- Futurama, Complete Series. As vast and hilarious as the universe itself, behold the utterly complete collection of FUTURAMA, the gravity-defying, Emmy Award-winning animated series from The Simpsons creator Matt Groening.
- After Planet Express ship is scrapped, professor saves it from the junkyard and rebuilds it into a super racer. But an accident during a race sends the ship into a two-dimensional universe. Fry and Leela's Big Fling.
- Add to that Futurama's stunning animation, and sharply subversive storylines that use the classic sci-fi method of lampooning real life in the guise of a future society. Fry, Leela, and the relentlessly hysterical Bender were fully developed in the first season and are further solidified here.
Futurama was also a very precisely written show and this episode, where everyone on Earth got a tax rebate for $300, shows how. All of the independent character strands come together perfectly in. Futurama: Created by David X. Cohen, Matt Groening. With Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Tress MacNeille. Fry, a pizza delivery boy, is accidentally frozen in 1999 and thawed out on New Year's Eve 2999.
The second show from the creator of The Simpsons was never given a real shot to shine.
Matt Groening became a true force in television animation after creating The Simpsons, which has aired an astonishing 600-plus episodes on Fox since premiering 30 years ago in 1989. With The Simpsons being a cultural phenomenon in every sense of the word, Fox began to express interest in a new show from Groening during the 1990s. Groening came back to Fox with the show that would eventually become Futurama, and while the series garnered a cult following over time, Fox didn't give it a fair shake on the small screen.
According to Groening, Fox seemingly never really wanted Futurama to succeed. The network moved the show around from time slot to time slot, then let it die a quiet death in 2003 before it was eventually revived by Comedy Central a few years later. Futurama was canceled at Fox because the network spent years — essentially from before the show even hit television sets — walking it down the road to the chopping block.
Fox and Groening butted heads over Futurama from the very beginning. During an interview with Mother Jones, Groening was asked about working in Hollywood (i.e., working with Fox). He had some not-so-great things to say: 'You can't believe what babies people are. It's really like being in junior high school.' Groening even said that Fox executives weren't fans of The Simpsons either, revealing, 'You can't expect people to behave in their own best interest. It's in Fox's best interest for this show to be a success, but they'd rather mess with the show and have them fail, than allow creators independence and let them succeed ... They don't like The Simpsons at Fox.'
When Futurama was originally coming down the pike, Groening wanted Futurama to air at 8:30 PM on Sundays, directly after The Simpsons (and ahead of The X-Files)in order to give the show the best chance to find a large audience. This seemed like a no-brainer — but Fox disagreed, for whatever reason, choosing instead to show only two episodes of Futurama in the Sunday night lineup before moving the seriesto a 'possibly deadly' Tuesday night time slot. By the time the second season of Futurama came around, Fox moved the show back to the 8:30 PM Sunday spot in which the first two episodes aired. Then, in a move that alienated audiences further, Fox shifted the show again in the middle of the season — this time bumping it up to 7:00 PM on Sunday.
You'd be forgiven for thinking Fox would've figured out this method of scheduling was doing nothing but hurting the show's prospects by the time the final season was airing on the network, but Futurama still had an unpredictable, erratic airing schedule up until its last episode on the network. Irregularly timed sporting events, which were a huge money-maker for Fox, made it even harder to anticipate when Futurama would air each week. This up-and-down scheduling had a majorly disappointing consequence: Fox held on to episodes of Futuramamade for the third and fourth seasons and reserved them for a fifth season... that didn't end up airing on the network.
Fox never formally canceled Futurama — not in the way that television series are usually axed nowadays. The network simply stopped purchasing new episodes of Futurama, and the series went out of production ahead of the fall 2003 broadcast season. Six years later, Comedy Central picked up Futurama. The series lasted seven years on the network before it ended in 2013.
In a 2003 interview, Groening offered his candid thoughts on the situation: 'The people at Fox didn't ever support the show and it wasn't to their taste and, in my opinion, they're out of their minds. But they don't like The Simpsons either. The idea of a TV show that they haven't gotten their greasy fingers all over creatively drives them nuts. That's why almost everything else is so lousy ... We won the Emmy for best animated show and I didn't even get a begrudging phone call from anyone at Fox. That's a dark company that they can't even make a fake phone call.' Ouch. Tell them how you really feel, Matt.
Ultimately, Groening got the last laugh. The Simpsons continues to run to this day, and his show at Netflix, Disenchantment, scored a second and third season in late 2018.
Disney+ was always going to be a massively successful streaming service, but when the House of Mouse acquired the film and television assets of 21st Century Fox in 2019, it became apparent that its catalog would soon be a thing of wonder. Even without said Fox properties, the draw of Disney+ was multi-pronged: the voluminous Disney catalog, all of Pixar's acclaimed films, nearly every Star Wars movie, and the near entirety of the Marvel Cinematic Universe were at the fingertips of subscribers from launch day. (Oh yeah, and some great National Geographic content, too; you'll forgive us for that oversight.)
While the rollout of the gargantuan Fox library has taken place slowly, the crown jewel of that library has been available on Disney+ from day one: every episode of every non-current season of The Simpsons, the longest-running primetime television series in history and the definition of a cultural touchstone. One slight kerfuffle over the aspect ratio of older episodes notwithstanding, the availability of The Simpsons on Disney+ has proved to be a significant pull — but it has also raised a question that fans of creator Matt Groening's other iconic series would like answered.
That question, of course, is: where the heck is Futurama?
While it may not have run for quite as long as The Simpsons (which is expected to begin airing its 32nd season this fall), Futurama has a legion fans who will go to bat for its superiority over the adventures of Homer, Bart, Marge, Lisa, and Maggie in nearly every respect: its whip-smart writing, its wonderfully developed characters, the sheer inventiveness of its storylines. Since Futurama was also produced by Fox, Disney now owns every episode — and yet, the series hasn't made an appearance on the Mouse House's streamer. What gives?
Futurama doesn't quite fit the family-friendly aesthetic of Disney+
While the reasons for Futurama's absence from Disney+ haven't been made public, we're pretty sure we can guess a major one: Disney+ has modeled itself as a family-friendly streaming destination, and Futurama doesn't always fit that bill. In addition to its sometimes weighty themes, the show was known to feature some decidedly, shall we say, adult situations and humor.
As pointed out by ScreenRant, the same can be said for other Fox-produced series such as American Dad!, Family Guy, and The Cleveland Show, none of which have shown up on Disney+. One could certainly make the argument that The Simpsons isn't exactly free of raunchy and ribald humor, but another could make a (far more effective) case that the show is one of the most popular of any genre in history, that its nearly 700 episodes serve to bolster the volume of the Disney+ library, and that failing to include it after spending over $71 billion to acquire Fox would have been ridiculous.
It's also safe to assume, though, that ol' Mickey won't simply let those other adult-oriented animated series sit on a shelf. Shortly after acquiring Fox, Disney spent an additional $27.5 billion to acquire full operational control of Hulu (via CNN), which — until the debut of Disney+ — had long been the chief competitor of that ubiquitous giant of streaming, Netflix. It stands to reason that this was at least partially done so that the not-so-kid-friendly assets of the Fox library could also find a streaming home, without the necessity for any third-party partnerships potentially gumming up the works.
Is Futurama on Hulu?
This obviously raises another question, but we won't keep you in suspense. Yes, all 10 seasons of Futurama are currently available for streaming on Hulu — along with 14 seasons of American Dad!, all four seasons of The Cleveland Show, and 18 seasons of Family Guy. Sure, it would be nice to have all of those iconic Fox animated series in one place — but, in case you're not aware, Disney+ offers a bundle with (ad-supported) Hulu and ESPN+ for a pretty darn reasonable price.
Futurama Memes
Disney's strategy for parsing out all of its various properties among its streaming platforms is likely just beginning to take shape, and it's even conceivable that Disney+ might someday feature separate sections for kids and adults, or implement parental controls to keep the eyes of young ones away from the more adult-oriented content (like Netflix has done). For now, though, Hulu is your destination for all non-Simpsons Fox animated series — including Futurama, one of the funniest, smartest, most heartfelt, flat-out best television comedies of all time. If you'll excuse us, we're going to fire up Hulu and start watching it from the beginning again.
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