I am pleased to remind everyone that Matt Groening's witty, erudite futuristic Futurama has a new DVD movie out, the first of four feature-length installments. Bender's Big Score has reunited the original team to bring this very fine series back from the dead.
Al Gore first appeared on Futurama in an episode that aired while the 2000 election results were in dispute. Leading the Vice Presidential Action Rangers, a crack team of top nerds including Stephen Hawking, Nichelle Nichols (Uhura from Star Trek), Gary Gygax (creator of Dungeons and Dragons), and intern Deep Blue (the chess playing computer), Gore has an exchange that I quote regularly:
Fry: "Who are you people?"
Al Gore: "I'm Al Gore. And these are my vice presidential action rangers, A group of top-nerds whose sole duty is to prevent disruptions in the space-time continuum."
Fry: "I thought your sole duty was to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate."
Al Gore: "That, and protect the space-time continuum. Read the Constitution!"
Gore has also appeared in an episode about global warming, portions of which were used in An Inconvenient Truth. I love the fake educational film they created, showing the the solution to global warming as dropping progressively larger ice cubes in the ocean, "Thus solving the problem ONCE AND FOR ALL!" (In this episode, Gore (or rather, his animated head in a jar) utters the famous line, "I have ridden the mighty moon worm!")
Gore's daughter Kristin was a writer and story editor for the show.
After 4 quite excellent seasons, Futurama was cancelled by Fox. Strong DVD sales and recurring fan interest enabled this new deal to go forward. In addition to the 4 DVD movies, the stories will be recut and aired as half hour episodes on Comedy Central (not Adult Swim where the old episodes are currently rerun daily). Futurama is full of the best writing that the best Simpsons episodes had, with mathematical and literary and historical references everywhere.
Bender: Hey, brobot, what's your serial number?
Flexo: 3370318.
Bender: No way! Mine's 2716057!
[Bender and Flexo laugh. Fry starts to, and then ...]
Fry: I don't get it.
Bender: We're both expressible as the sum of two cubes!
In this movie, the secret to time travel is found tattooed on Fry's butt ("It had to be somewhere.") and despite warnings of certain doom, a set of spam-sending villians download a virus into Bender and force him to use the time bubble to loot Earth's past for treasure. The Harlem Globetrotters return with their supernatural mathematics skills to help Professor Farnsworth work out why this can happen without paradox, but discover a Doom Coefficient that increases the Doom Level with every use.
Special features on the DVD include a math lecture by a professor who routinely uses material from Futurama and The Simpsons in her lectures, and commentary from Al Gore on the made-for-You Tube Futurama promo for An Inconvenient Truth.
If you enjoy Futurama, laugh at Bender calling you a chump for buying the DVD and buy it anyway, so that we'll have more episodes to come.