves, for their part, all cheer in unison tossing all manner of clothing into the air in celebration!

These guys need a better union.

After a break, we find Bender with Santa’s hat on outside the ship still. Santa declares that Bender can’t do the job since he wasn’t built to Yuletide specifications. Bender retorts that he wasn’t built to steal Leela’s purse either, but that didn’t stop him. He produces her purse from inside his jacket and Leela immediately grabs it from him. Bender then orders the elves to bow before their new master, which they seem happy to do. This takes us into a musical section where the elves, along with the Planet Express crew, sing a song welcoming the elves back to work. It’s a rather cheerful sounding melody with dark and bleak lyrics. The elves proudly announce they’ll do the job for free and expect to be horribly maimed in the process. One elf gets a toy lodged in his brain. There’s a spot where Leela sings about turning up the controls to super speed, which she does, causing even the song to get faster in response which is pretty clever. The elves make some pretty shitty toys while Bender gets spray-painted red to look the part of Santa Claus. When the song is over, it’s time to get Xmas underway!

Bender knows what to do with a flying sleigh.

The song concludes with the elves getting their drink on celebrating their adequate gorillas. Bender takes flight and passes by the moon before circling the area and dropping gifts that explode like fireworks. Poor Robot Santa can only issue threats from his icy prison. Bender arrives on Earth and encounters his first home. The chimney has a grate across it which Bender bends easily before entering. Upon landing in the fireplace, he comes face to face with a mother and her kids. She (MacNeille) declares that this is the end and frantically instructs her children to take their suicide pills. Bender stops her telling her he’s the good Santa and he comes baring gifts – at reasonable prices! This is when the father (Herman) pops his head up telling his kids not to believe Santa for he is the father of all lies and the uncle of all tricks. Not even Bender producing a box of Tri-Ominos can sway them and he’s forced to bail. As he does, the entire family wails on his legs with fireplace tools. Bender is able to escape though quite the worse for ware.

You have to admire the woman’s confidence to think she could seduce a robot.

His next stop sees him popping out of the chimney to a well-lit room which startles him. It’s the home of the, shall we say, loose old lady character? She (MacNeille) is perched in a doorway rather seductively, though her charms are unlikely to affect Bender. She saunters over to the mechanical man and offers him a cookie from her cookie jar. Bender is receptive to the idea and sticks his hand in only for an old-fashioned mouse trap to snap across his fingers. As he regals the trap, he asks “What’s in these things?” The old lady them suggests he slip into something…fiery, and she pulls out a flamethrower and lights him up. Poor Bender is then shown emerging from the chimney charred and broken.

Poor Kwanzaa-bot.

We next catch Bender flying in the sleigh his body reflecting the punishment he has endured this evening. He is soon approached by Kwanzaa-bot (Coolio) who is in some sort of rocket powered canoe. He’s alarmed to see “Kringle,” as he calls him, in such a sorry state, and Bender just bemoans the fact that everyone hates him. Kwanzaa-bot counters with an at least everyone understands you. Bender asks if he wouldn’t mind helping him out with these toys, but Kwanzaa-bot has his own work to do tonight: handing out the traditional Kwanzaa book “What the Hell is Kwanza?(sic)” Kwanzaa-bot then hangs his head and sighs, “I’ve been giving these out for 647 years.”

Fry should probably look more disgusted than he is here.

It’s time to check-in on the rest of the Planet Express crew at their headquarters. Amy, looking no worse for ware following her earlier accident, is using a jetpack to spray Xmas lights onto the traditional Xmas tree. They come out of a can like silly string. Leela is decorating a bush with candy canes which Nibbler promptly eats off. Fry has moved an old-fashioned clawed bathtub into the living room to make eggnog in – just liked Grandma used to drink (even though in the prior Xmas episode we found out his idea of eggnog was just bourbon and ice cubes)! Hermes looks on as Fry tastes it immediately spitting it out declaring it’s gone sour. Zoidberg (West) then emerges from the nog requesting privacy while he takes a scented bath. Leela is at the side of the Professor’s chair reminding him that Bender is Santa so they don’t have to hurt him. He angrily shouts back at her “Yes! Yes! Yes! You sound like a broken mp3!” and waves her off.

It’s hard being Santa Claus.

At that moment, Bender drops in with an unenthusiastic “Ho. Ho. Ho.” The Professor immediately produces a shotgun and blasts the poor robot in the chest knocking him down. Leela cries out, “Professor! Don’t you remember what I just told you?” He just shouts, “No!” in response and blasts Bender again who had been assisted to his feet by Amy and Hermes. We cut to the roof Planet Express HQ where Bender is seated crossing off the Professor’s name on his list. He moans that there’s got to be a better way. We then cut to a street view with a Toys for Tots bin in clear view. Bender walks by it with his sack of toys and then just dumps them in the sewer. He declares himself a genius then walks off laughing his usual evil laugh. A sewer mutant (Vyolet, voiced by Tress MacNeille) pops up waving one of the Barbie-like dolls Bender just dumped in the sewer crying out that it creates an unfair standard of beauty.

What a world.

With the toys “delivered,” Bender ducks into an alley to unscrew his present – a bottle of booze. As he enjoys it, New New York’s finest beat cops Smitty (West) and URL (DiMaggio) happen upon him. They both reason that bagging Santa on Xmas Eve would do wonders for their careers, earning URL a promotion and getting Smitty back onto the force (he’s apparently not an actual cop in this moment). They approach Santa Bender who looks alarmed to see them. There’s no struggle, apparently, as there’s a camera shutter and then a copy of the New New York Post is superimposed on the screen with a picture of Bender and the headline “Suspect Nabbed in Santa Case!” And below that, “Chanukah Zombie Still at Large.”

The Professor is now a man who just carries a shotgun everywhere he goes.

We then find our defendant at Famous Original Ray’s Superior Court where Bender is being brought before the Honorable Judge Whitey (West). His crime? Being Santa Claus! When the judge asks him to enter a plea, Bender stands up and announces “Not Santa,” at which point the Professor rises from the crowd to shout, “There he is again!” and blasts him in the back with his shotgun. The Hyper-Chicken (LaMarche), a frequent lawyer character on the show, is addressing young Premula on the witness stand. He tells her she need not fear him and then promptly pecks at her. He apologizes for mistaking her as corn, then politely asks her to point at Bender. She does, the crowd gasps, and the Hyper-Chicken has no further questions. Bender, apparently representing himself, then gets his chance to cross-examine the young girl (who appears to be the same girl injured by the bicycle gun from earlier). He points out that she was paid for her testimony today. She confesses that it’s true as Bender gave her a dollar and some candy causing Bender to scream back at her, “And yet you haven’t said what I told you to say! How can any of us trust you?!” The girls breaks down into tears causing the judge to order Bender to stop badgering the witness. The mere mention of a badger gets the Hyper-Chicken all flustered as he starts looking about for danger.

Maybe one day he’ll be a judge.

Judge Whitey gavels the room to get the Hyper-Chicken to stop freaking out over imaginary badgers. He’s apparently heard enough as he tells everyone in the court he has a ham dinner with mayonnaise waiting for him back at his mansion, so he finds Bender guilty. He sentences him to death which will take place at sundown (wow, the future moves fast). Bender is lead out in handcuffs while Leela is left to remark she hopes that dumb chicken feels bad about what he’s done. We cut to the chicken at the top of the courthouse crowing to the heavens.

He apparently gets a lot of the same messages.

After a break, we find our hero (villain?) Bender being lead to his cell by Smitty, URL, the mayor and the robot preacher while Smitty calls out “Deactivated robot walking. We’ve got a deactivated robot walking.” When Bender comes to a cell with some gangster looking robot in it, he (DiMaggio) calls out to Bender that when he sees the Robot Devil to tell him he’s a coming for him! One cell down the hallway is where Bender finds the Robot Devil (LaMarche), but before he can tell him what the other guy said he just says “I heard him!”

That wasn’t part of the plan.

Fry and Leela apparently aren’t going to give up without a fight. We find them on Neptune where the elves are dressed in summer casual attire and happy to see the two return. Leela doesn’t care about them though as they’re here for one thing and one thing only: Santa. Leela reasons that if they return to Earth with the real Santa the courts will have to spare Bender. She uses a chainsaw to free him from the ice while still leaving him stuck in a cube. Santa taunts her the whole time over who will get the last “ho.” Once Santa has been extracted, everyone soon realizes that they have a problem. The heat from the factory has caused a greenhouse effect and the cube starts melting immediately. Santa is soon free forcing Fry and Leela to bail on this idea. There’s a brief chase sequence through the toy factory which includes on animation goof where Santa suddenly has his hat back on, even though Bender stole it. He also gets his ass impaled on a toy solider. Fry and Leela reach the ship without much trouble and as they fly away trying to devise another way to free Bender, the camera pans to find Santa clinging to the ship and hitching a ride to Earth.

Bender already hates magnets so this is probably the absolute worst way for him to die.

Back on Earth, Bender has been strapped to a table in-between two gigantic magnets. Mayor Poopenmeyer (Herman) is there to explain to Bender how these two magnets will rip him to shreds in the most humane way possible. When Bender points out how that doesn’t sound very humane, the mayor confirms that it is for the witnesses since it’s not boring! He then dawns an executioner’s hood and takes his place by the switch. When a random number generator hits zero, he’ll throw the switch. Since the number generator is random, it just spits random numbers that aren’t zero, for the time being.

Jesus must have been their ace in the hole in case the Spartacus routine failed.

This allows the others to attempt to free Bender. Leela comes running in ordering the mayor to stop the execution on account of the fact that he has the wrong Santa. He just keeps calling out numbers though while the “real” Santa is brought in. It’s Fry dressed in a Santa suit which causes the witnesses to all gasp and the mayor to cry out “What?” Then Hermes enters in a Santa suit declaring that he’s the real Santa, followed by Amy (in a much more revealing outfit) and the Professor. And in the rear is Santa’s friend Jesus, which is Zoidberg in a Jesus costume. Fry tells the mayor that he’ll have to execute all of them. The mayor tells them they’re not Santa and points out that they’re not even robots, then gets in the line of the episode, “How dare you lie in front of Jesus!”

Is Santa looking out for a fellow robot? Or does he just need something from Bender?

The random number generator then hits zero and the mayor gleefully throws the switch. Bender immediately feels the effects of the magnets, which as you may or may not know, causes Bender to sing folk songs, “Swing low sweet chariot coming forth to carry me home!” Fry can’t bare to see Bender suffer, while the Professor happily points out that at least it’s not boring! At that moment, the real Santa finally comes crashing through the wall in his sleigh. Doing so destroys one of the gigantic magnets though Bender still appears to be in some distress since he is attached to the board he’s on. Santa also has his hat back, so I guess he found a spare somewhere. Santa opens fire on everyone in the room and destroys the other magnet. The mayor cries out to Jesus for help, but Zoidberg informs him that he helps those who help themselves and then makes a retreat.

Is Robot Santa going to turn over a new leaf? Is this the heartfelt Xmas special conclusion we’ve been waiting for?!

Santa then approaches Bender who immediately thanks him for saving his life then begs him not to kill him. Santa laughs and tells Bender he’s not here to kill him, but he does need his help to save Xmas. Sappy music chimes in and Bender remarks, “Gee whiz, Santa, you want me to help you save Xmas?” Fry then cries out, “Don’t do it! He’s evil,” and it’s Santa who turns to Fry and says “I know he is, but I have no choice!” Robot Santa needs Bender to help him complete his brutal rampage, because without that it just wouldn’t feel like Xmas. He the turns to Bender and says, “Bender, won’t you join my slaying tonight?” All Bender can muster is a, “Well, ’tis the season!”

Of course not! Now there’s two of them for twice the carnage and mayhem!

It’s time for a holiday montage! It begins with Santa and Bender flying through the city streets while Bender smashes light poles with a baseball bat set to the tune of “Jingle Bells.” Santa then fires a missile into a diaper truck, one that apparently picks up dirty diapers? It rains diapers on the people of New New York causing Robot Santa to cry out, “Let it snow!” Bender then gets to hurl dolls through windows and brick walls and poor, little, Premula gets shot with a bicycle gun once again. It just wouldn’t be Xmas without that poor girl getting shot with a bicycle gun.

Fear: The Magic of Xmas.

At Planet Express HQ, fire is raging all around while the crew is huddled in the darkened living room. Leela is miserable because all of the trouble they went through just lead to an Xmas just as horrible as before. Then it dawns on Fry that this terrible future version of Xmas still does retain some of the magic of the one he left behind for it’s fear that has brought them together. The Professor is ready to tell him how stupid he thinks that sentiment is, then an explosion goes off and he meekly requests, “Hold me!” The whole crew are then left embracing each other in terror on the sofa as somber music plays.

Bender doing his best Hans Gruber.

We’re not done though, as we need to check-in with Bender and Santa one more time. We learn that Santa’s reindeer are Smasher and Thrasher as Bender calls out to them while also whipping them. Kwanzaa-bot pulls up alongside them to inform them Chanukah Zombie is throwing a party and they should come check it out, Bender just responds with “Word.” With Kwanzaa-bot gone, Santa tells Bender he wanted to give him something for covering for him while he was trapped in the ice. Bender greedily accepts the present, but is surprised to find that the box is empty. When Bender informs the big guy he made a mistake, Santa turns to him and says “Oh it might appear empty, but I think the message is clear: Play Santa again and I’ll kill you next year!” And with that, Santa swats Bender out of his sleigh where he falls to a fiery end. Laughing, the robot turns and heads off towards a gold-tinged moon laughing all the way. Merry Xmas, everyone!

Merry Xmas, Santa!

I’ve watched my fair share of dark or bleak Christmas specials over the years. I tend to find most of them funny when they’re done well. As a result, I’m pretty used to them and sometimes it takes me doing one of these write-ups to notice just how bleak an episode like this one is. Santa is a murderer. He inflicts violence upon children and misery upon the “elves” of Neptune. I can see why some at Fox would find this depiction of Christmas distasteful. There’s a perverse message in it that Xmas is supposed to bring people together in fear and we see our beloved main characters all in a fetal position grasping at each other. The darkest joke may have been the family Bender drops in on and the mother ordering her children to take their suicide pills. Does that count as a suicide joke? I suppose not in the traditional sense, but there’s no way to frame a mother ordering her children to kill themselves in order to spare them a long, torturous, death as anything but bleak.

Was the darkest joke in this one the family suicide pact? The little girl getting repeatedly attacked with a bicycle? The kid asking Santa for a coffin for his grandfather’s rotting corpse?!

Despite all of that, the episode is very funny. There are way too many lines in this one to quote them all. I might as well just post the script. Some of them don’t even read as well as they come out like the Professor’s “No!” in response to Leela asking him if he remembers what they just talked about. Billy West’s delivery is just so perfect. Pretty much every line the Professor has in this episode gets a chuckle out of me and it’s largely because of the performance of West. John DiMaggio does a lot of heavy lifting as well voicing Bender and some of his usual incidentals while also taking over the role of Robot Santa. He sounds surprisingly similar to John Goodman’s version of the character enough so that if you weren’t watching these close together you may not even notice the change. DiMaggio would continue to voice Robot Santa in his various appearances on the show. None of which really compare to the first two. I enjoy the other Futurama holiday specials to some degree, but the first two stand head and shoulders above the pack.

Professor Farnsworth is my pick for episode MVP. Every line he has is gold.

If you’re interested in this dystopian Xmas of the future then you can check out Futurama on either Hulu or Disney+, depending on your subscription and residency. Futurama still airs on cable in syndication as well and this episode is probably airing somewhere, perhaps even right this very minute! The series has also been released on physical media and is available to purchase digitally. Futurama is an easy show to find, and a worthwhile one as well.

Can’t wait until tomorrow for more Christmas? Check out what we had to say on this day last year and beyond:

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Dec. 12 – The Futurama Holiday Spectacular

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Presented by Gundersons!

Back before the advent of home video, when a show aired you either saw it or you didn’t. Miss something all of your friends were talking about the next day and you were at the whim of re-runs until your favorite show hit syndication – if it hit syndication. When VCRs were popularized you had the option of recording television shows for later use, but re-watching a show was a great deal more difficult than it is now. When children’s shows were sold on VHS they were usually obnoxiously expensive costing upwards of twenty dollars for an episode or two. The home video market for television just wasn’t something studios paid much attention to, at least not until DVD made it a whole lot easier, and cheaper, to sell television shows to fans.

Futurama owes a great deal to home video and syndication. When the show originally debuted on the Fox Network it struggled to find consistent air time. Often banished to that time-slot before The Simpsons on Sunday nights, it was the first thing bumped if an NFL game ran too long. Many blame the poor time-slots of the show on its lack of success, because once the show was cancelled and appearing in syndication on Cartoon Network’s adult swim block, it suddenly found an audience. DVDs of the first few seasons sold well enough that Fox brought the series back, as it did with Family Guy before it. The only change was that Fox declined to broadcast the new shows and instead optioned the series to Comedy Central, who would eventually gain control of the first four seasons from Cartoon Network. After four direct-to-video Futurama movies were released, the show returned with “Re-birth” in 2010 and would run for two more seasons totaling 52 episodes.

During its original run, Futurama gave birth to two Christmas specials – “Xmas Story” and “A Tale of Two Santas.” For the return season we were gifted with “The Futurama Holiday Spectacular.” The general opinion by most fans is that the post-cancellation episodes are inferior when compared with the pre-cancellation ones. There are of course those who feel the show came back better than ever, or at least as good as it always was, but I tend to agree with those who feel the post-cancellation episodes were lacking when compared with the others. In that sense, “The Futurama Holiday Spectacular” is similar because it’s not as good as the previous two Christmas specials (I guess I should say Xmas Specials), but it’s still an enjoyable episode with some good holiday jokes and puns.

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The crew preparing for Xmas, with an obvious Gundersons tie-in to keep that joke running.

Unlike the first two Xmas specials, this one is a non-canon anthology episode like the Anthology of Interest episodes and the anthology ones that followed. It’s broken up into three segments that focus on three holidays. Only the first one is an Xmas story and the homicidal Robot Santa makes a return in this segment. The second segment concerns Bender’s made up holiday, Robanukah, which he came up with as an excuse to avoid work in the season one episode “Fear of a Bot Planet.” And the third segment is about Kwanzaa with Hermes being a celebrator of that holiday. It also features the return of Kwanzaa-bot, voiced by Coolio, who first appeared in “A Tale of Two Santas.”

Our first segment opens with an ad for Gunderson’s Nuts – they’re “nut” so good, as we pan around the Planet Express headquarters. Inside the crew is decorating for Xmas and Fry is feeling blue, much like he was back in “Xmas Story.” He’s just down because the future version of Xmas is more about survival than good cheer, and we’re soon visited by Robot Santa after Fry asks for everyone to, once again, explain this crazy holiday and do it preferably through song. A little song is sung and we get some visual gags of fruit cake bombs and egg nog molotov cocktails. Robot Santa enters and departs just as quickly, letting them know that to properly celebrate Xmas they need a “tree that’s coniferous.” Also, Scruffy dies.

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The White House Xmas tree isn’t very impressive in the year 3010.

Fry wants to get a real Xmas tree, but Professor Farnsworth explains that the pine tree has been extinct for generations and that they’ll need to head to a seed vault in Norway. Gaining access to the vault is surprisingly easy as the guard, surrounded by barking snakes in a callback to the first segment, is willing to let them in to rummage about. Next door to the vault is the germ warfare vault and Leela expresses concerns about cross-contamination with the seeds. Inside, the guard happily gives them some pine tree seeds and reveals the tree is extinct due to an emergency toilet paper need during the Fifty Year Squirts. Amy notices the seeds have traces of green crud, but no  one is overly concerned.

Back home, Fry plants his seeds and a year later we see he has a sickly looking pine tree for his efforts. Passer-by’s think it looks great, including President Nixon who is immediately advised by Vice President Dick Cheney that he needs to steal it to improve his poll numbers. He apparently does, because soon after The White House is hosting a tree lighting ceremony, and very much like A Charlie Brown Christmas, the sickly little tree suddenly appears a lot more full once decorated. Fry and the gang are there too, so apparently they weren’t too sore about their tree being stolen, but soon the tree grows massive. It was apparently mutated by being stored near the germ warfare containment vault (duh!), and at first Leela thinks it might be a good thing it mutated since it suddenly looks a lot more healthy than it did before. Soon it starts shooting off pine cones, pine cones that in addition to exploding also lead to massive reforestation.

Soon the entire planet is covered in pine trees. Leela, ever the optimist, still believes this could be a good thing and the Professor remarks that global warming has all but been eradicated as a result, and we get our required Al Gore cameo here. The Professor quickly realizes that oxygen levels are climbing dangerously high, and Bender remarks that he hasn’t done anything for awhile and lights a cigar. The air starts to sparkle before it catches fire and we get a view from space of the whole word being destroyed. Robot Santa flies into view laughing about how everyone is dead and tells us to stay tuned for more hilarity!

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Robanukah features six and a half weeks of fembot oil wrestling, let the good times roll!

The second segment centers on Bender’s made-up holiday Robanukah. It’s just after Xmas and Professor Farnsworth remarks they need to destroy all of the Xmas gifts they failed to deliver. Bender immediately gets salty about how they have to celebrate every dumb human holiday but not the robot ones. Everyone is well aware that Bender’s holiday was made up by him to avoid work, but that doesn’t stop Bender from singing a song about Robanukah in a bid to legitimize it. During that song we get a taste of the holiday and it basically takes all of the Chanukah customs and perverts them, most notably by including six and a half weeks of fembot oil wrestling. When Bender finds out they only have enough petroleum oil for four and a half weeks of wrestling, he makes the crew set out to acquire more.

At Mombil, they learn that petroleum oil is all gone, and Al Gore pops in again to reprimand the viewers that he warned this would happen. Bender isn’t satisfied and is determined to find more petroleum oil and he makes the crew head for the center of the earth. There they drill for oil, but the intense pressure kills everyone except Bender. Five-hundred million years pass and Bender, after apparently occupying his time by singing about how great he is, notices his friends have become petroleum oil. He heads back to HQ with his oil friends to find the two fembots still wrestling in oil – a Robanukah miracle!

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It wouldn’t be Kwanzaa without Kwanzaa-bot and beeswax candles.

Our third segment opens with the Planet Express crew arriving at the home of the Konrads and Leela is concerned her chocolate cake may be offensive in some way. They are there for Kwanzaa, and even Barbados Slim shows up shirtless and covered in snow, much to the dismay of Hermes. When everyone is gathered for dinner, it’s decided we need our third song of the episode to explain the holiday featured in the segment, so Kwanzaa-bot bursts in Kool-Aid style to rap about the holiday. The joke of the song is that even he isn’t completely sure about anything concerning the holiday, but he does know they need authentic beeswax candles to celebrate or else they might as well be white. It’s noticed that the Konrads do not have authentic candles, so Hermes takes the crew out to acquire some on the last night of Kwanzaa.

Like the trees and oil, beeswax proves hard to come by and the crew is forced to return to the hive from “The Sting” to get the necessary wax to create their candles. There they find the space bees have been infected by some kind of mite and they’re in some distress. The mites are causing the drones to crash and explode, and the workers are at odds with each other. The queen bee is the only one who appears unaffected, despite the presence of mites on her, and she explains the situation to Hermes. During this, Leela is able to acquire plenty of beeswax but Hermes can’t leave the bees like this, not on Kwanzaa! He explains the meaning of Kwanzaa to the bees, and his message of unity together with the spirit of Kwanzaa causes the bees to embrace each other and the mites to fall off and die. With their minds fully functioning once more, the bees turn their attention to the Planet Express crew. Kwanzaa-bot returns offscreen to save them, and is quickly killed, also offscreen. The bees attack and we fade to black and re-emerge to be wished a Happy Kwanzaa by Hermes who is encased in wax. The camera pans back to reveal the entire crew as wax candles and a curtain falls on the special.

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Al Gore is a reoccurring presence throughout the episode, and even gets to close the show.

Al Gore emerges, still as a floating head, to assure us, the viewers, that the crew will return next year in all new episodes. We get one final send-off from Gunderson’s, and the holiday special is ended. In re-watching it for this post I will say this episode is funnier than I remember. It still suffers from too much fan-service as many jokes exist just as a call-back to an older season (“My ice cream man-which!”) which just feels kind of lazy. There’s still plenty of witty dialogue and exchanges between characters, but the anthology format sacrifices pay-off as the stories are forced to be quick and concise with less room for everything, including jokes.

As a Christmas special, “The Futurama Holiday Spectacular” is mostly underwhelming because only a third of it is devoted to Christmas, and a bastardized version of the holiday at that. And with most of the Xmas parody handled by the past episodes, there’s little left for the show to tackle here. The inclusion of songs is the easiest form of parody, but they sometimes feel too much like padding as not a lot happens in these short segments. The best Futurama episodes are able to be funny while telling a meaningful story containing characters we genuinely care about. I suppose killing off these characters in three separate segments is kind of a play on holiday specials itself, but it’s not really as funny as it could be. It’s cool that they found room for more holiday lampooning, and not just Christmas, even if the Kwanzaa jokes felt a bit too easy. There’s always room for more holidays, as far as I’m concerned, and it’s the most obvious aspect of this special that makes it stand out. Criticisms aside, this one may do little to evoke the Christmas spirit, but it’s still a worthwhile inclusion in your annual holiday viewing.

If you want to watch this one this year, Futurama is shown on Comedy Central and they will play the crap out of the Christmas episodes (as of this update, the episode is scheduled to air Thursday December 21 at 5:20 PM EST). The show is also now syndicated on the Syfy channel and that channel is also set to air the Christmas specials this year. Syfy is showing a Christmas Eve marathon of Futurama including all of the movies and ending with the three Christmas specials. This one will be last to air at midnight, right when Santa is arriving!


#3 Best in TV Animation: Futurama

FuturamaWhen Futurama was first announced I didn’t think much of it. It felt like an unofficial spin-off of The Simpsons with a stupid title. The premise, a 20th century slacker getting cryogenically frozen to awake in the 30th century, probably should have interested me more than it did. As a result, I, along with most of America, mostly ignored the show during its initial run. Only when re-runs started surfacing on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block of programming did I truly give the show a chance. And what do you know? – I loved it!

Futurama follows the exploits of Fry, Bender, Leela, and the rest of the Planet Express package delivery crew as they parade around the universe getting into more trouble than a normal package delivery company would expect to. Like The Simpsons, Futurama relies on satire and a diverse cast of characters for its humor, and setting the series a thousand years in the future actually makes the satire come rather easy. It’s almost as if show runners Matt Groening and David X. Cohen watched Back to the Future Part II and decided a show that centers entirely on the future portion of that film would be a great idea. The future is a lot like our present, only America essentially rules the entire globe with President Nixon, now a head preserved in a jar, coming into power early in the show’s life. There’s also the Democratic Order Of Planets, or DOOP, which attempts to police the entire known universe with the incompetent Zapp Brannigan as its leading general. Robots handle a lot of the menial labor on earth with relations between humans and robots tenuous at best.

This picture essentially tells you all you need to know about Bender.

This picture essentially tells you all you need to know about Bender.

The principal cast revolves around the Planet Express crew itself. Fry (Billy West) is the main protagonist who is time-displaced due to a mishap in 1999 and doesn’t seem to mind it all that match. He’s a well-meaning but plainly stupid sort of character. His best friend is the robot Bender (John DiMaggio), who would rather chain smoke and steal than actually do any work around the office. Leela (Katie Sagal) is the pilot of the Planet Express ship and nominal love interest of Fry, a subplot that actually takes quite a while to fully develop. She also happens to be a one-eyed mutant. Professor Farnsworth (also voiced by West) runs the company (mostly incompetently) with the help of Hermes Conrad (Phil LaMarr), Amy Wong (Tress MacNeil)e, and Dr. Zoidberg (West). As you may have noticed, the voice cast is pretty well stocked with talented individuals, some who made a name for themselves with Groening’s Simpsons. West is the obvious star and one of the very best at his craft, but everyone is pretty top-notch making Futurama arguably the most well-voiced program in the history of animation.

Visually, the show is excellent and for most of its run was superior to its predecessor, The Simpsons. Fox clearly was pretty generous with the budget for the show’s first four seasons as traditional hand-drawn animation was blended well with computer-aided visuals where appropriate. The show is bright and vibrant and the setting helps to give it a unique look. As expected, there are some pretty standard tropes of the future setting like transportation tubes and laser weapons to go along the obvious hover cars. The show doesn’t make too many attempts at actually predicting the future, and given the setting is a thousand years away there’s little need to. The various aliens and robots are usually pretty fun to take-in and is where most of the show’s visual creativity ends up being on display.

Billy West lends his voice to many characters on the show.

Billy West lends his voice to many characters on the show.

Most importantly, the show is just plain funny. The characters tend to work well with each other. Fry and Bender are often the ones getting into mischief, and early in the show’s run, Leela was often left to play the straight man (woman). Bender is the unofficial star of the show as his general selfishness and law-breaking ways make him both hilarious and popular in the same way Bart Simpson did ten years prior, only with the debauchery and lewdness magnified considerably. Dr. Zoidberg, likely the universe’s worst doctor, is often a source of humor at the character’s expense considering he is both poor and foul-smelling. Professor Farnsworth is probably my pick for the most unsung hero of the cast. Whenever the show turns to him for a one-liner or a visual gag he seems to always deliver. The simple delivery of his “Tell them I hate them,” from “Fry and The Slurm Factory” gets me every time.

Where the show really found a way to separate itself from others is with its heart. It sounds sappy, but the show is surprisingly effective when it wants to make the viewer experience something other than laughter. The first episode where the show really successfully delivered on such was the Fry-centric “The Luck of the Fryish.” In that episode, Fry finds out his brother essentially stole his identity after he was frozen and basically lived out all of Fry’s dreams while becoming a national treasure. He owed it all to Fry’s lucky seven-leaf clover. Fry, in anger, wants his clover back and will go to great lengths to get it back, even if it means digging up his brother’s corpse. There’s a twist in the end and good luck keeping your eyes dry when it comes about. Of course, the show’s most infamous episode in this style is “Jurassic Bark,” in which we find out what happened to Fry’s dog, Seymour, after he was frozen and left him behind. I still remember the first time I caught the episode on television and the ending really snuck up on me and obviously made an impact. In general, the show does a really strong job of finding the humor in almost any situation. And even when the characters have to do something mean for laughs, the show is able to keep them from straying too far from a moral baseline so that the audience never turns against them. Even Bender has his moments where he does something nice.

Like The Simpsons, Futurama's cast became exceptionally large.

Like The Simpsons, Futurama’s cast became exceptionally large.

Futurama was originally unsuccessful during its initial run on Fox, though it did manage to last for the better part of four seasons. After the reruns performed well for Cartoon Network and DVD sales excelled, the show went the direct-to-video route with four feature-length films. They would eventually be chopped up into episodes that aired on Comedy Central, who picked up the show for an additional three seasons. Having the show come back from the dead was pretty awesome, but you would have a hard time finding a Futurama fan that felt the post-cancellation episodes were up to the same standards of quality as the first four seasons. Still, there were episodes here and there that stood out and subpar Futurama is better than most shows. The show ended with its 140th episode, a healthy run by any standard. In those 140 episodes the show made a bigger impact than all but two others, according to this list, and really stand among all television shows, animated or otherwise, as being among the very best.