Dammit! Halfway through, and I accidentally hit the tab and clicked the submit button! I figured I hit stop in time.
Could any passing mod do me a favor and kill that post?
Since you axed nicely, maybe you’ll get it for Ecksmas.
I agree with everything you said.
I loved early Simpson’s (Let us say first 8 years) and I loved Futurama. (The Star Trek Episode and Blurnsball was as funny as the best Simpsons episodes)
I like South Park and some episodes are brilliant. (“Lemiwinks” and “The Return of the Lord of the Rings” as examples or “Simpsons did it”)
No Family Guy show was a great show. They have funny skits and funny jokes but no great shows.
Jim
In order to get all the references on a typical Family Guy episode, you have to have watched a lot of television between 1975 and 1995.
In order to get all the references on a typical Futurama episode, you have to have been a serious computer/sci-fi geek.
I qualify on both counts, but Futurama is simply more intellectually challenging.
You really think so? Maybe I’m a bigger geek than I figured, then, because either a lot of references sailed over my head without my even noticing, or else I must have understood them and just didn’t even think about what a geek I was to recognize them.
Futurama is fine the way it is.
I dunno, given that censors on AS have cut out things like, “Great zombi Jesus!” and Fox censors are notoriously fickle (see the Wish Upon a Weinstein episode of Family Guy) and I doubt that Groening would seriously entertain the idea of a Fry/Leela/Amy threeway scene.
How’s’about "'CHR$(77)=>“many things she gave me” ?
It’s the geek equivalent of “Sneed’s Feed and Seed”.
Little help: Hellzapoppin’
Much of the sensibility of Warner Brothers’ cartoons was borrowed from Hellzapoppin’. (1941)
A typical example of the sort of absurdist humour that drives Hellzapoppin’:
Periodically, the action is interrupted by a uniformed messenger coming through the scene, pulling a potted plant, holding a waybill, and plaintively calling, “Mrs. Jones? Mrs. Jones!” Everyone watches without comment as he passes through, and then resumes whatever they were doing. With each appearance, the plant is bigger, until finally it’s the size of a giant redwood, and the messenger is riding on top of it.
The stage play it was loosely based on featured a Yiddish Adolph Hitler as an opener.
I don’t get it - character 77 is “M”, right? I don’t remember ever seeing that anyway. So at this point, we can assume that I’m not a geek, but simply so out of it that I missed most of what was going on in each episode.
I have seen every episode several times, incidentally.
Nonsense.
Futurama had a four season run, which is two or three seasons longer than most shows run. No other network would have EVER put Futurama on the air… or The Simpsons, or Famly Guy. Without FOX, you would never have seen a single episode of any of those programs.
It certainly helps, but the references come from all of pop culture, as they do in Simpson, Family Guy and South Park. Just for example, the “Fry and the Slurm Factory” episode was fantastic, and made of references from beginning to end, but darned if I can think of any that were science/sci-fi specific.
On the other hand, anyone who can’t appreciate the “horse wins by a quantum finish” joke will not be enjoying Futurama to its fullest.
Wooo!
I win X-Mas!
And that is why you fail.
Wow, you never got exposed to that trope in song or sampler form?
You could argue that the Uncertainty Principle isn’t even in the domain of geekdom anymore – it’s practically popular culture. Even Six Feet Under did an extended riff on it, without feeling any need for exposition.
I think the real “geek” jokes are things like Bender’s “6502” brain. If that means a damned thing to you, it’s a safe bet you’re a double-dipped geek. 
That’s from the Fry and the Slurm Factory episode, by the way.
Fry: Maybe Slurm is made out of… people!
Leela: They already have that. It’s called Soylent Cola.
Fry: Really? How’s it taste?
Leela: It varies from person to person.
Of course, that’s been used so often, it’s probably become mainstream. A joke unquestionably in the realm of geekdom is when the F-Ray (which Bender and Fry would later use to find the winning bottle cap) reveals that Bender’s brain is a 6502 chip, the same as in the Commodore 64.
Huh. I see Larry Mudd is my cowboy-hat counterpart.
Or that Bender and Flexo’s serial numbers are both expressable as the sum of two cubes. (They are. I figured it out (after a long time.))
How about beer that comes in Klein bottles? (Zero fl. oz.!)
Old Fortran Malt Whiskey!
An alien language that was really just a monoalphabetic substitution for English plaintext, which when it proved to easy to crack, was replaced by a modular sum cipher?
A “quantum finish” ruined because the judges observed it!
A plausible explanation for faster-than-light travel, which it turns out really isn’t.
A robot planet named Capek.
It goes on and on. Futurama is the shizzle fo’ rizzle.
[QUOTE=friedo]
Or that Bender and Flexo’s serial numbers are both expressable as the sum of two cubes. (They are. I figured it out (after a long time.))
How about beer that comes in Klein bottles? (Zero fl. oz.!)
Old Fortran Malt Whiskey! …snip…
[QUOTE]
I missed some of these and I am a computer geek. The Chip I knew, Old Fortran of course and Capek etc. But what is a Klein bottle and why 0 oz?
I came up with this from Wiki
and Get an ACME KLEIN BOTTLE
So never mind the what, but even a Klein bottle would hold liquid.