In The Asphalt Jungle , everybody is corrupt except for the criminals. They are at least honest about what they are and what they want, and have a nobility to them that the cops and seemingly upstanding figures in their orbit don’t. John Huston began his career with The Maltese Falcon , one of the essential film noirs -but it is not until this movie nearly a decade later that he carves out a more complex image of the cops and robbers dynamic that made film noir an interesting genre to contend with. These are not shifty, unsettling figures like Sidney Greenstreet or Edward G. Robinson. They are more nuanced and motivated and in their way more moral. They are the ones with families -or in the case of Sterling Hayden’s Dix, a committed girlfriend. While the indebted, incompetent lawyer weaseling in on their scheme ignores his ill wife for a creepy affair with a much younger woman. It was a touch contentious in 1950. Louis B. Mayer, whose studio produced the picture, vehemently disliked it...
In 2014, a year after Futurama ’s second cancellation at Comedy Central, Matt Groening’s other show The Simpsons extended an olive branch with a crossover episode called “Simpsorama” -it wasn’t particularly good but it allowed the Futurama characters one more appearance on TV before presumably fading away. Of course, nine years later it got to come back again on Hulu, and now Futurama is in the position to return the favour to Disenchantment , another Groening show that was canceled by Netflix in 2023. It is fitting, Disenchantment shared a lot of the same writers and voice actors as Futurama , and as a medieval fantasy series functioned as something of a genre counterpart show. So “A New New York Yankee in King Elfo’s Court” doesn’t feel as out-of-place as “Simpsorama” (or the even worse Simpsons - Family Guy crossover); the pitch of both shows is hit quite well. They are still contrasts, but contrasts that gel together amicably. It begins in the (relatively) ordinary world of F...