Review: Futurama ‘Saturday Morning Funpit’

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Its Saturday Morning and Nixon wants some cartoons. Eventually, a mob shows up of whom is all against cartoons to which Nixon has to call Hollywood about to get the fuckers off his yard.The mob returns complaining of violence… Nixon decides to put out a PSA to teach us all a lesson.

Bendy Boo and the Mystery Crew

Bender is Scooby, Fry is Shaggy, Hermes is Fred, Leela is Daphne, and Amy is Velma. The crew listen closely and hear a scary audience recorded laugh track, and eventually meet up with George Takei. Turns out someone built a basketball arena and its affecting George’s business. To help, the crew heads over to the Professor’s cloning room where we find the Harlem Globetrotters acting like a bunch of assholes. That said, one of them throws a switch, and low and behold…LARRY BIRD! He CRUSHES a one-liner, but before you know it the clone machine creates more Larry Birds. But, the gang needs to gather a bunch of clues to a question no one really asked and as a result Zoidberg’s head gets removed. We find out that there’s been a dragon ghost flying all over the place and George Takei has been in it the entire time. The Globetrotters make it to the game and guess who they have to beat??? SIX LARRY BIRDS!

Purpleberry Pond

Purpleberry Pond is a hell hole of a city made of purple fruit and people singing all about eating healthy. Eventually, Lord Loquat shows up and right away some of the town don’t like him, but eventually they sing a song and warm up to him. The Berry Burglar wants to shit on everyone’s parade and he shoots a blast of sugar at Purpleberry Pond. At the end of the day the whole sketch is just one long commercial for a fake cereal.

G.I. ZAPP

G.I. Zapp leads a bunch of mercs to defend us all with violence. Of course the angry mob ruins the sketch, but we get to see the crew head on over to the Professor’s evil army. The Zapp crew takes care of business, but there are casualties.

Our Take

This week’s episode follows the format of a Viewer Mail from Family Guy or Treehouse of Horror from The Simpsons in that the writers get to have some fun and come up with some sketches. In this case, Futurama takes on 80s cartoons. The best one by far was Bendy Boo mainly because Larry Bird comes in and clears house like he used to. Purpleberry Pond had the novel concept of how kids cartoons just sold sugar, and G.I. Zapp was all about Superjail violence. I actually thought the last bit would have been better without the Nixon voice over, and Purpleberry hit it over the head one too many times, but overall you can go ahead and open this shit up.