Oi oi oi… how y’all doing? One of the features we like to have on the site is Episode Recaps of the newest Simpsons episodes. Of course with all the holiday goodness, we’ve fallen a little behind and I aim to fix that over the next week or so. You can see previous recaps here. Keeping with our goal to catch up, here’s a recap for Season 26, Episode 6: “Simpsorama”. I know some people prefer to watch these on their own so only click more if you don’t mind SPOILERS. I know everyone can’t watch them so sometimes reading them can be a nice replacement. Also fun to see what others took away from an episode. I read a bunch every week honestly.
So as a fan of both The Simpsons and Futurama, I have to preface all this by saying you really should just watch the episode. It’s worth the 22 minutes or so of your life but if you really want to see my recap, read on… I wrote this one in complete stream of consciousness style without pausing. The only tweaks I made were to typos so this recap is very raw and might show how “sane” I truly am lol.
– Gotta love the Hedonismbot from Futurama in the couch gag
– Each student has been assigned the mandatory honor of contributing to the Springfield Time capsule where their “icona” will be held until the 31st Century… a pic of Nelson’s dad, lucky rabbit’s foot, video of Milhouse being humiliated and a snot sandwich from Bart
– A thousand years in the future, they expect the Mayor to be a cockroach and they put the capsule in the ground with Burns’ ooze for those lucky future people to find
– Even God hates jazz… poor Lisa
– A mysterious electrical storm happens in town and Bender appears in the Simpsons basement
– Bart: “Remember when this country didn’t suck? Cuz I don’t.”
– All great art is kind of a mirror according to Homer… I agree
– They catch Bender with a “barted” trap. Of course he’s more interested in Homer’s beer stash… “Don’t touch my loved ones!” lol… oooh… tetherboy
– Homer and Bart go off to drink at Moe’s… they take electronic hyper-credits and Bender had a fling with the jukebox… he hates it when they get quiet
– Bender bowls in a Pin Pals uniform complete with monogrammed name
– It’s like the guy who designed Bender just took a drawing of Homer and stuck an antennae on it
– Lisa takes Bender to Frink to prove he’s from the future… the delicate unplug and replug procedure reminds Bender of his mission programming… to kill Homer Simpson. Aaaaah… a boxing glove!
Commercial
– Bender can’t kill Homer because they bowled together. Bender’s bottom projects Leela showing creatures Homer begat out of control in New, New York. Fry and Professor Farnsworth and Hermes and Zoidberg all appear too. Leela, Fry and the Professor use Bender to teleport to Springfield to do the task Bender couldn’t.
– While Frink and the Professor figure out a solution to the mutant rabbits in the future… the others are tasked to find out why anyone would ever pay for freemum games? Ya gotta love Homer’s explanation and blush a little as a TSTO player…
“Ok… it starts free, right? Theeeen… you visit your friends game and he’s got this awesome candy mansion… and you’re like 99 cents, you bet I’d like one… AND that’s why I owe Clash of Candies $20,000.”
– This is all said as Leela, Fry, Bender and Homer walk through Springfield. They meet Marge and both her and Leela have an awkward moment not mentioning eyes and blue hair.
– So… the Futurama folks arrived by teleporting through a singularity that was quantum entangled to Bender in the guise of fixing his collar. Time machines are physical impossibilities unless they’re used by Bender to arrive in Springfield.
– The fix to the rabbits is to kill someone else… this time Marge… wait… no… just all her children or the one who sired the killer rabbits. And just in time we see the mutant rabbits metamorphose to green Bart hellions that spit his old catchphrases. He’s doing the same jokes a thousand years later. Aye Carumba!
– So the rabbits happened because of Bart’s spit sandwich in the time capsule. The rabbit’s foot, phlegm and nuclear ooze created the mutants. “Let this be a lesson. Never throw meaningless crap in a time capsule.”
– The solution is now digging up the time capsule. Willy delays the dig and Scruffy and Amy appear just in time for The Simpsons and Futurama peeps to all be sucked into the future sans Bender and Maggie who go betting on horse races
– In the future…EPCOT Center is a work farm for the weak but not as crowded as the slave labor camps at Universal Studios
Commercial
– The eBook of Mormon and mass killings of Bart mutants by Homer strangulation
– Bart’s birthday is February 23rd
– Marge needs to go home even if motherly love was outlawed in the future
– The Atheists prayer… too funny
– The final answer to the mutants is to round them up with Lisa manipulation and shoot them into space like they do the losers of the Super Bowl
– Ooooh… Hypnotoad!
– Chief Wiggum’s uniform is the only clothes that fit him
– The round-up is great… Butterfingers with fingers layed on them and Lisa playing saxamaphone future-style
– They round all the mutants into Madison Cube Gardens and shoot them into space
– The family returns back to the past via Bender portal and Marge is reunited with Maggie.
– Bender turns himself off to await the thousand years to the future. Too cute that Homer takes him a beer in the basement.
Commercial
– One last segment with mutant Barts on Omicron Persii 8… King Lirr and his wife are besot by the mutants but Lirr finds them delicious. We learn Kang and Kodos’ last name is Johnson and they are both female?
– And one last futurama segment sung by Homer.. really great… Lard Lad, Blinky, Comic Book Guy, a floating Jebediah Springfield statue, Ralph Wiggum’s headstone and headless Scruffy with an El Barto tag in the background.
THE END… LOVE THIS EPISODE… TTFN… Wookiee out!
P.S. Dear Matt Groening and animators and anyone with the power to do this… PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BRING BACK FUTURAMA!
Von meinem iPad gesendet
>
so much better (IMHO) than the family guy crossover (although both were good). So glad they did it.
My question now is, will the Futurama voice actors earn more residuals from the (dwindling) Futurama repeats or from this one Simpsons appearance? 😉
Me thinks the repeats since I still see them regularly on Comedy Central. I just hope they get lots because they earned it with all the laughs.
The first thing that strikes me is that you have 3… THREE… ad breaks! What? In a 22 minute show? I thought we had it bad. Just the one ad break here – after about 7 minutes or so – presumably where your first one is.
listen to the season 1 audio commentaries on Simpson DVDs & they comment about how much longer the shows were back then.
The ad breaks have basically stayed the same it’s just there’s more ads that have to be squeezed in. Sadly, it’s just the way things are right now…
Noooooo, it ended so well, leave Futurama alone now!
What I would like them to do is make an extended version of this episode which, as I knew it would, was way too short thus making it feel too rushed (and this sentence is way too long, I should end it right now, that is after this last part which was pointless).
Even, sorry to say, Family Guy knows that special episodes need to be longer to make them special.
see, I felt that the family guy crossover felt too long…
I have a love/hate feeling about how Seth can convince the network to have extended episodes on the first run (repeats of Stewie & Brian in the bank, etc are regular length on later viewings). I love that he gets them to adjust the time yet I hate that he seems to be the only one capable of doing it. Why Simpsons doesn’t get the same respect I have no idea.
Do you seriously have to endure 3 commercial breaks during one 22 minute episode? In the UK we have one break in the middle.
At least 3…
And reruns gave reached implosion status. I watched a Friends rerun recently that was changed from a half hour to an hour. That sounds good, until you see that the commercial breaks were between 7 and eight minutes long and the ep was so cut up that I had no idea what was going on. When you added all the scraps together the run time of the actual aired ep was about 9 minutes. Is this the future of all rerun shows? We’re heading there…
It gets worse….
I learned as an intern on The Simpsons & working in the industry since that once the series hits syndication (repeats during the day on Fox or FXX) then they speed up the episode by 10%. All to fit even more ads!
That’s AFTER it gets cut down so those 2 second establishing shots are now 1:15 or something like that & some of your favorite throw away gags that don’t impact the plot are mysteriously missing.
It happens to every show. Very rarely do they take the time & money to go into ProTools & fix the pitch of the voice so that it’s not changed by the speed up. There’s a story about when they brought back Scooby Doo there was a (heated?) debate between Frank Welker & the director about Frank doing Freddy’s voice too low or not. Come to find out the director had only seen the speed up versions of the cartoon & so he knew Freddy’s voice at a higher pitch than Frank Welker had performed it initially. Going to DVDs or YouTube kept proving the director right but Frank knew he wasn’t wrong. They had to go into the cold storage archives to find the original voice recordings to prove that the voice was indeed lower but the only version available to the general public was the syndicated speed up (& therefore higher pitched) versions.
Many TV show DVDs (especially kids shows like Disney Afternoon, Tiny Toons, etc) are the syndicated versions since they’re the most recent version available to the DVD people. So unless you have the original airing on VHS recorded from the TV or score a magical trip to the archives (& even there it’s a crap shoot), you will NEVER see the original uncut, uncensored, unsped up version of these shows again. Your kids will never see what you saw (at least in the US. sometimes you can get ahold of an overseas dubbed version & you’re good).
Thank God that the Simpsons DVDs go back to the original 1st time airing version!
Have all the winners been notified yet? I haven’t seen a new email in my inbox, hint hint wink wink lol 🙂
lol no we just pulled them. We’ve got to put everything together for the post and then they’ll be notified 🙂
The episode was great considering the amount of time they had to work with. It would have been nice if it was an hour long, but you knew that Fox probably would not allow it.
As much as I miss Futurama though, IMO, its had its time. Unless Fox were to bring it back (which probably won’t ever happen), it wouldn’t last very long again on another network. Looking at the big picture — It was on for 10 seasons. Very respectful despite all the years of it getting jerked around. It was a great blast of nostalgia and I’m glad both shows were able to come together.
I miss Futurama too! Would have liked a episode tie-in beside the mutant rabbit. Like an actual beloved character from the show.
I loved this episode, if I have one thing to complain about it would be that they could have made it an hour long, like the family guy crossover.