You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
TV series Futurama

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
It’s the late 90’s – “from the creator of The Simpsons” is still a huge selling point.

It appears to be Futurama month here on the Avocado, so I figured, let’s do an Ad Space looking at how the show’s premiere was originally promoted in back in the far-off future year of 1999!

They took an interesting approach to advertising a new series, as there’s no effort made to tell you what the premise of the show will be beyond “comedy set in the future”, or who any of the characters are beyond “dopey generic guy” and “robot”. Instead, they basically just play a single scene from the pilot episode.

But, y’know, they picked a damn good scene for this! Not only because it’s funny, but because, in just a handful of seconds, it covers the different ways that Futurama will be funny. There’s “dum-dum does dumb deeds” humor, with our lead accidentally requesting a slow and horrible death. There’s the humor of being hyperbolically cynical – not only does this society have suicide booths, but have “slow and horrible” as an option. There’s physical humor as the our characters dodge a bunch of deadly whirling instruments in an enclosed space. There’s humor from characters treating a horrible/ridiculous situation like it’s mundane (“Kill me already! By the way, my name’s Bender.”) And then there’s humor born from pure absurdity, with the cheery voiced suicide booth informing you that “You are now dead.”

If you’re gonna pick just thirty seconds from the pilot episode to embody what the show will be, then they picked the right thirty seconds.