(I'm not sure why I'm on a bit of a Superman kick right now, but I'll try to change it up after this one!)
So the other day I was watching Cleo in her swing. Calm, content, kind of smiling. Then suddenly... MASSIVE FREAKOUT! She just starts screaming, instantly red in the face! I rush over to pick her up, convinced something is pinching her and... nothing. She whimpers a little bit, but calms down easily enough and is smiling at me a minute later. I talked to H about it a while later and she says the same thing happened to her the other day.
What's going on here?
Well, my working theory right now is based on Clark Kent, specifically Smallville. I have a hard time with the "soap opera" aspect of Smallville, but I've always enjoyed their take on the evolution of Big Blue.
When Smallville starts, Clark has two powers: super strength and super speed. Over the series he develops all of the powers we associate with Superman with flight being the last. Each one has its own Very Special Episode: X-Ray (X-ray vision), Heat (Heat Vision), Whisper (Super Hearing), and Sneeze (Super Breath). All of them (Whisper is a partial exception, but basically the same) follow the same pattern:
Clark suddenly develops a new power. This power causes massive chaos and inconvenience to him and really freaks him out. As the episode progresses, he learns to cope with it and usually defeats someone evil with it. It then becomes a part of his life and completely under his control by the next episode.
I think being a newborn is like this. Life is blurry and unfocused and then suddenly... CLEAR VISION POWER! Or she's just flailing around then suddenly... SUPER GRIPPING POWER! Eventually these just become part of her life and are no big deal, but that first time is a big Keanu Reeves style "Whoa".
My proposal to H is that we need to find an evil baby that Cleo can defeat with her new powers in order to give her closure, but H has frowned on this idea. In truth, it's hard to figure out which baby's are evil (though I have my suspicions) and I don't think Cleo is equipped to deal with an inner turmoil episode that usually happens when a hero beats up someone who it turns out is NOT evil. We're pretty much just into the first season and that's more of a second or third season episode anyhow when the story lines become more complex.
However, come fall of 2014, watch out evil babies!
So I'll start this out by saying "The Expectant Father" is an amazing book. I've gotten two copies, one from my mother-in-law and one from a good friend, but instead of getting rid of one copy, I keep one copy at work and one at home. That's how much I like this book. Great, down to earth information and each chapter starts off detailing what's going on with the mom's body, the mom's emotions, the baby's development, and likely the dad. It really is great.
That said, this thing is also completely terrifying for me right now. Not because of any content (well the section on Cesareans is pretty freaking terrifying, but anyone who's seen Prometheus knows that), but more so because of how few chapters are left. I crack open the book and read for a bit, but suddenly every sentence in the book changes into "You are not prepared for this!".
How this book feels right now
You see we're having the baby shower next week. We're both looking forward to it, but it also means that we currently have nothing babyish in the home. A friend of H who is also pregnant currently has a nursery with tons of stuff in it and apparently the dad painted a freaking anime cartoon mural on the wall. We have a bassinet in the corner filled with baby books. Not because we don't want stuff, but mostly that we just don't know what stuff to get yet. Currently our apartment looks suspiciously like the apartment of two people who are in denial of the fact they are having a kid.
Ewok Air Force: Protecting the Gene Pool
What this really means, though, is that H and I are in a holding pattern. A gentle holding pattern akin to floating on the breeze with, say, a hang glider. Reading stuff about after the baby arrives takes me out of this nice little holding pattern and launches me into a goddamn WARZONE! Remember how the hang glider squadron's fared back in World War I? Of course you don't, because even the people back then recognized that they would get completely freaking SLAUGHTERED! The only Person stupid enough to think that hang glider combat is a good idea is George Lucas! I still don't understand why the Ewoks, a race of creatures that live in a freaking forest, would develop hang glider combat unless it was some sort of crazy Darwinian kind of logic where any Ewok who straps on a pair of wings and face plants into a redwood at about 100 feet in the air probably was no good for the species anyway.
I may never say this again, but I am really, really looking forward to the reassuring clutter of baby stuff. Freaking Ewoks.
So for those of you who don't know, Unicorn City was released earlier this month on iTunes and Amazon. In short, it's a movie about a guy who wants to get a job at "Warlocks of the Beach" and decides to create a gaming utopia to accomplish this, or basically a full time LARP. I was really, really looking forward to it, and while it was entertaining and funny, it kind of fell short for me. Here's the trailer:
The trailer makes it look really funny. And it is very humorous. It's just not... whimsical enough I suppose. The characters in the movie are entertaining, but they are more funny awkward rather than the zany types depicted in the trailer. The main character Voss is a little too unappealing for too long. As a friend of mine put it, the movie is one of those "How does a manchild become a man?" stories. You know he is going to make that transition, but I feel this transition is put off until way too late in the movie. It would have been nice to see an evolution of character rather than an epiphany. To put my feelings on the film in perspective, I'm a fan of low budget fantasy comedy, but after having rented it I'm just not sure if there is enough rewatch value to it for me to justify plunking down more money to own it.
That said, they do the best with what they have. I'm really looking forward to "The Knights of Badassdom" too, but this features a real special effects budget as well as actual C to B+ grade actors in it (Peter Dinklage, Steve Zahn, Danny Pudi, and Summer Glau).
No sooner do I invoke the name of the DnD movie than I am exposed to this: the trailer for Dungeons and Dragons the Movie 3: the Book of Vile Darkness. It is really, really sad.
So I pointed out in my post on a few weeks ago that fantasy movies don't specifically have to be bad. Yet the D&D ones consistently are. Why is this? Simple: they are not paying attention to what is different from a generic fantasy movie and D&D.
D&D is composed of two things. One part is the plot and the heroes who quest in a land of danger, magic, and destiny. The other is about the people who sit around a table (possibly drinking Mountain Dew) while rolling dice. You film one without the other and you end up with either a bland fantasy movie or a boring documentary. Ah, but you put them together and you have... Dungeons and Dragons!
Dead Gentelment Producations (last I checked, these are local boys stationed out of the NW!) the creators of The Gamers and The Gamers 2: The Dorkness Rising understood this. In both of these movies, there are two stories going on: the story of the Gamers and their personal conflicts in the real world, and the story of their campaign where the same actors are acting out a fantasy movie. They use this primarily for comedic effect and execute it brilliantly considering the low budgets they were working with.
As the worst Futurama movie, it is still 10x better than the D&D movies.
Another way to handle this duality is a concept that is actually right there in front of the guys at WOTC: the gamers somehow end up actually in the game world. If it seems like you may have heard this before, it's because you have. It is basically the same thing that happened in the D&D cartoon, except they used a carnival ride as the plot device instead of the actual game to make it more Narnia-ish; likely to appease book burning fundamentalists who were overly focused on D&D at the time. It's also reminiscent of what happens to the Futurama crew in Bender's Game.
It doesn't have to be that cheesy or ironic though. Joel Rosenberg used this mechanic in his 1983 book "The Sleeping Dragon", which became the Guardians of the Flame series. In this book, a group of college students playing a D&D-like game suddenly become their characters in a fantasy world. He does a good job of capturing the real reactions actual people would have such as panic, anger, despair in addition to wonderment. One character that enjoys it too much and treats it like a game ends up dead early on, establishing the gravity of their situation. You could also soften it up, but gritty material like this could also go over well now that Game of Thrones has set the stage.
So there we are. Two effective ways of making a D&D movie. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and WOTC chose neither, tromping out into the wilderness without supplies and ignoring the baying of hungry wolves. And that has made all the difference.
So I recently got a book for little Kidney (that's our current nickname for her) called "My First Wonder Woman Book". Gotta say, I love it.
Thick blocky pages and an ending featuring a tinfoil mirror so the kid can see their own reflection as Wonder Woman. Then I started thinking "I want more!" But... there isn't much more. There are LOTS of Spider Man, Batman, and Superman things floating around the book area, but not a lot of superheroines.
And really, are there that many to choose from? At least, as far as iconic ones go. From DC we have Supergirl, Wonder Woman, and Batgirl. Marvel we have Shadowcat, Ms. Marvel, Rogue, Jean Grey, and Storm. Supergirl is the only one to try a solo movie and Wonder Woman's 1970s TV show is so bad that it's something I plan on featuring on TGIS.
I do have high hopes for Lauren Faust's (the person who revamped My Little Pony) Super Best Friends Forever series and I'm hoping it'll become more than just a series of shorts and blossoms into a full blown show. I really need some more superheroine stuff for Kidney!
I'm not sure when it happened. It could have been the truly terrible "Episode II: The Clone Wars" movie. It could have been while insulting the intelligence of his fans via the whole "Han shot first" issue. It could have been the final, forced, and anticlimactic "Noooooooo!" I don't rightly know, but the one thing I realized recently is that somewhere along the way I stopped caring about Star Wars. I'm... worn out. Not by all the fan culture stuff mind you. I love the creativity of fans and all of the novelty star wars beanies, cosplay, fan movies, etc.
No, the big thing is that it all seems to be catered to a man who does not respect his fan base. Star Wars is dead inside. These days when I see a desk made to look like a Tie Fighter, I only find myself feeling sad. You see, it's gratifying to particpate in geek culture when the creator is not only the guy who made it, but is also a fan. Felicia Day, Peter Jackson, and Joss Whedon are examples of people who aren't just creators, but fans of their work who will geek out with the best of them.
Felicia Day singing "Still Alive" from Portal w/ John Coultan at PAX
Has Lucas ever done anything remotely this cool?
I don't think that George Lucas is a fan of Star Wars, though. Not anymore at least. All he ever really wanted to do was make movies about hot rods and by extension, hot rods in space. Now he's ended up being trapped in this franchise since the 1980's. And even though he was a probably bit creeped out by his fans and their intense devotion to the brand, he still accepted it and, if not respected it, he at least humored it.
Then came the prequels.
Great film about this!
While we didn't know this at the time, it is now understood that Lucas had become complacent and had started believing his own hype when he made the prequels. A lot of the brilliance of "A New Hope" and especially "Empire Strikes Back" really came from the people who took Lucas' raw vision, refined it, and told Lucas to sit down and shut up where needed. In fact, in Empire he gave up the directing AND screenplay writing to other people so he could focus on the special effects. Some of the most memorable lines from Star Wars were never written by Lucas! Unfortunately for the prequels, the ambitious trailblazing talent this rebel filmaker had surrounded himself with in the 1970's had since been replaced by people on his payroll who didn't know how to disagree with a legend no matter how stupid his ideas were.
Living in this foggy Xanadu, I'm sure Lucas was shocked as he saw the rabid adoration of his fan base turn into feral rage at he and Jar Jar upon the release of "Phantom"; fanboys gnashing their teeth and venting vulgar fury onto the internet. Shock likely turned to frustration, then disappointment, and now his feelings towards his fan base have distilled into a palpable disdain.
While I obviously have sympathy for him, I personally can no longer tap enthusiasm for things Star Wars related since all I can sense is the scorn of George Lucas. At best he is apathetic, at worst he acts with an "I'm going to take my toys and go home!" attitude. He and his fans are now adversaries, which saps away the magic for all of us. His "re-imagined" Star Wars is not just a selfish denial to the fans that would rather not watch it (Lucas refuses to release the originals and will only sell the ones with computer generated images in them), but is disrespectful to all of the other people who worked hard on these movies. The original Star Wars won academy awards for the space ship battles. Innovative geniuses worked to push the boundaries of sci-fi movie making forward, but get no say in Lucas' decision to whitewash over their efforts with computer animated fight scenes.
Which then makes me think, isn't there a better direction for fans to take their passion? Why not lavish it on a creator that deserves the adoration? Lucas has "retired", but unless someone steps up to his or her own vision of the galaxy far far away (eg. The Battlestar Galactica reboot), it will really only serve as a sluggish, wheezing juggernaut blocking up the corridors of imagination for the future generations of creative talent. I, for one, am more curious about what they have to say in their own idiom rather than another Lucas Arts sponsored game or cartoon that continues to beat a dead tauntaun.
(Bonus geek points for those of you who recognized the title!)
So one of the cool things about having a wife like Hydee is that she really indulges a lot of my geek tendencies. She respects me having time blocked off in my schedule for D&D, she made a hand knit Brain Slug, and listens patiently when I share fantasy characters and world building maps I've made. The most recent case in point though: My wedding ring.
I'm a fiddly guy. I like to have stuff in my hands to do things with. In class I do pen spinning while I listen. In the past during breaks at work I used to juggle. When I used to smoke, I loved having a Zippo so I could do lighter tricks. Hell, even typing a blog fits in to this category. So getting a ring means I would fiddle with my ring, twisting it on my finger and likely irritating the skin underneath. How to solve this problem? Enter: the Gear Ring.
It really is as cool as it looks in the video. H remembered me liking it from a few years back and ordered it for the wedding. Now she could have demanded a traditional wedding band and I would have completely gone along without complaint. (Considering how informal our wedding was, she had every right to!) Instead, she goes ahead and gets me the cool ring! I really am a lucky man.
Joss Whedon is pretty open about the fact that he is a feminist, but is questioned a lot for making this stance. Oddly, a lot of this fire is from feminists. I'm not an expert on the subject, but I can't help but wonder that it might be that he considers all angles of feminism and not just empowerment. A great example is Xander from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.
Wait... my superpower is immunity to 3D?
Xander is a take on the man living in the feminist world. He is the only character by the end of the series who does not have supernatural powers. Almost all of the women have been gifted with magic or super strength and what happens to Xander? He loses an eye. All these empowered women around him... and he is just a man. But its important that he remain mortal. The concept at work here is that now that women are powerful, what becomes of masculinity? And Xander isn't alone in the Whedonverse.
"I am a large, semi-muscular man!"
In the Firefly universe, the relationship of Wash and Zoe stands forefront to this. He's comfortably in a relationship with a woman that Jayne would hesitate to make angry, and yet he struggles with this on occasion. As masculinity is essentially a concept based in strength, now that a man doesn't have to be so tough, how do you determine what is in a mans nature and identity? How much of it has been for show? How much of it is really just what a man is like?
In contrast, if you look at most superhero relationships, the man is either more powerful than the female or, in the rare occasions where she has more power, she has power that she can't control (Dark Phoenix, Sue Richards, etc). It ends up being this Darin and Samantha from Bewitched situation where she has amazing and wonderful abilities but the man knows best and a frown from him means she knocks off the shenanigans. The equally repellent flip side are books like Elizabeth Hayden's, where these strong powerful male heroes act like whiny emo bitches when around her heroine. (I'm all for peeling back the veil on a macho facade, but these men practically have split personalities!)
I suppose that's why I enjoy the relationship between Batman and Wonder Woman. Throughout the Justice League Unlimited series there is undeniable chemistry between the two. Sadly it's only a product of the cartoons and not canon, but I wish it was. Diana is one of the most powerful creatures on earth and Bruce is really just a man. And yet, his reasons for not dating her have nothing to do with feeling threatened by her strength, but are the more garden variety commitment phobic statements.
Like a lot of geeks, I tend to dig too much into the meaning of trivial things, and yet on some level I feel this is important. I think if there was more exploration in fiction of relationships with super powerful females where the men remain heroes you would still like to be, it could help with the weird identity issues a lot of guys deal with.
(Note: This is part three of my retrospective look at D&D)
I remember being terrified of turning 30, but really, it was one of the best years of my life. H and I were in the beginning stages of our relationship, I had some amazing friends from grad school, and things were falling into place. Whenever you hit a landmark age, though, you also re-evaluate your life. You decide what's working, what's not working, what to try next, and maybe what's worth revisiting in your life. On my 30th, I decided to start playing soccer again and to try playing D&D again. Both have been great decisions for me. However, I'm not sure my D&D resurgence would have taken root except for one factor: Living Greyhawk.
Living games are games where your character exists independent of the modules. What I mean by that is that I can start off with a first level character playing with four people locally, take it up to 8th and gain a bunch of magic items, then fly across the country to a convention in Chicago, play with 4-5 complete strangers, and I can still use the SAME CHARACTER! I think this is unbelievably cool.
You see, I'm the type of person who likes the blackjack tables in Vegas not because of the game, but because of the people you meet. Everyone who comes to the table has a story and since none of you are competing against each other, people tend to share. Last time I was there I talked with a dealer who had spent most of his life working at The Sands Hotel until it got torn down and it was a really fascinating life he had led. Living Greyhawk (LG) was kind of like the D&D blackjack table. Meeting people from all walks of geek life was great. Some became regular faces. Others were one shot partnerships. Sure linear story and character development were sacrificed, but in return you were exposed to a multitude of playing styles, character concepts, and player personalities.
Home Sweet Home
Alas, the only thing constant is change. LG was a grassroots, volunteer run organization only sponsored by Wizards of the Coast. It was divided up into regions that were assigned virtual territories in the world of Grehawk. Washington, Oregon, and the rest of the NW were The Duchy of Urnst. Adventures were developed on a national level about the world and destiny of Greyhawk, but also at a local level about your region by people in your region. This allowed for a massive amount of flavor, customization, and genuine regional difference. Adventures designed by people in Australia for their region "Perrenland" would feel genuinely different than Oregon adventures. While this created a ton of flavor and details, it did not offer enough control to the people at Hasbro, WOTC's parent company.
LG was killed off and Living Forgotten Realms was launched in its place; a living game that was very vanilla and completely controlled by the corporation. Initially I didn't like 4th edition, but I now realize it wasn't really 4th edition I didn't like, it was Living Forgotten Realms. They had taken away my quirky local coffee shop and replaced it with Starbucks. Yeah, maybe not everyone was a fan of free trade coffee sponsored angry lesbian slam poetry night, but it's better than homogeneity of assembly line coffee any day. Life goes on, the sting fades, and while I may not play living games anymore, I have at least gotten over my issues with 4th edition.
Note: This is part 2 of a series of posts leading up to 5th edition.
Ten Dollars?!?
I thought I'd continue my journey down memory lane regarding D&D and get a little sentimental. Very few people played first edition. Unless you are about twenty years older than me and 100 times geekier, you probably didn't. First edition was very basic. Illustrations by Gary Gygax basic. It was that bad. It was the evolution of the Chainmail system by Gygax that Arneson usded to take the focus off of miniature wars and put them on individual miniatures. However, this was a different time and these were old school geeks who were into the details more than anything. Kind of like how old school nerds designed computers to be functional and hadn't ever considered that they could be sexy until Steve Jobs got his hands on one. In the old books, the dungeons and tables were the centerpieces. Characters and sometimes story were incidental. A far cry from today where characters are the centerpiece. I never played this version though.
Happy National Geek Day!
What I can speak to is the original Red Box. I actually have my old Red Box books.I got it in about 3rd grade, so that places things in the mid to early 80's. This is the one where there are only seven classes: fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief (not rogue!), elf, dwarf, and halfling (the races WERE classes then).
Why did this unlock my imagination so? I'm still not sure. I suppose that since I was into fantasy books, the prospect of making my own fantasy adventure was empowering. I bought a bunch more of the Advanced D&D books but I essentially lived in the rural country. The closest person my age lived about a mile away, so my odds of finding someone I could actually play with were really slim. I attempted to play D&D on a few occasions around school and with friends, but without a car, gatherings were nigh impossible. It possibly would have faded from memory if not for Jason.
When I was in middle school, my mother brought in some extra income by tutoring a teenager named Jason. My mother would pick me up from school and I'd wait in the car while she tutored Jason in math and I would come in towards the end of the lesson when I couldn't stand the boredom. Jason was a paraplegic who only had the most limited movement in one hand due to a car accident, but had a fully functioning brain. In a situation like that, it's only natural that you would develop an amazing imagination. Jason had long hair, loved heavy metal music, and had an large colleciton of crazy RPG materials like Gamma World and Shadowrun that he would talk up and lend to me. He was eccentric and intelligent and I remember thinking he was pretty cool.
Unfortunately, the age gap prevented any real friendship (I was in 7th grade and I believe he was a sophomore in high school). Very sad really. While 4 years age difference doesn't seem like much now, it was half a lifetime back then. By the time I was a teenager and likely old enough to hang out with him, I was way too much into all the teenage high school drama to think of contacting him and my mother had stopped tutoring him years ago.
Jason is gone now. He passed away in his mid 20's. When my mother showed me the obituary, I did find myself feeling regret. In some ways, I feel like my self consciousness about being a geek really robbed me of experiencing some truly legendary adventures with a great guy. Maybe it's kind of paltry, but I like to think that when I put myself out there on a limb openly indulging my geek nature by doing things like going to conventions or unapologetically confessing my love of D&D, I'm at least doing right by his legacy.
(Note: I originally planned to do this as one post, but I have decided to break it up into a series of posts leading up to my impression of 5th ed)
Today is the day that the D&D Next playtest comes out. Despite every fiber in my body protesting this, I am excited. Why do I have such reservations? Because being let down by D&D has been a trend in my life. It's like Jagermeister. On the one hand, Jagermeister is brought out only when it is party time, so it's good and brings out good memories. Unfortunately, it's appearance can also often be traced back to when the party went seriously downhill and you had to spend the night emptying the contents of your stomach. That's what a new edition of D&D is like. You yell out in an intoxicated cheer every time it's brought out and end it feeling sorry for yourself on the bathroom floor. Sad.
..... no comment
My first disappointment with D&D actually came before I even played a game. I remember being just crazy excited about the D&D cartoon. Yeah, almost all of the magic weapon powers sucked and the episodes were mind numbingly bad, but that ranger bow rocked! (the shield was also pretty cool, but who wanted to be that whiny guy?) It's almost exclusively the reason I bothered learning how to shoot a bow. Throw in some confusing pre-adolescent feelings about the chick with the invisibility cloak and the acrobat that made a staff... become longer... and I was there every Saturday morning.
WTF D&D?!?
Unfortunately, there was never any closure. The kids, transported to this magical dimension and tormented by Vengar and Tiamat, never found their way home. THERE WAS NO FINAL EPISODE! It was planned. They just decided to not make it! For a while the script of the final episode was floating around the internet. There was no internet back then, though. Just one Saturday you woke up, D&D is not in the rotation, and you were left feeling confused. There is a guy starting a Kickstarter project to do the final episode. I'm not a fan of his animation style, but I suppose half a loaf is better than the dark empty hole in my childhood.
Honestly, this cartoon is kind of what's lacking for Wizards of the Coast. I don't know if I would have bought that Red Box set if I hadn't already been intrigued by the cartoon. Getting it to fly in this day and age would be tough. Cartoons were allowed to be more violent back then and even by the standards of the 80's it was singled out as being too violent. A way to get kids into the game that doesn't dumb down the game is sorely needed. Just make sure it has an ending!
Sigh. Even if it means including a stupid unicorn in the party...
Once upon a time... Is a game Hydee and I own. It's a story game where you create fairy tales based on the cards you have, trying to force the ending to the one you want. A friend of ours from France introduced it to us years ago and it took forever to find. Even specialty game stores didn't cary it, so we had to order it online. And today I saw it in Powells. In fact, most bookstores these days have layouts like this:
These aren't crap games either. These are games I would have specialty ordered in years past.
I plan to talk a lot about games and gaming on this thing and one thing that has caught me by surprise is the rise of board games. Board games were a relic of an age without computers. You either had boring abstract "classic" games like parchesee or you had gmicky remakes such as Lord of the Rings Monopoly. Gameplay wasn't innovative, but instead laid out like a formula by the men at Parker Brothers.
Then one day, everything is upside down. Who saw that coming? I remember playing Settlers of Catan years ago and thinking "Wow, this is like Monopoly, except fun!" I'll let the trailer from the documentary "Going Cardboard" say it better than I could, but rest assured, I will be back to this topic.
Thankfully this movie is amazing! I got to see it this weekend with H, my dad, and my stepmom who all enjoyed it as much as I did! Co-written, produced, and directed by Joss Whedon, this is the type of windfall success that geeks sorely needed. The failure of this would have doomed all of us to another decade of Hollywood feeling they could only trust their franchises to skeezy, frat boy Michael Bay clones and his style of low plot, low dialogue, low character development, high explosion, and hyper macho movie making.
Actual picture of Mr. Bay. If I have a daughter, she has permission to pepper spray men like this before they even talk to her. Or if they enter the same room as her.
The real hero of the movie!
Joss Whedon is loved by all geeks but has never really had box office success. Usually his shows and movies are unappreciated in their time, do not reach high numbers of sales, and really only hit their stride as cult classics. Buffy has been the one exception to this. However, there is only so long a person can coast on one hit and numerous unprofitable cult successes before Hollywood stops giving you opportunities. Just ask Terry Gilliam.
Hopefully the massive success of The Avengers will help us see an uptick in Whedonesque style movies!
I couldn't tell you when exactly I began loving Futurama, but it is one of my passions in life. I remember watching it back when it first came out mostly because it was on before The Simpsons and was made by the same guy. The Simpsons was starting to suck at that point as Homer made the slow transition from lovable moronic oaf to sociopathic lunatic.
How... lovable...
However, Futurama is a more acquired taste. I remember not really "getting" the show until the episode "A Big Ball of Garbage". Then it was renewed, but FOX bounced it around the schedule so it was too hard to follow. One week it was on at 8pm on Thursday, and then the next week, same time, same channel, I'd turn on the TV and be greeted by Calista Flockhart's duckface as they decided to show an Ally McBeal rerun.
All glory to Futurama.
I tried my best to follow the show, but I'd already been burned by Firefly being cancelled and could not devote myself to another show. Oh, and I suppose was massively depressed, addicted to MMORPGS, and living in a spare room of my mom's home. It's probably not a coincidence that Futurama was there when I turned my life around, though. In 2003 I went to grad school, had a studio apartment with a TV, and evening classes. I would come home from classes and watch Adult Swim. This block featured bizarre anime, Family Guy, and Futurama. I'm one of those guys that falls asleep with the TV on so I would usually fall asleep to Adult Swim. You could make an argument that I only like Futurama due to subliminal influence, but I don't really like Family Guy (though I did grow to love Cowboy Bebop and FLCL).
Erwin Shrodinger: Evil Genius
So what is it about Futurama that now makes it the show I watch pretty much every night as I drift off to sleep? I'd say that except for a dip in form during early season six and "Bender's Game", they don't go for the low hanging fruit. They pass on the simple, obvious joke and try harder or at least they usually make the writers work hard to bring in that simple joke. They're also not afraid to assume their audience has a brain. For example, in "Law and Oracle" we have a scene involving Schrodinger's Cat, Lorentz Invariance, refracting combined with Andy Warhol style portratits, Tron, and then they wind it all down with Fry getting attacked by Shrodinger's cat. How do you even pitch a joke like that?
I think being a newborn is like this. Life is blurry and unfocused and then suddenly... CLEAR VISION POWER! Or she's just flailing around then suddenly... SUPER GRIPPING POWER! Eventually these just become part of her life and are no big deal, but that first time is a big Keanu Reeves style "Whoa".
