A Man. And His Blog.

The second season of FOX's animation comedy started airing late 1999 and finished airing late 2000

Matt Groening’s second season of the 31st century sci-fi sitcom “Futurama” maintained the high scripting standards of the first and also well brought improved digital animation. Couch potato Fry now seems thoroughly reconciled to his new existence, transported 10 centuries hence to “New New York” and working for Professor Farnsworth’s delivery service “Planet Express”. He’s surrounded by a cast of freaks, including the bitchy and cute Amy, with whom he has a romantic brush, and Hermes, the West Indian bureaucrat. Most sympathetic is the one-eyed Leela – like Lisa Simpson, she is brilliant but unappreciated; she finds solace in her pet Nibbler, a tiny creature with a voracious, carnivorous appetite. By contrast, Bender, the robot, is programmed with every human vice, a sort of metal Homer Simpson with a malevolent streak.
In one of the best episodes, Bender is given a “feelings” chip in order to empathize with Leela after he flushes Nibbler down the toilet. Elsewhere, Fry falls in love with a mermaid when the team discover the lost city of Atlanta, Fry and Bender end up going to war after they join the army to get a discount on gum, and John Goodman guest stars as Santa Claus, an eight-foot gun-toting robot. Brimful with blink-and-you’ll-miss-them hip jokes (such as the sign for the Taco Bellevue hospital) and political and pop satire, Futurama isn’t a stern warning of things to come but rather, as the makers put it, “a brilliant, hilarious reflection of our own materially (ridiculously) overdeveloped but morally underdeveloped society.”

Episode 01: I Second That Emotion
It was a good season premiere, but it could have been a bit more funnier though. I liked how Bender reacted to Leela’s feelings, especially when they were in the sewer system, before the mutants were discovered. And anything after that was actually really funny. The mutants’ city, the large toilet and a sub-sewer system with sub-mutants – hilarious. But the humor is a different one than during the later seasons.
The story itself was alright. Nibbler gets lost, Bender is in rage after he doesn’t get the attention from his friends, and Leela is way too emotional. On a side note there are really alligators in the sewer system, as well as some mutant cities… Okay, the episode was pretty much uninteresting and not surprising, and I kinda was annoyed about “Bender didn’t learn a lesson from me, but I did from him” (though it was just the first part of a gag).
Some few gags: The virgin thing and the mutants having looked at Zapp’s website; Fry burning his hand, Bender’s two arms at the monster, the left one signaling the right one and the right one hitting him – hilarious. 7/10

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FOX's animated series premiered way back when ... in midseason 1999.

Set in the year 3000, Futurama is the acme of sci-fi animated sitcom from Simpsons creator Matt Groening. While not as universally popular as The Simpsons, Futurama is equally hip and hilarious, thanks to its zippy lateral-thinking contemporary pop cultural references, celebrity appearances, and Bender, a distinctly Homer Simpson-esque robot. Part of Futurama’s charm is that with decades of sci-fi junk behind us, we’ve effectively been living with the distant future for years and can now have fun with it. Hence, the series stylishly jumbles motifs ranging from Lost in Space-style kitsch to the grim dystopia of Blade Runner. It also bridges the gap between the impossible dreams of your average science fiction fan and the slobbish reality of their comic reading, TV-watching existence. Groening himself distinguishes his two series thus: “The Simpsons is fictional. Futurama is real.”

The opening season sees nerdy pizza delivery boy Fry transferred to the 31st century in a cryogenic mishap. There, he meets the beautiful, one-eyed Leela and the incorrigible alcoholic robot Bender. The three of them join Fry’s great (great, great, etc.) nephew Professor Farnsworth and work in his intergalactic delivery service. Hyper-real yet strangely recognizable situations ensue: Fry discovers he’s a billionaire thanks to 1,000 years’ accrued interest, Leela must fend off the attentions of Captain Kirk-like Lothario Zapp Brannigan, and Fry accidentally drinks the ruler of a strange planet of liquid beings.

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