Futurama Vol.6 (Blu-Ray) - Bluray Reviews

Format: AC-3, DTS Surround Sound, Subtitled, Widescreen
Language: English
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish
Region: Region A/1 (Read more about DVD/Blu-ray formats.)
Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1
Number of discs: 2
Rated: Unrated
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Bluray Release Date: December 20, 2011

Episodes: 101 - 114
Run Time: 337 minutes

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Futurama Vol.6 (Blu-Ray)

I was one of those people that gave Futurama short shrift during it’s initial run. I think I may have watched only three episodes. Those episodes weren’t enough to win me over -- there’s so much more I could be doing with my precious entertainment time. It didn’t strike the same chord that The Simpsons consistently managed to, especially in the first decade. And maybe the humor just wasn’t delivered fast enough. Since I stopped watching the show was cancelled and

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revived, then switched networks, so fans must have this Futurama thing figured out. There must be something here that I missed out on.

The biggest difference with my past experience with Futurama is the animation. It’s not hand-drawn, it’s all done with computers. there’s this exactness of it that feels somewhat antiseptic. It’s almost too clean. But it’s an easy thing to

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get used to plus it seems to free up creators to imagine episodes like “Benderama” that features Bender being able to replicate smaller versions of himself, right down to the size of atoms. With traditional animation methods I imagine that an episode like this would have been nearly impossible to pull off.

But as I’ve come to discover, the animation, just like with The Simpsons, is the secondary draw here. It’s all about the humor! There are some sight gags that made me smile: spotting the tail section of Oceanic flight 816 in a cloud of space debris in “Mobius Dick” or Bender’s “special robot vision” to see inside packages which means his eyes telescope and poke into the package or the ode to the Police Academy movies in “Law and Orcale” but the real strength is the dialogue.

In one of the Behind the Scenes features it becomes evident that one of the reasons for this, beyond the writing, is that actors record dialogue together. It just sounds more natural when it all comes together. Comedy is all about timing and this seems to grow organically from having the actors sit in the same room.

I also really liked the fact that even with 13 short episodes it felt like the characters had grown. The relationship between Leela and Fry, the history between Professor Farnsworth and Zoidberg, and especially Bender, who gets a couple of episodes to really flesh out his character. I started to like these characters.

What really made me appreciate the combination of the acting, writing, and design is that it’s a multi-stage process that takes upwards of a year or more from start to finish! How these episodes come together as well as they do speaks volumes to the talent and skill of the people involved.

With so much horror and strife in the world, laughs can be in short supply so the $30 MSRP seems a paltry amount for the number of laughs to be had with this set.

- Aaron Simmer

(February 20, 2012)