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Talking Futurama - The Route of All Evil (Patreon)

Published:
2021-12-13 05:42:23
Edited:
2021-12-13 05:52:37
Imported:
2026-06
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Note to listeners: The original post for this episode was experiencing some technical difficulties and had to be deleted. You're now looking at the repost. Thanks for your patience!

Our last Talking Futurama podcast of 2021 features the return of a character nobody likes, starring in an episode unceremoniously kicked from production season three to broadcast season five. Yes, the hated Cubert Farnsworth is back, and Hermes now mysteriously has a son who's been away at boarding school? It's a rare low moment in Futurama's Fox run; one that proves this workplace sitcom about alcoholic robots has no room for Rugrats-style antics. Listen in and learn why this episode doesn't really work, as well as too many facts about the drinking of beer!

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Comments

mavrick

still waiting for the mom-cast

PurpleComet

For some reason my podcast feed has the audio for Insane in the Mainframe episode

Boyd Adkins IV

Resident "guy with dreads" here and you guys are correct about not easily untwisting them. While there are a few ways dreads can interlock if done correct they cannot just be rustled in and out. Hehehe

Declan Kennedy

Bob is right, I turned 40 this year in lockdown and I haven't put my slippers away yet

Justen Brown

Some insider paperboy chat: I can’t imagine a scenario where kids delivering papers was ever feasible. I worked as a delivery driver for the local press. Tomorrow’s paper was sent to the printer that afternoon and the finished papers assembled by midnight. The drivers (me) would load a truck about 3/4 for distributors and 1/4 for stores. The distributors would gather around drop sites (usually grocery stores) and they’re the ones who put papers in mailboxes. The pay was surprisingly decent, $15 an hour in 2011 money to drive a truck, and being a night gig it was perfect for community college student. I went through the entirety of Retronauts’ 1UP backlog doing that job. Almost everyone who handled a newspaper was some form of retired, veteran, or stay at home parent that could work midnight to 6 from their car. The stereotype of the paperboy is a kid on a bike but you get your newspaper before you even wake up and no bike can hold the 6+ bundles of papers on the average route.

Sarah

Philo Quartz shows up as an adult in A Flintstones Christmas Carol and you see that he’s grown up to be a cop.

Bradford A Barker

I was already digging the 7^11 beer talk, then the nerd stuff started. "Old Fortran": Fortran is still used in many, many scientific software codebases to this day. There are extremely recent versions of the language, but in my experience Fortran90 is still the standard, 30 years out. It is much more "scientist-friendly" than C++, for instance. The name comes from something like, "Formula Translator," after all. And there's this quote: "I don't know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran.” —Tony Hoare, winner of the 1980 Turing Award, in 1982. Klein bottle: The 3D analog of a Moebius strip. Here's a great, short video on how it's made, starting from a square, with conditions on how the ends join together: https://youtu.be/yaeyNjUPVqs . I couldn't find a video I recall watching about how to think of it in four dimensions, but maybe that was just me after some Old Fortran. "St. Pauli's": The joke was definitely for the physics bachelor's to appreciate, but the interesting thing is that it gives us the structure of the periodic table, and, in a much more complicated sense, the microscopic picture of contact forces (why atoms don't just move past each other like Kitty Pryde, since they are mostly empty space). The proof of the "spin-statistics theorem", which is behind the Exclusion Principle, is something that apparently Pauli accomplished with tremendous effort, and everyone appreciates and just goes along with.

Graeme Black Robinson

I had a paper route in the early aughts. I think I was 12 at the time. I went around the neighborhood with a wagon full of papers. Riding a bike was pretty much out of the question, since the papers were stuffed with fliers for the local grocery stores and Canadian Tire. The night before delivery a big pile of newspapers and an even bigger pile of fliers were dropped off at the end of the driveway and it was my responsibility to put one of every flier into each paper before delivery. To be honest, this was the main part of the job, certainly the most time consuming. Even then it was clear to me that I was more of an ad delivery boy than a paper boy. Anyway, as you guys say, this is basically the nadir of early Futurama. Looking forward to the upcoming Paper Girls TV show for a much better hybrid of paper delivery and sci-fi!

SilkiePJ

Having been a Homebrewer now for 7 years, I always had a fondness for the subplot of this episode. And going back to it, I'm surprised they actually got a few things about homebrewing accurately. 1. Homebrewing kits at home are typically done in 5 gallon batches, which Bender's beer ends up slightly above. Though 5 gallons of beer tends to be around 48 12 oz bottles of beer, or about 2 cases. So depending on how much everyone is drinking, they'll certainly last a week. 2. The label on BenderBrau says it is a "Cold Fusion Steam Beer." Steam beer refers to the style known as "California Common" most often associated with Anchor Brewing Company which uses lager yeast at higher temperatures normally used for ales. So when Bender says if it could be an "Lager or Ale", a California Common could fit the definition of both. However, because the beer accurately ferments within 2-3 weeks, that's more similar to an ale. 3. Also while Bender burps as a way to simulate baby kicking, when beer is fermenting it does have to release C02 through an airlock so it doesn't explode. Homebrewing is an expensive hobby, it takes around 200 dollars to start and can easily climb up in price with speciality ingredients and all kinds of gear. It's a fun creative scientific way to explore new kinds of flavors with a fun community, however it's dwindled a fair amount during COVID times because restrictions on gatherings AND every small brewery I knew was at risk of closing so they were begging for business. Not to mention it is very easy to screw up beer and have it taste wrong (metallic is an off-flavor!) so it is very high risk, high reward. I'm with Bob/Henry, there's so much great beer out there that's easy to get that's not a huge increase in price, but it can be a fun artform to nerd out about.

hrhomer

Re newspaper delivery : I'm about a decade older than Bob and Henry, born in '73. I can say for certain that where I was born, Trenton NJ, the vast bulk of papers were delivered by adults. I worked at a 7-11 from 1990 to 1996, part time in high school and college, then full time after I dropped out in 1993. I worked with a very cool old (to me at the time, her mid-50s was old) lady named Anita. She worked the 3 PM to 11 PM shift 5 days a week, often with me, then 7 days a week, 365 days a year, my entire tenure there, delivered papers in the morning. She delivered a THOUSAND papers a day, and, IIRC, made a dollar per paper per week, plus tips. Not as much as it seems as a contractor, paying for massive amounts of gas and maintenance. For the last few years I worked there, I did Graveyard, 11 PM to 7 AM. She'd come in around 2-3 AM to shoot the breeze and snort coke to stay awake. We partied a lot, I stuck to weed, however. Fun lady. She wasn't the only adult paper person. She used to wait for papers to come off the presses with a few dozen other adults with cars, ready to deliver. Her hands were always black with ink, and she had rubber bands around her wrists all the time.

To Boldly Joe... Moore

The amount of times I find myself quoting "No I'm doesn't" is quite frankly ridiculous. ^_^

Dylan

Lemon Spindrift, lime Bubly and blueberry pom Aha

Nathanial Miller

Lol i'm listening to retronauts and there was an ad for the federalist podcast

Kyle Orland

I have to quibble a bit with your suggestion that a "death of newspapers" joke would have made sense to be written in 2000. In fact, US newspaper advertising revenue peaked in 2001 (in inflation adjusted terms) before starting a precipitous slide that would take out 3/4s of that annual revenue by 2014 (see https://slate.com/business/2014/04/decline-of-newspapers-hits-a-milestone-print-revenue-is-lowest-since-1950.html). Online newspaper ads made up only a small sliver of that difference. Daily US newspaper circulation peaked a few years earlier but didn't begin to really crater in real terms until the late aughts (https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/6/14/75-years-of-us-advertising). I have this information perpetually at the top of my mind because that peak in 2001 was the very year I started taking journalism classes in college. Back then print newspapers were still seen as the paragon of the form and "online journalism" at my school was a single elective course where the instructor barely knew HTML. I could see the beginnings of the changes coming via the rise of the Internet (and Craigslist) even at that point, but for the news industry and the general public in 2000 it seemed like newspapers were at the height of their influence and money-making potential.

Adam W

Further paper boy comment Comment I had a paper route. when I was 10 years old. In 2007 delivering papers was decidedly not a kid’s job anymore. But I really wanted to have money of my own, and probably got the idea from cartoons that this was the only job I could have at my age. So I talked about wanting a paper route for months, and eventually my mom found one with a lesser local paper. I delivered a little over 250 papers across several neighborhoods. It was one of the large routes that this paper had on offer. The papers arrived on Thursday morning. I’d wake up two hours early to fold the papers up and shove them in little plastic bags. After school my mom would drive me around in her minivan and I’d toss the papers from the window. There would be a few subdivisions where I’d get out of the car with the papers in a tote and take them up to people’s front doors. There was never a bike involved because parts of the route were separated by highway. I made a little under 75 bucks a month. And when you consider the gas my mom’s 1999 Plymouth Voyager burned through, the profit margin was pretty low. Luck for me, my mom was nice enough to let me keep the money. I quit after about a year and bought a laptop. Which I had to share with my siblings. But looking back, when I consider what my mom put into this, that seems fair enough. I really hope paper deliverers are paid better these days, because at this point there’s no way there’s any kids left doing this.

Bennett Billard

I'm surprised no one has done a Futurama mod for Paperboy based on this ep.

Drew Waranis

C'mon guys, at least feign interest in the math, physics, and topology j̴o̴k̴e̴s̴ references.

Drew Frisbie

In my hometown it’s been the same crazy cat lady delivering papers on foot for years I don’t think I’ve ever seen a kid do it

Matthew Salisbury

I don’t know if it has been specifically stated, but the blobs in this episode seem like an homage to space mutants from The Simpsons.

Joe Hodgson

I might be in the minority when it comes to this episode. Not in the sense that I think it's good, it is quite likely the worst of the Fox era, but I like the more infantile approach taken with Cubert. Yes, it doesn't really mesh with him being a genius, but maybe having his mind blown at the end of his debut episode caused him to pull a 180 in his attitude. It strikes me as similar to when The Simpsons portrays Lisa as more of a kid at times which I'm always onboard for or when the kids of South Park get to behave like actual kids rather than sociopathic adults.

Sabrina

I only watch Futurama to keep up with the podcast, so this episode is as far as I am in the series but… I really liked this episode. It’s one of my favorites so far. It’s also the only one I’ve watched twice (although I did rewind Zapp singing “Leela” several times). I just think it’s really cute. However, I understand that most people don’t watch Futurama for cuteness!

RyoGeo

I LOVE Futurama now, but when it was originally broadcast, and fox made it so hard to find, I just wasn’t regular. When I finally saw this episode, I just ended up thinking, “Well, I guess this show just isn’t for me.” I didn’t hate this episode, I just … didn’t think it was funny. All I could think was, why are they doing kids? Kids don’t even belong in this show except as some kind of Tiny Tim pinch line. Glad they got past these characters.

Deadlockoriginalfilms

It really is sad that the Simpsons can't make jokes about Disney plus. I remember one of my favorite jokes from a later Simpsons episode was Homer responding to Ads in before a movie by saying " if I wanted to pay money to watch ads I would subscribe to Hulu Plus", which was directly making fun of the service that was hosting Simpsons episodes of the time