Futurama loves but is not particularly good at anthology episodes. Don’t get me wrong, the two “Anthology of Interest” episodes from the show’s original run are great, and I do quite like “Reincarnation” from the end of season six as well. But during the Comedy Central run, the show took a real gimmick-heavy approach to this type of episode, to diminishing returns. “Saturday Morning Fun Pit” is worse than “Naturama” which was worse than “The Futurama Holiday Spectacular”. It was when these episodes came around that I most felt like the show was running out of ideas, or else needed an episode of filler for the production order. And “The Prince and the Product” unfortunately continues that trend.
Written by series veteran Eric Kaplan, apparently with his son Ari John Kaplan, this episode re-imagines your Futurama cast favourites as generic variations of well-known children’s toys: wind-up Lego-like figures, Hot Wheels cars, and rubber ducks and eggs. However, before we get into these, we need to address the nonsensical framing device, which is completely divorced from the mini-stories and has absolutely no thematic tie-in to product placement. It’s also pretty bad on its own, functioning initially as a misdirect as to what the episode will be about. The Planet Express makes a delivery to the never-before-mentioned Prince of Space, who puts a love spell on Leela while the King disapproves, and through some weird nobility Fry ends up challenging the King to a duel on behalf of Leela’s apparent desire to marry the prince. Ultimately, Leela fights the duel in Fry’s place, accidentally killing the Prince, who secretly fought in the King’s place, and everything is resolved. The plot is broken up by “commercials” where the other stories play out, but it must be noted just how bizarre these stretches of the episode are and how badly it integrates with the main gimmick. Even if you take it as pure silliness, like an anthology segment itself, it’s still really shabby writing, with little care taken towards characters or jokes or the basic premise itself. Everything that happens is pure lazy convenience and it serves no point other than to fill out time.
And it’s not surprising this show needed time to fill out, as there’s barely enough material in the product stories to last the six to seven minutes they do. The first, a Wind-O story, is the most confused, playing out some meagre fear of death theme as Fry faces an impending demise related to cold circuits from the freezing tube; he’s saved by Bender but Bender then dies and experiences reincarnation. All the while beyond a couple sight gags, not much is made of their construction –and certainly the animation isn’t anything interesting. In fact, nothing experimental is done with the animation through any of these –which is part of the fun when a cartoon commits to a bit like this.
So the second story’s creativity is limited to just designing the characters off of Pixar’s Cars. Here the lack of imagination is really felt as so much is simply borrowed from stuff Futurama has done before. We already saw Bender as a car in “The Honking”, a looping Hot Wheels racetrack was already illustrated in “2-D Blacktop”, and a serial killer among the Planet Express crew had been touched upon much better in both the first “Anthology of Interest” and “Murder on the Planet Express”. There is the seed of a funny idea in casting Zoidberg as an Ed Gein-type, but in this format it’s just stale.
The last segment is the one that comes closest to working, if only for how it plays its Fry and Leela story. About half the characters are rubber ducks who on a mission of exploration meet the other characters who are eggs, and Fry the duck and Leela the egg instantly fall in love –sparking a feud between the two groups who go to war over this relationship. In the end, even Fry and Leela are dead, though they each manage to reproduce (asexually it would appear) a Fry egg and a duck Leela who go off into the sunset together. A cute resolution, though the story behind it amounts to so little.
Each sequence has maybe one or two gags that stand out or warrant a smirk, but by and large they are pretty boring. Once again I have to wonder if the show is too indebted to its old jokes –Fortune Teller robot appears again recycling dialogue beats from “The Honking” for instance. Yet what new moments of interest show up here are few and far between. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of heart put into anything on this episode –the Kaplans and the writing staff seemingly have as much enthusiasm as Jon Vitti did on The Simpsons when assigned to write clip shows. It’s just altogether bland. We’re almost at the end of this first chunk of season eight, and an episode like “The Prince and the Product” really highlights its deficiencies and a consistent trend towards the general mediocrity The Simpsons has been ensconced in the last twenty-two years. I don’t want that for Futurama and I hope that next week’s season finale can restore my faith.
Now for some stray observations:
- Oh, how I wish based off the title the episode could have been a satire of commercialism rather than a cheeky tribute to it.
- Speaking of which, I could believe the whole frame story was reverse-engineered from that title, which isn’t even a very good one to begin with.
- I don’t know if I’d been distracted before and didn’t notice or it was just a weird thing with this episode in particular, but in various places Fry’s voice sounded older and heavier to me. I know that some voice actors as they get older can have difficulty maintaining certain character voices -I’ve only recently noticed how different Julie Kavner’s current Marge Simpson voice is to what it was in the 90s. But Billy West hasn’t had this difficulty before -though granted Fry is one of his few remaining young characters.
- Why did the music in the first segment sound so much like the theme from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?
- So the duck army was clearly led by Zapp and Kif, but who was the guy leading the egg army? You think they’d put a recurring character in that role, but I have no idea who that helmeted guy is.
- “Wind-Os: Roughly a Minute of Fun” is one of the few good jokes I’ll grant this episode.
- On the other hand, Bender crying “I can’t look” while covering his eyes, then saying “oh now I can” when he moves his hands away, is a shockingly, impressively lazy joke that the writer ought to have their comedy licence revoked for. Also, I don’t know that an episode has had a lamer final gag than Leela substituting “magic spell” for “science spell” on the Professor’s insistence. No effort whatsoever.
- Let it be borne in mind that Eric Kaplan’s previous Futurama credits include “Hell is Other Robots”, “Parasites Lost”, and “Jurassic Bark”. Damn! Since leaving Futurama, he’s written for The Big Bang Theory, which is as good a scapegoat as any for this episode.
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