Well, there’s some unfortunate timing on this episode’s part. Or maybe on my part because Hulu dropped it a few weeks back despite being out of order and I haven’t watched it until now. Either way it’s weird at this moment to be seeing a caricature of Dolly Parton in a Futurama episode. Perhaps that’s not exactly what Idabelle Sue is meant as, but Tress Macneille is very clearly doing a Dolly Parton impression for her generic sultry southerner voice. It’s a connection hard to miss and it is a little distracting -though that is of course not any fault of the episode “Catfish Hunter”, which is rather good otherwise. An episode about scams and catfishing, naturally it is a Bender show. It also naturally begins with unfortunately an instance of elder abuse. Bender takes Fry to visit his Abuelatron (as seen in “The One Amigo” ) who has left Mexico and moved into a nearby retirement home called Rusty Acres where Bender has made a point to see her once a year. Against the snapshot of her dour...
I and other critics like to bemoan movies that operate on pure nostalgia. But I get it, the comfort of the past is so alluring that it is easy to want to escape into -hence why it feels like such a lazy device in movies. The 2020s are awash in nostalgia in a cynical effort to cash in on fond memories and youthful feelings, and while it’s never been as prolific a characteristic it is not without some precedent. Previous decades and other generations had their own nostalgia-bait though it took on different forms and wasn’t entirely tied to pop culture. Still, it was driven by that same sensation. In the 1970s, perhaps the best nostalgia picture was George Lucas’s American Graffiti with its image of carefree California youths in the early 1960s pre-Vietnam. But an equally popular one was Summer of ‘42 . Summer of ‘42 is an interesting nostalgia film though because its nostalgia is melancholy in nature. It is reflective of a period of youth marked by innocence but also the loss of it, fe...