There could also be no notion within the Futurama fandom extra cursed than, “Possibly the community censors had been proper.”
Futurama’s struggles with its personal channel are an enormous a part of the present’s historical past. After overcoming two cancellations and leaping platforms as many instances, there’s a wholesome quantity of acrimony amongst Futurama followers towards Fox and Comedy Central for his or her roles in stalling the sequence and threatening the way forward for the longer term. Regardless of networks taking pictures Matt Groening and his workforce down repeatedly over the near-quarter century of the present’s existence, Futurama retains discovering a solution to come again even stronger — besides, perhaps, for the latest Hulu revival which feels extra like a slowly paced victory lap than a brand new period of the sequence.
So, when a fan within the Futurama subreddit discovered {that a} joke from the present’s second season had been modified within the subsequent reruns and streams, the preliminary response was outrage earlier than some followers realized that, really, the censored model of the joke works even higher than the unique. For over a decade, when Bender positioned a severed arm below the profession chip scanner on the cryogenics lab in “The Cryonic Girl,” his occupation learn, “Prime Minister of Norway.” When Norway suffered a pair of lethal terrorist assaults by a far-right extremist in 2011, Comedy Central determined to make a change.
In “The Cryonic Girl,” Fry, Leela and Bender are all fired from Planet Categorical after Fry and Bender go on a disastrous joyride with the ship utilizing keys swiped from an inattentive Leela. Leela means that she and Fry use the outdated profession chips that designated their respective occupations earlier than they joined Planet Categorical to get their outdated jobs again, bringing Leela again to Utilized Cryogenics with Fry and Bender in tow for some purpose. There, it’s revealed that Leela unintentionally switched her and Fry’s palm implants and that Leela is the one one who received’t be working on the cryogenics lab, and Bender pulls out the important limb on the middle of a censorship incident.
It’s eminently comprehensible why, with protection of the phobia assaults that killed 77 folks dominating TV information on the time, Comedy Central executives in 2011 determined that reruns of the Futurama episode didn’t want to incorporate the implication of the Prime Minister of Norway’s dismemberment when the terrorist who perpetrated the assaults focused the precise Prime Minister with a automotive bomb. And, many followers realized, altering the joke from a “lol so random” punchline to a bit that’s relevant to the state of affairs really improved the scene.
“given the severed arm, i believe the brand new joke performs higher than the unique,” one commenter wrote of the change to “Chainsaw Juggler.” Others disagreed, stating that, after the change, the salute Fry and Bender’s new boss offers Bender doesn’t make sense — however, actually, neither did Bender having a random politician’s severed arm in his chest compartment. And, on the finish of the day, neither a chief minister nor a chainsaw juggler have any extra enterprise working at a cryogenics lab than somebody with expertise working at a cryogenics lab, so Bender touchdown the job over Leela remains to be equally nonsensical.
Principally, in a future the place nothing is smart, it’s higher to be foolish than it’s to be unintentionally offensive. No should be up in arms about it.
