Talking Futurama - A Flight to Remember
Added 2018-05-11 07:00:01 +0000 UTCIt's the year 1999, and there's never been a better time for a Titanic parody! And Futurama does just that in what's technically the season two premiere as the Galaxy Express crew boards a ship with the same name as the one that sunk in that famous movie. (And presumably in real life.) Along the way, we see Fry try to put Three's Company problem-solving skills into action, learn about Hermes' tragic limbo back story, and see Bender realize that true love is shareware. Dip your bare fingers into your favorite kind of bisque and get ready for this week's episode!
Comments
I love it.
Anita
2018-05-21 13:17:28 +0000 UTCMy line of the episode is, "But she saved our lives. Without her, we're light enough to get away." It's so subtle, I love it.
Chris (eazeapeazea) Lavorgna
2018-05-19 21:22:45 +0000 UTCI very much remember the nude scene from Titanic. What 14 year old wouldn't who never expected to see full-frontal in a PG-13 film? I remember being at a Circuit City (RIP) not long after the home video release and the store display for some televisions was playing this film. While my mom was off looking at something else, I fast-forwarded the film to the nude part expecting it to be edited and lo and behold it was not. So I did the only reasonably thing I could do - I paused it and walked away. I probably walked away cackling maniacally like Professor Chaos for exposing the patrons of the store to the luridness of Kate Winslett's boobies.
Joe Hodgson
2018-05-17 19:56:59 +0000 UTCIf you haven’t yet, watch the alternate ending to Titanic. “That really sucks, lady!”
Brian Rude
2018-05-16 03:35:52 +0000 UTCI thought the jewel Bender is tempted to steal was supposed to be similar to the Heart of the Ocean which Billy Zane gifts to Kate Winslet in the movie. In that movie, (spoilers) she holds onto it until she's an old woman at which point she drops it in the fucking ocean! That was easily the dumbest part of the movie. She could've sold it for millions of dollars, it was a gift to her. She and her children would've lived comfortably for the rest of their lives. Argh
PurpleComet
2018-05-15 14:36:18 +0000 UTCthis is another episode, like the Mom/anchovy one, that makes me so angry. Brannigan destroys the ship and kills people for no real reason (he's bored? jealous of Fry?) but faces zero consequences. Like, not even a slap to the face.
Diamond Feit
2018-05-13 21:13:09 +0000 UTCTitanic is a movie of two halves. The first half being a terrible romantic period film with some neat special effects. The second half being an amazing visual effects tour de force. I remember when my sister rented the VHS tape we discovered that not only was it two tapes but the second tape starts right as the ship hits the iceberg. When I learned that I made a point of watching the entire second tape. To this day I’ve never seen the complete film from beginning to end though I think I’ve basically seen the whole film at this point.
Kevin Schiavoni (thepenguin55)
2018-05-13 17:27:26 +0000 UTCFYI, if you'd like another rumination on America's sexual discovery of the ass watch the beginning of Brockmire Season 2 Episode 1. Hank Azaria is great.
lego69lego
2018-05-12 23:34:33 +0000 UTCwait... the countess coughs in that scene when the family broke her fall but that's the very thing that betrayed Fry on the robot planet. this episode. i tells yuh. I still can't watch this episode.
Solomon Mars
2018-05-12 15:06:31 +0000 UTCit's okay Bob, I haven't seen Titanic either. and I feel fine. I get weird long silent stares from my cinephile girlfriend, but otherwise I feel fine.
Solomon Mars
2018-05-12 13:45:41 +0000 UTCTitanic was the source of what might be the first clever thing I ever said. I was in eighth grade at the time and it was the Big Deal Movie and it came up in conversation while we were all in class at our desks. I offhandedly joked "I still haven't seen it, don't tell me how it ends," at the exact right moment for everyone in the classroom to hear me. Exactly one person laughed and he was cracking up like a maniac and I've been chasing the high I got from that joke the rest of my life.
Matt Bixler! Hello!
2018-05-12 02:37:19 +0000 UTCI didn't get into Futurama until after it came to Adult Swim. Even by that point, I felt Titanic parodies were played to death. I don't necessarily think that hindered my enjoyment of the episode, but the screaming thought that crossed my mind the moment the name of the ship was mentioned was "really, they're doing one of these?" Its an okay episode overall. Not my favorite, not my least favorite, but just fine. I will, however, dock points from the season 6 episode "The Mutants are Revolting" for doing a Titanic theme again. Not to mention all the continuity problems it adds simply by having another vessel that shared a name with the ship.
Curtis Bostick
2018-05-11 23:20:26 +0000 UTCI've always been fascinated by the Titanic. The movie's really good, if you ignore the love story part and just focus on the action. - As for the ship itself, it's recently been discovered that actual reason the ship sank, or at least the reason the iceberg tore through its hull so easily, was because the ship was actually on fucking fire the moment it left England. There was a fire raging in the fuel room, which considering is a gigantic room designed exclusively for holding enough very flammable fuel to keep a huge ship running for several days - it's not surprising they had a hard time putting it out. It burned and burned, weakened the hull from the inside - and the iceberg just tore through it. But guess why no one's heard about this since 1912? An iceberg is an accident or even act of god. A fire is someone's fault, and costs insurance. Guess which one White Star Line went with? Here's the documentary for it, with lots of evidence including eyewitness accounts and even photographs - it's really quite fascinating - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgwHTKBdNCc." rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgwHTKBdNCc.</a>
Chris J
2018-05-11 21:31:49 +0000 UTCMatt's story about watching Titanic in school on two VHS tapes also happens to me - but I'm much younger than him so it's fucking bizarre that it did. When I was in ninth grade (fall of 2010), the ancient-ass teacher I had for French (which was also my homeroom that semester) still used a VCR in her classroom (despite every other prof using their computer hooked up to the projector to play DVDs) and would watch the randomest shit with the vaguest relation to class (i.e. we did an annual terry fox run, so we spent a week watching some terry fox movie). In our French textbook, there was one aside story about the titanic, so the next week or so of class was devoted to watch it on VHS everyday in homeroom. The teacher was perfectly fine with us seeing Kate Winslet completely nude for the painting scene, but she stood up, and fast-forwarded through the sex scene while blocking the TV, despite it having no nudity. To me, that sums up Catholic school in a nut shell.
Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag
2018-05-11 20:25:14 +0000 UTCMerlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders was the MST3K episode that didn't air until after the series finale.
Wiseblood
2018-05-11 17:20:49 +0000 UTCFYI, the chip Bender gets in season 2 is an "empathy chip", not an "emotion chip." Bender's always had emotions. What the empathy chip does is allow him to feel the emotions of someone who's on the same emotional frequenzy as the chip is tuned to.
Hjels
2018-05-11 16:17:08 +0000 UTCFeel free to shout 'NERD!' out of your car window, but I was super fascinated with the Titanic as a kid. We had the book by the scientist in question, Dr Robert Ballard, filled with the first photos of the wreckage. The disembodied doll's head on the sea floor is still the creepiest image I have ever seen. I think this episode was actually the first reference to it that I'd seen in another medium; I didn't watch the movie until much later when it appeared on TV. In case anyone thinks the band going down with the ship was just a movie reference, it did actually happen in the sinking. Given that they were trying to calm people down, though, they probably didn't play "Nearer My God To Thee". Henry's also right about the bulkheads being like an ice cube tray, but the scale of the damage was more of an issue than the design - only a warship would be built to withstand that. The bigger problem was the steel and rivets they used, which (unbeknownst to contemporary science) became super brittle in arctic temperatures, and probably buckled much easier than they should have.
Alex Bullock
2018-05-11 14:37:36 +0000 UTC
