I miss the What If Machine.
In “Anthology of Interest I” and “Anthology of Interest II”, it was the catalyst for some wonderfully absurd takes on the three-short-out-of-continuity-stories format that Futurama inherited from The Simpsons. Yet, while the Comedy Central and Hulu revivals have made these three-shorts episodes an annual affair, they’ve done so without the What If Machine … much to their detriment.
The genius of the What If Machine was that it provided a framing device to connect the three shorts, making them feel not so terribly random, yet it was also such a broad concept, it allowed the shorts to be about pretty much anything. What if Bender was a giant? What if Leela went on a killing spree? What if Fry never came to the future but was abducted by a cadre of nerd icons?
Those stories have nothing to do with each other – they don’t even use the What If concept in the same way: one starts with everything normal before making any changes, another explores the ramifications of changing one thing in the past, and another just goes full alternate reality and says Bender was always the Iron Giant. Yet they fit comfortably within the same episode, because they’re all framed in the context of the characters spitballing What If ideas.
But we don’t have the What If Machine anymore. Instead, the show makes its three-short episodes feel cohesive by building the shorts around a common premise: holiday stories that end in Armageddon, nature documentary spoofs about animals humping, everyone being sapient toys for some reason … or, in the case of this week’s episode, riffing on classic children’s mystery books. And I don’t think that approach works nearly as well.
One obvious problem is the lack of variety, and the need to come up with a premise strong enough to sustain three seven minute shorts, not just one. Like, remember the part of “Anthology of Interest II” where the world becomes like a video game? As a single short, it’s dynamite, full of terrific gags. But if they’d built the whole episode around video game plots, with one story about Pac Man, another about Space Invaders, and another about … I dunno, Donkey Kong? I doubt it would be nearly as good – instead of fitting all their best video game jokes into seven minutes, they’d be spreading those jokes out across the whole episode, and filling the remaining time with other video game jokes that weren’t good enough to make the cut for the original short.
That’s what most three-shorts episodes feel like since the revival. There are funny moments in “The Futurama Mystery Liberry” (I’m particularly fond of Amy as Tomboyish Friend Andy), but there are a lot of other moments that don’t do much for me. And I can’t help wishing they’d condensed all their best ideas for kid detective spoofs into a single short, and then done something else in the remaining two.
But even aside from that, there’s another problem with this format. In most of these three-shorts episodes, the characters we know, that we tune in for each week, are effectively gone – replaced by new characters who, while they have the same voice actors, and bear some vestigial resemblance to our regular crew, are fundamentally different people.
In small doses, that can be fine – I think the time the main cast were all changed into Wizard of Oz characters was aces. But, again, the loose confines of the What If premise meant the other two stories in that episode didn’t have to do the same sort of thing – those stories kept the main characters recognizably themselves, leaving the Wizard of Oz stuff as brief journey into something completely different.
But when you build the whole episode around these sorts of everyone-is-someone-else spoofs, it can wear out its welcome. It can even feel a bit alienating, seeing these long running characters reduced to, essentially, a coat of paint slapped onto whatever they’re spoofing now.
The only three-shorts episode to avoid these problems in the post-Fox era is “Reincarnation”. Rather than changing the characters into something else, it has the Planet Express crew be the same people they’ve always been, getting into the same hijinks they always get into, just filtered through different genres of animation. And because animation is such a broad field, they’re able to make the shorts quite distinct from each other: rubber hose animation, 80’s computer games, and poorly-dubbed old-school anime all bring very different vibes and sources of humor.
Same can’t be said for “The Futurama Mystery Liberry”. It’s everything I’ve come to expect from revival era three-shorts: occasionally amusing, mostly mediocre. Not as dire as “The Prince and the Product” or “The Futurama Holiday Spectacular”, but a little short of “Saturday Morning Fun Pit” or “Naturama”.
One more episode left in the season folks – and so far, the season ain’t been great. There’s been one episode I really liked, a few more I thought were decent, and about half that earned a resounding “meh”. They really need a home run next week if they wanna keep their averages up.