The employees of Planet Express have more wacky adventures and even stop to deliver the occasional package.

CRITIQUE

Many people have a reason for hating the execs at Fox. A lot of people were mad when Family Guy got canned (whereas I was mad when it came back). Arrested Development fans still cry about what was done to their baby. So many people bemoan the treatment of Firefly you have to wonder why the ratings were so low. My beef with the network is over its handling of Futurama.

All the programmers had to do was stick it on after The Simpsons and leave it alone. But they instead shuffled its timeslot and/or preempted it whenever football coverage ran long. Why should viewers bother to tune in when there was a less than 50/50 chance the show would even be on?

After its unceremonious cancellation back in 2003 (which was referenced in the opening of the initial run’s final episode), Futurama returned for a series of direct-to-video features beginning in 2007. These movies were later aired by Comedy Central, split into four episodes each. I was happy to have the show back, but I was disappointed by the movies. The writing was both rusty and padded; you could tell the writers had been away from the material for some time, and going from telling a single story in thirty minutes to telling one in ninety or so led to a lot of fat and clunk, as the plots often played like shorter episodes that had been awkwardly stretched to fill a longer slot (which became even more noticeable when they were broken up).

I was also happy when it was announced Comedy Central had decided to order another season of the show, but I was also a little worried. Would this be a return to the heights of the original series (once it hit its creative stride--which didn’t take long--Futurama was one of the best shows running), or would it be the middling mediocrity of the movies? It ended up being neither, really, instead resting somewhere in between.

Although they ordered a 26-episode season, the folks at Comedy Central chose to break the run into two mini-seasons, broadcasting the first batch in 2010 and the remainder in 2011. The ones presented on this set are the 2011 episodes, and for the most part they’re quite good. Although one episode comes close (more on that in a minute), you won’t find anything that equals such series highpoints as “Roswell That Ends Well,” “Jurassic Bark,” or “Amazon Women in the Mood” (my personal favorite), but they’re still damned funny. The writers still have some kinks to work out as far as plots and the mechanics of plots go (plots with two storylines don’t dovetail as smoothly as they should, for example), but they’ve got the characters down, and nailing the characters makes it easier for the jokes to flow.

That helps make something like “Benderama” work. Using another of Professor Farnsworth’s seemingly useless inventions (it’s designed to shrink sweaters), Bender begins creating clones of himself. Each clone is smaller than its source, so eventually the clones are impossible to see with the naked eye. Disposable matter is required to fuel the cloning process, so the clones begin eating anything they can get their mouths on.

All of this leads to some wackiness with the world’s supply of alcohol (as robots run on alcohol), and it all comes together with the story of an ugly giant (voiced by Patton Oswalt) who’d earlier taken offense at being mocked by the Planet Express crew, who’d come to his cave to deliver some acne medicine. It’s more than a little awkward when the giant returns to the story, and the outcome is a bit contrived, but the jokes and one-liners involving the Bender clones come so fast and furious that the wonky structure of the plot is easy to ignore.

The standout installment here--and the only episode that comes close to equaling the magic of the old days--is the finale (although it wasn’t intended to be the season finale), “Reincarnation.” It’s comprised of three loosely linked stories, each told in a different visual style. The first adopts the look of a carton from the ‘30s, sort of a mix between early Disney and an old Fleischer short. The characters are gangly, the moon and Planet Express building both have faces, the sound effects are quaint, everyone speaks in nonsensical slang, the music is bouncy, and the characters and backgrounds bounce along to the rhythm of the music.

The middle story is rendered in the style of an 8-bit video game, everything created with a small number of pixels, the music and sound effects cheaply programmed. The settings are flat, and the action generally scrolls from side to side (which leads to a great joke when Bender tries to exit a room). The final segment is an anime homage, designed to play as if the team responsible for translating it into English had no clue what the original show was about. You get giant robots, stiff line readings, clunky dialogue, and a dance-off finale. The creators even went so far as to acquire bits of music from Voltron, Robotech, and Battle of the Planets, which only adds to the fun.

The only real clunker among the bunch is “Yo Leela Leela,” in which Leela accidentally creates a popular kids’ television series (loosely based on her misadventures with her coworkers) and ends up going all Hollywood, becoming a ruthless exec and forgetting about her friends. It’s not funny, and the particulars of the plot make it seem more Family Matters than Futurama. The show often has something to say (one episode here, “The Tip of the Zoidberg,” works some poignant themes into its story), but the message is usually handled in a subtle manner. That’s not the case with this episode, where you instead get beat over the head with it.

It still has a ways to go, but these episodes (and the ones that make up the first half of the season) make it clear that the show is finding its footing. Comedy Central has ordered another 26 episodes (to be broadcast in 2012 and 2013), and I’m hoping the momentum doesn’t wane.

THE VIDEO

The episodes are presented in their original 1.78:1 ratio; the thirteen episodes have been encoded at 1080p with AVC and spread across two 50GB discs. The show made the switch to a wider aspect ratio for the first of the direct-to-disc movies, and this was the first season to be given a first-run high-def broadcast.

We don’t get the HD broadcast out here in the sticks, so I was forced to watch the episodes in standard-def. I don’t know how much of an improvement this Blu-ray presentation is over the high-def airings, but I do know that it makes the standard-def version look pitiful by comparison. The opening credits wow, and what follows looks great. Colors pop; the CG augments (which are less frequent here, a consequence of the reduced budget) often look fantastic. As is often the case with traditional cel animation, some aliasing crops up in the line work.

THE AUDIO

The only audio option is a series of DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 tracks. The show doesn’t have the most active sound mix, unsurprisingly favoring the front channels but throwing in some nice surround action every once in a while. Dialogue sounds very good (and weighty); there’s also some nice reinforcement from the low end. The best thing about the lossless encode is the chance to hear the occasional subtlety woven into the mix; there are little effects in the finale (great care was taken to replicate the various sonic qualities of each segment’s influences) that weren’t all that apparent during the original broadcast.

English SDH, French, and Spanish subtitles are available.

THE EXTRAS

Falling in line with past sets, here you get a commentary on every episode. It’s sort of a rotating lineup (series creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen appear in every installment, and they’re joined by various writers, directors, and members of the cast), but the results are always the same: there’s some production info, more than a few jokes, and everyone talks over one another.

All of the following are presented in high-def:

Deleted scenes (15 minutes) from several episodes have been compiled. All are just gags that had to be cut for time or were chopped because they didn’t work. Depending on at which point they were cut, these are presented as either fully rendered animation or rough animatics.

Professor Farnsworth’s Science of a Scene (17 minutes) focuses on each stage in the creation of a scene from this season’s penultimate episode, in turn providing an overview of how each episode is created.

Reincarnation Explained! (7 minutes) is a chat with Peter Avanzino, director of the season finale, who discusses the enormous amount of work that went into creating the episode’s stylized segments.

Futurama F.A.Q. (Frequently Axed Questions) (11 minutes) gives the show’s creators an opportunity to answer various questions (which are read by John DiMaggio in his Bender voice) that have been sent in by fans.

FINAL THOUGHTS