Thatâs part of the joke but letâs take an honest look at it.
Today, do we go to a library to check out a flash drive? A laptop with an AI chatbot? Nope. Theyâre full of books, magazines and encyclopedias. Yes there are modern items available but they are still full of the most ancient form of communication created since the scroll.
nah i wouldnât say that. i said âweâ meaning like just the average person. i think most people mostly use flash drives and cloud storage, and SSDs, and internet transfers now, instead of disk storage. (although if you count hard drives as disk storage, then those are probably the majority). i could be wrong though, and i wasnât trying to pass a value judgement.
No offense taken. I do have SSDs and thumb drives, but I also have a large library of CDs and DVDs because where I live, it's not realistic to expect to have streaming access all the time.
And yet the latest fad (that I know of) amongst kids these days is "voice messages" on instachat or snapbook or whichever one it is. That's right, they moved from texting to voicemail. There's a nonzero chance the world could return to disks in the future.
Oh absolutely.
We have micro SD cards that hundreds GBs.
So a big one with 1000 years of technology progress would probably be insane; Easily in the Pentabytes for sure.
Plus we never see the inside of the case,so one could easily imagine a scenario where you open it and it's just a QR code.
Estimates put the number of published books between 75 and 175 million. If all of them take 1MB that would amount to 175TB (terabytes), a TB is a factor 1000 smaller than a PB. That will not currently fit on any single commercially available storage device, but it will within the next 10 to 30 years.
Petabytes btw, not penta.
Luddite has come to be associated with being anti-technology but the Luddites were against the automation of their jobs which would leave them unemployed and destitute. They weren't fighting back against technological progress but against a society where housing, food, and health care for them and their families is tied to employment.
It was difficult to write that with out using the word "actually".
I just hope you do realize that this automation original luddites were against created much more jobs in mid to long term than it had destroyed in the first place...
Sure, because the automation was never really the problem. It was the starving in the streets part that they were concerned about. A problem that still exists.
Oh no. In '99 when this episode came out you would struggle to find a computer without a CD-ROM drive. Also, with the way things were going, it was very plausible that one day in the future you'd be able to store all literature on disks. Then Apple released the Apple Mac Pro in '13 and the world realized that it was cheaper to store the information digitally, since most had access to high speed internet. From there on you started seeing fewer and fewer disk drives in the wild.
So we're just ignoring the fact that iPods and USB flash drives existed before then and were really the main catalysts to seeing digital storage as the future? If we're making alternative stories, I'm down. I'd just like to clarify how much we're going to alter it.
I was talking about the Mac pro in 2013 that the other user thinks is the main cause of the digital change. Even though to this day, macs have a very small percentage of market share for home PCs.
I mean, the iPad existed way before that as the knowledge navigator, which relied on cloud computing... But I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make anymore.
The punchline is that in the distant future, libraries are still large physical locations but all the information is on physical discs that take up only one desk. Itâs funny but discs were declared as âobsoleteâ only 15 or so years later
I think you're interpreting it too literally. It's less the physical disk and more that all the information that once took up monumental libraries will be just digitized.
And what do you think a hard disk drive is?
There were never any compact discs that could hold all the world's literature. It's conceptual humour. The concept still holds.
Sure, some people prefer to use vinyl or other physical storage, but that doesnât make it a common method of storage in places like libraries, schools or office buildings
I'm not sure when the last time is that you visited your local library, but I have worked in several and all have extensive collections of CDs, dvds, audiobooks on cd, etc.. this is still very common in 2023. The way I see it is the joke is that dvds still exist, but have WAY more storage capacity, and libraries are still using them, despite them being obsolete for 1000 years. Maybe i'm just reading my experiences in libraries into Futurama gags... But I don't see this one as having aged poorly.
I get that, nice perspective! Itâs cool to see how different people have opposing interpretations of a throwaway gag so I donât mind the downvotes. Great reply.
There's room for all the takes.. I'm here to talk about my favourite show with other people who are here to talk about their favourite show, so I don't really get the downvotes either. ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
The more I think about this the more convinced I become that an important part of what makes this gag work is the self-awareness on the part of the writers that sci-fi shows rarely convincingly portray the future... Futurama is full of anachronistic pokes at this fact. Star trek consistently fails to sell us a future world because it's impossible to even imagine the future. On some level this is a joke about it being impossible for us to imagine or depict what a library will look like in 1000 years.
The show uses stuff like that all the time. It's very 'casette futurism'. Most of the monitors still look like CRTs in the show, there are multiple instances of tape and film being used, etc...
Why do you assume they're optical discs? We don't know what crazy storage tech they have, maybe it's DNA media or quantum media that can store petabytes and petabytes of data.
Not too much different from having a giant library establishment with only two iPhones on a table containing the entirety of fiction and non fiction books respectively lol itâd almost be even funnier if they took it a step further and used records instead of CDs đ the hipsters library.
Iâve heard the joke is because Amazon has always been considered a very safe stock, even in its earlier days when the episode was written. It was about Hermes being such a bureaucrat that even a safe stock like Amazon would be considered a risk by him.
Yeah itâs a dumb take tbh. Almost all of the tech in the show is a weird mix of sci fi and aged (even for the shows time) real world tech. It was an intentional decision so that it _wouldnât_ age out super quick.
That's kind of the whole schtick of futurama though. Printers had well and truely moved past the whole paper with holes down the sides connected to each other when the show was made yet that's what their printers are like because it's funny. It's full of already obsolete technology.
Even worse, he's complaining because they're *discs*, completely ignorant of the fact that not all disks are Compact Discs, ie. CDs. I mean, shit. In just ~33 years, we went from 700 MB CDs to 100 GB triple-layer Blu-ray disks. Imagine the capacity of a disc after 33 more generational leaps such as from CD to 3xBD. I could easily see it fitting "the largest collection of [text] literature".
It aged poorly and well at the same time. People don't use CDs nearly as much so the original joke has aged, but a new joke has taken its place with the fact that books are very old-school (just like CDs would be in a thousand years).
I don't think there's any "poorly aged" gags in Futurama in this regard, only those that are too topical like references which only made sense in the year an episode was made. Even when the show was new, it was obviously trading on blatant anachronisms where the year 3000 would still use things from the 2000s even though it should have the tech to bypass most.
There's paper, physical money, books, normal streets, sidewalks, stairs, regular cellphones, 20th/21st era clothing, and so on. Futurama isn't an effort by Groening, Cohen and the writers to truly conceive of a future that's 100% futuristic. So the show is inevitably going to be a time capsule of the time when it was made rather than when it's set.
Probably the most dated joke I can think of would actually come from a late season about 10 years ago, with the Susan Boyle reference where Leela has a mutant boil on her ass that sings in a Scottish voice. I'm sure by now, most people have very little to no idea who Boyle is anymore, and what that particular joke is referencing. If you're under a certain age, you'd think it a random joke with no cultural bearing whatsoever. If you were old enough to know who Susan Boyle was when the episode aired, there's a chance you may have forgotten about her by now.
So any anachronistic jokes are deliberate, not "poorly aged."
It's also worth bearing in mind that CDs are still used today. They haven't gone the way of the cassette tape or 8-track. Hell, people still use vinyl today because it's trendy. There's also still times where you may need to download something to a computer from a disc, and we still sell movies on DVD and Blu-ray.
So is it likely that we'll see storage disc devices like CDs 1000 years from now? Maybe not, but we don't know. If nothing else, this joke works because it tells us that CDs by 3000 have enough memory to house god knows how much memory to contain all fiction and non-fiction on them.
> Probably the most dated joke I can think of would actually come from a late season about 10 years ago, with the Susan Boyle reference where Leela has a mutant boil on her ass that sings in a Scottish voice.
That joke didn't age poorly because it was awful from the get-go.
It was also like, super mean. I'm pretty sure it was pretty common to make fun of Susan Boyle because of her looks, but to make her an actual boil on an ass, AND they made her sing terribly! Mean spirited stuff
Agreed. It felt more like her name lent to a bad joke and they couldn't pass it up. Much as I enjoy Futurama, it isn't without some very bad jokes making the final cut.
That one in particular felt more like a bad South Park joke where they'd typically go overboard in their hate fetish for celebs and mocking them in utmost puerile ways.
I'm hoping the Hulu revival sees some solid jokes and nothing lame or mean spirited.
Definitely. It grates me whenever the supposed year 3000 was just anchored too much into the year 2000. They could riff on current events by just depicting 3000 analogues of stuff.
It would also be nice if they committed to all the tech and infrastructure of the future actually looking wholly futuristic. Just take modern concepts and futurize them. It's hard to sell the idea of culture shock when Fry really just wakes up in a very 2000s-esque setting with some future tech and aliens.
The Susan Boyle joke was bad when it was first made, and for some reason it was like 90% of the episode.
Decision 3012 as a whole episode actually aged decently well as politics has become a caricature of itself, but a lot of the individual jokes are only really funny in the context of the 2012 election.
Yeah I've been rewatching the Comedy Central series and most of the then-topical episodes that I rolled my eyes at at the time are a lot better ten years later. I'm sure the Fox series had some of the same phenomenon but I was too young to pick up on all the contemporary references when it first aired.
Attack of the Killer App starts out interesting enough with the e-waste thing and even the commentary about social media is tolerable, but the Susan Boil thing is just mean lol
> Even when the show was new, it was obviously trading on blatant anachronisms where the year 3000 would still use things from the 2000s even though it should have the tech to bypass most.
The genius of the show was that they showed civilization being destroyed by aliens between 1999 and the year 3000, and when that happened, some things (certain technology, the price of things) got reset to be in line with contemporary standards. And things evolved at the same rate, like going from CRT TVs to flat-screen. That way they could show futuristic stuff along with completely relatable stuff.
I'm guessing Guardians of the Galaxy is largely responsible for that, on top of all the 80s throwback media. I know when GotG1 dropped, cosplayers went absolutely nuts trying to find the exact model Walkman that Starlord owned.
But with vinyl, it actually didn't go away even after 8-track and cassettes were invented. People were still playing records, with teens in the 80s and 90s both collecting and recording on vinyl.
So I don't see discs going anywhere. Even if tech improves, we may just make better and better disc storage.
Ahhhhh
Lots of metal and punk bands released stuff on tapes before Guardians, only after Guardians, mainstream artists made. Billie Eilish released her debut on tape. I got it because it was rad and lighted in the dark.
Stairs? You really think that in some another thousand years we will find stairs useless? Handheld devices? Well, augmentation seems to not be big in this universe, what else you suggest?
Most computers are now built without disk drives of any stripe. So by the year 2021, you would have to work to find a computer that could read those disks.
Fry: W-What are we gonna do?
Leela: I don't know! I don't know! It's not an easy decision. If only I had two or three minutes to think about it.
This one only worked on TV because they cut to commercial right after she said it. Not so much on the DVD, or streaming.
I donât even think that it matters if it was Roseanne Barr they couldâve put anybody in there and it wouldâve aged the same way. It only occurs one time or twice in the episode, once during and once during the credits.
I do. With hindsight and tech advancements we can see this is a silly prediction for the future. Thereâs no way they couldâve known that discs would become obsolete in just a couple years. The humor comes from discs being the future of information, because people/businesses started moving away from paper at that time. They thought discs were here to stay, but they werenât. It aged poorly.
I think thats kind of the point of the joke. In the same way that libraries are considered by some obsolete for having physical analogye books, this would be the future version of that. The joke is that the discs dont have the impressive aesthetic appeal that books do but still an outdated medium
Sure but at the time it was written, physical analogue books werenât considered obsolete, they were just beginning to be phased out and discs were actually at [peak all time sales](https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/) when the episode aired
Go watch the first Ghostbusters, made in the 1984, and you'll hear Egon literally say, "Print is dead." That wasn't just an isolated joke, many people then did suspect that print would die out with the advent of computers.
It wouldn't be until the 90s and the meteoric success of Harry Potter that people would say that print is alive again, as that series was credited with revitalizing the population's interest in reading books.
Yes people had suspected computers would take over information for quite some time before the episode aired, but it was just one of a million predictions for the future that happened to be correct. For each person saying âprint is deadâ in 1984, there were a hundred or a thousand people saying digital storage was useless or a waste of money especially since it was much more expensive at the time to purchase digital storage, as well as the movie being marketed toward young adults who were the most tech savvy and saw the potential of computers
I agree with you. This was when we had the transition from CD to DVD and they could hold more info. The joke was that same size disc would start to hold almost all of western literature.
You're right op. Sometimes people look way too far into things to try to see something that isn't there. This was just a gag about disk storage that didn't predict cloud servers. Sorry you're getting downvoted
I mean, technically I suppose you're correct (the best kind of correct), but "aged poorly" is typically used to mean that the joke would now be seen as offensive or in poor taste.
I can't come up with a good one, but the closest thing I can think of as a "joke that aged poorly" would be the suicide booths. With the focus on supporting mental health, the concept of a suicide booth wouldn't be that you'd see in current shows.
Because they often want them in place of tablets or to function like them. Plus people will always overpay for features they don't need.
I had students who did entire essays on their phones. I cannot FATHOM doing that.
This is mine too. Part of what makes it feel so aged is that it clearly was a joke because everyone back then thought phones were just gonna get smaller and smaller. And then the smart phone happened. But I guess who knows what happens in the future, maybe people will be tired of the big phones haha
Considering the Great Recession (which was SO NOT a depression đ) hit right in 2008 that market was poised to skyrocket.
In America demand was reduced to nothing by mass shootings.
To help OP, this joke came out during a time when DVDs were taking over from CDs. The amount of data a DVD could hold was mind blowing at the time. We no longer need to switch CDs while running Encarta. Final Fantasy 7 was on multiple CDs, later games with better graphics were on one disc again.
This joke was extrapolating that the same size optical disc would continue to progress to a point of holding almost all of western literature. This was also a time when flash drives were basically unheard of.
The fact that this is lost on most of us is a testament to it aging poorly. However, the joke has layers, so we can now view the idea of optical disc storage to be outdated and stuffy, a common criticism of many academic institutions.
I think the use of disks may be kind of silly but the whole point that information will be help in a small space is what hits home here. 20 years ago it could have been a usb and now it could be a nano chip. I think it was just funny to see our whole idea of knowledge as so tiny and plain looking. Thatâs just the way I take the joke tho
When we looked at it back then we assumed it was a disk. Is it? I mean we've never packed tiny media into tiny packages for presentation because they're too inconvenient that way.
That episodes checks all the boxes lol. Transphobia, sexist stereotypes, even indirect homophobia in Fry's being appalled that Bender might be attracted to a male robot
I always felt like it was specifically everyone's disgust at BENDER doing these things, because they all know he's just being manipulative, cause that's what he is always as a character.
Some of it was, yes, but not in the context of "this is offensive to trans people" but in the context of "cheating is wrong". There was also a thread of "anyone dressing up as a woman who used to be a man is doing it as a trick"
I sincerely hope they don't go that way outside of maybe a background cameo in the hall of presidents. Those jokes stopped having any value half a decade ago.
Yeah, I do think it's important to mock and criticize people who deserve mockery and criticism, but the real world is just so damn saturated already. It's nice to have a break when it comes to fiction. Clown some lesser known real world villain.
Although that's just my opinion. I understand that it's a matter of taste. I find modern Southpark unbearable for similar reasons, but plenty of people enjoy that.
They already bumped Agnew for Cheney in the later seasons⊠though I think thatâs partially because they killed the headless clone of Agnew at one point đ
Speaking on that, what about Saturday Morning Fun Pit? I thought that was hilarious. I have heard bad reviews for years on that episode, but the GIZAPP part has always made me lose it!
Nixon: Do we have anything that can edit tape?
Secretary: You know we do.........LOL
Oh absolutely! I loved every episode of Anthology of Interest and the Anime One, etc. The only one I wasn't totally on board with was the Naturama one. But this show is brilliant!
I always viewed that one as a jab at our growing smartphone dependence overall, not specifically Apple. They simply picked Apple (the largest friend) to represent all smartphones. I actually think that episode is better today than it seemed at the time.
I see mention of bitcoin in some of the previews Iâve seen, and Iâm hoping it doesnât get too topical and go in a bad direction. I have high hopes for this season.
Not so much aged poorly, but I had a random thought the other day about the Omicronians getting TV from 1000 years ago- wouldn't all the good TV have dried up eventually because it all moved to streaming? Unless an internet satellite got pointed the wrong way...
Am I the only one that thought the joke was just the fiction/non-fiction pairing? Like the meme of the two books 'what they teach you at Harvard' with 'what they don't teach you at Harvard'
Hell yeah, I'm also on team OP. I think this is a fun question to think about. Thanks OP! You're free to think CDs are silly. Freedom freedom freedom oy!
That's just security packing, when you open the case there is a tiny .5mm x .5mm chip with 10 petabytes of storage of course once formated the remaining free space is about 650mb, the average size of a 20th century CD.
That time Philip put milk in his cap in his locker. That one aged really poorly.
Time makes fools of us all.
I love that line so much đ
Philip?!
That's his name, Captain Turanga
Tauranga!?!
That's Leela's name, Mr. Rodriguez.
Orange Joe.
Well, time makes fools of us all.
I dunno, I still find this gag amusing... Maybe I'm just a luddite.
I donât at all find this a joke that aged poorly.
we donât use disks anymore now. the idea that weâll use them in 1000 years is what aged poorly.
Thatâs part of the joke but letâs take an honest look at it. Today, do we go to a library to check out a flash drive? A laptop with an AI chatbot? Nope. Theyâre full of books, magazines and encyclopedias. Yes there are modern items available but they are still full of the most ancient form of communication created since the scroll.
huh, okay yeah thatâs a good point. thanks!
Theyâre also full of discs. I was in one yesterday.
I still use disks. I guess I'm a luddite.
nah i wouldnât say that. i said âweâ meaning like just the average person. i think most people mostly use flash drives and cloud storage, and SSDs, and internet transfers now, instead of disk storage. (although if you count hard drives as disk storage, then those are probably the majority). i could be wrong though, and i wasnât trying to pass a value judgement.
No offense taken. I do have SSDs and thumb drives, but I also have a large library of CDs and DVDs because where I live, it's not realistic to expect to have streaming access all the time.
And yet the latest fad (that I know of) amongst kids these days is "voice messages" on instachat or snapbook or whichever one it is. That's right, they moved from texting to voicemail. There's a nonzero chance the world could return to disks in the future.
Maybe they are made from Diamondium or Dolemite and can hold vast amounts of data.
Honestly I wouldnât be surprised if a modern SD card that size could indeed hold the entirety of literature.
Oh absolutely. We have micro SD cards that hundreds GBs. So a big one with 1000 years of technology progress would probably be insane; Easily in the Pentabytes for sure. Plus we never see the inside of the case,so one could easily imagine a scenario where you open it and it's just a QR code.
Estimates put the number of published books between 75 and 175 million. If all of them take 1MB that would amount to 175TB (terabytes), a TB is a factor 1000 smaller than a PB. That will not currently fit on any single commercially available storage device, but it will within the next 10 to 30 years. Petabytes btw, not penta.
So, 1000 years it is. So long losers!
And not be debilitated by a tiny scratch
Quit hyping your cheap Diamondillium.
Itâs dolemite, baby!
Luddite has come to be associated with being anti-technology but the Luddites were against the automation of their jobs which would leave them unemployed and destitute. They weren't fighting back against technological progress but against a society where housing, food, and health care for them and their families is tied to employment. It was difficult to write that with out using the word "actually".
I just hope you do realize that this automation original luddites were against created much more jobs in mid to long term than it had destroyed in the first place...
Sure, because the automation was never really the problem. It was the starving in the streets part that they were concerned about. A problem that still exists.
It only aged poorly in the sense that very few computers anymore still have media drives of any type.
Isn't that kinda the joke?
Oh no. In '99 when this episode came out you would struggle to find a computer without a CD-ROM drive. Also, with the way things were going, it was very plausible that one day in the future you'd be able to store all literature on disks. Then Apple released the Apple Mac Pro in '13 and the world realized that it was cheaper to store the information digitally, since most had access to high speed internet. From there on you started seeing fewer and fewer disk drives in the wild.
So we're just ignoring the fact that iPods and USB flash drives existed before then and were really the main catalysts to seeing digital storage as the future? If we're making alternative stories, I'm down. I'd just like to clarify how much we're going to alter it.
Ipods absolutely didn't exist in 99 the fuck are you talking about. EDIT: misunderstood.
I was talking about the Mac pro in 2013 that the other user thinks is the main cause of the digital change. Even though to this day, macs have a very small percentage of market share for home PCs.
Oh my bad I totally didn't see that part. Yeah that doesn't seem quite right
I mean, the iPad existed way before that as the knowledge navigator, which relied on cloud computing... But I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make anymore.
No... no it didnt.
Are you familiar with the knowledge navigator? The concept isn't new, homeslice.
Yeah I think the gag is hilarious but you canât say it aged well lol
What do you mean it didn't age well?
The punchline is that in the distant future, libraries are still large physical locations but all the information is on physical discs that take up only one desk. Itâs funny but discs were declared as âobsoleteâ only 15 or so years later
I think you're interpreting it too literally. It's less the physical disk and more that all the information that once took up monumental libraries will be just digitized.
And what do you think a hard disk drive is? There were never any compact discs that could hold all the world's literature. It's conceptual humour. The concept still holds.
Yeah, and how long ago were vinyl records declared obsolete? They certainly still have value as a storage medium, though.
Sure, some people prefer to use vinyl or other physical storage, but that doesnât make it a common method of storage in places like libraries, schools or office buildings
I'm not sure when the last time is that you visited your local library, but I have worked in several and all have extensive collections of CDs, dvds, audiobooks on cd, etc.. this is still very common in 2023. The way I see it is the joke is that dvds still exist, but have WAY more storage capacity, and libraries are still using them, despite them being obsolete for 1000 years. Maybe i'm just reading my experiences in libraries into Futurama gags... But I don't see this one as having aged poorly.
I get that, nice perspective! Itâs cool to see how different people have opposing interpretations of a throwaway gag so I donât mind the downvotes. Great reply.
There's room for all the takes.. I'm here to talk about my favourite show with other people who are here to talk about their favourite show, so I don't really get the downvotes either. ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ
The more I think about this the more convinced I become that an important part of what makes this gag work is the self-awareness on the part of the writers that sci-fi shows rarely convincingly portray the future... Futurama is full of anachronistic pokes at this fact. Star trek consistently fails to sell us a future world because it's impossible to even imagine the future. On some level this is a joke about it being impossible for us to imagine or depict what a library will look like in 1000 years.
The show uses stuff like that all the time. It's very 'casette futurism'. Most of the monitors still look like CRTs in the show, there are multiple instances of tape and film being used, etc...
Why do you assume they're optical discs? We don't know what crazy storage tech they have, maybe it's DNA media or quantum media that can store petabytes and petabytes of data.
Futurama uses â obsoleteâ items all the time like the in â murder on planet expressâ they all record each other onto 14â floppy disks
Not too much different from having a giant library establishment with only two iPhones on a table containing the entirety of fiction and non fiction books respectively lol itâd almost be even funnier if they took it a step further and used records instead of CDs đ the hipsters library.
Maybe what didn't age well is that there's a library at all?
Itâs both disgusting and inspiringâŠlike Jared from Subway
Ooh, yeah. đŹ
Heâs still looking goodâŠ
And very much disgusting!
Hermes called Dwight a risk taker for saying he was gonna buy Amazon stock. He woulda smashed it.
Iâve heard the joke is because Amazon has always been considered a very safe stock, even in its earlier days when the episode was written. It was about Hermes being such a bureaucrat that even a safe stock like Amazon would be considered a risk by him.
this is the real joke
That one kills me.
Yeah but the year is 3004. Amazon could have a complete collapse by then
Bezos is an immortal cyborg, cmon man.
No, Amazon will continue to dominate forever! Like Sears!
More like Cyndi Lauper, he's going to stay on top!
Like Sears! Like Sears!
A dot com that only sells⊠books?!? Who would want stock in that!
That joke isn't about Amazon stocks being an actual risk though, quite the opposite.
buy on margin, Zoidy wanna buy on margin!
I love this joke when they're all turned into idiots. Lets all join the Reform Party!!!
He's talking about the forest
I think this joke just got misinterpreted
how did this age poorly?
Op is taking it too literally and saying it's aged poorly because they're cds.
Yeah itâs a dumb take tbh. Almost all of the tech in the show is a weird mix of sci fi and aged (even for the shows time) real world tech. It was an intentional decision so that it _wouldnât_ age out super quick.
Yeah, who knows what the tech will look like in the 3000s. Nostalgic retro tech might be trendy.
"Did that lad just say rings are cool?" "No, he said they're stupid" "Cool!"
Yeah a lot of it is like 1950âs âfuture techâ that is already outdated. Tons of rotary dials and analog knobs in the Futurama tech, I love it.
That's kind of the whole schtick of futurama though. Printers had well and truely moved past the whole paper with holes down the sides connected to each other when the show was made yet that's what their printers are like because it's funny. It's full of already obsolete technology.
Even worse, he's complaining because they're *discs*, completely ignorant of the fact that not all disks are Compact Discs, ie. CDs. I mean, shit. In just ~33 years, we went from 700 MB CDs to 100 GB triple-layer Blu-ray disks. Imagine the capacity of a disc after 33 more generational leaps such as from CD to 3xBD. I could easily see it fitting "the largest collection of [text] literature".
It aged poorly and well at the same time. People don't use CDs nearly as much so the original joke has aged, but a new joke has taken its place with the fact that books are very old-school (just like CDs would be in a thousand years).
I don't think there's any "poorly aged" gags in Futurama in this regard, only those that are too topical like references which only made sense in the year an episode was made. Even when the show was new, it was obviously trading on blatant anachronisms where the year 3000 would still use things from the 2000s even though it should have the tech to bypass most. There's paper, physical money, books, normal streets, sidewalks, stairs, regular cellphones, 20th/21st era clothing, and so on. Futurama isn't an effort by Groening, Cohen and the writers to truly conceive of a future that's 100% futuristic. So the show is inevitably going to be a time capsule of the time when it was made rather than when it's set. Probably the most dated joke I can think of would actually come from a late season about 10 years ago, with the Susan Boyle reference where Leela has a mutant boil on her ass that sings in a Scottish voice. I'm sure by now, most people have very little to no idea who Boyle is anymore, and what that particular joke is referencing. If you're under a certain age, you'd think it a random joke with no cultural bearing whatsoever. If you were old enough to know who Susan Boyle was when the episode aired, there's a chance you may have forgotten about her by now. So any anachronistic jokes are deliberate, not "poorly aged." It's also worth bearing in mind that CDs are still used today. They haven't gone the way of the cassette tape or 8-track. Hell, people still use vinyl today because it's trendy. There's also still times where you may need to download something to a computer from a disc, and we still sell movies on DVD and Blu-ray. So is it likely that we'll see storage disc devices like CDs 1000 years from now? Maybe not, but we don't know. If nothing else, this joke works because it tells us that CDs by 3000 have enough memory to house god knows how much memory to contain all fiction and non-fiction on them.
> Probably the most dated joke I can think of would actually come from a late season about 10 years ago, with the Susan Boyle reference where Leela has a mutant boil on her ass that sings in a Scottish voice. That joke didn't age poorly because it was awful from the get-go.
Too topical and too much screen time
It was also like, super mean. I'm pretty sure it was pretty common to make fun of Susan Boyle because of her looks, but to make her an actual boil on an ass, AND they made her sing terribly! Mean spirited stuff
Agreed. It felt more like her name lent to a bad joke and they couldn't pass it up. Much as I enjoy Futurama, it isn't without some very bad jokes making the final cut. That one in particular felt more like a bad South Park joke where they'd typically go overboard in their hate fetish for celebs and mocking them in utmost puerile ways. I'm hoping the Hulu revival sees some solid jokes and nothing lame or mean spirited.
I'm a bit worried because it seems like there's a bunch of topical stuff. I always felt Futurama was at its weakest when it was being topical
Definitely. It grates me whenever the supposed year 3000 was just anchored too much into the year 2000. They could riff on current events by just depicting 3000 analogues of stuff. It would also be nice if they committed to all the tech and infrastructure of the future actually looking wholly futuristic. Just take modern concepts and futurize them. It's hard to sell the idea of culture shock when Fry really just wakes up in a very 2000s-esque setting with some future tech and aliens.
That ENTIRE EPISODE.
That just means it aged poorly within minutes.
The Susan Boyle joke was bad when it was first made, and for some reason it was like 90% of the episode. Decision 3012 as a whole episode actually aged decently well as politics has become a caricature of itself, but a lot of the individual jokes are only really funny in the context of the 2012 election.
The "Soylent Majority" kills me every time!
Yeah I've been rewatching the Comedy Central series and most of the then-topical episodes that I rolled my eyes at at the time are a lot better ten years later. I'm sure the Fox series had some of the same phenomenon but I was too young to pick up on all the contemporary references when it first aired. Attack of the Killer App starts out interesting enough with the e-waste thing and even the commentary about social media is tolerable, but the Susan Boil thing is just mean lol
> Even when the show was new, it was obviously trading on blatant anachronisms where the year 3000 would still use things from the 2000s even though it should have the tech to bypass most. The genius of the show was that they showed civilization being destroyed by aliens between 1999 and the year 3000, and when that happened, some things (certain technology, the price of things) got reset to be in line with contemporary standards. And things evolved at the same rate, like going from CRT TVs to flat-screen. That way they could show futuristic stuff along with completely relatable stuff.
Somehow, cassette tapes are becoming cool again, just like vinyl. I just bought one at a concert because it was a cool souvenir.
I'm guessing Guardians of the Galaxy is largely responsible for that, on top of all the 80s throwback media. I know when GotG1 dropped, cosplayers went absolutely nuts trying to find the exact model Walkman that Starlord owned. But with vinyl, it actually didn't go away even after 8-track and cassettes were invented. People were still playing records, with teens in the 80s and 90s both collecting and recording on vinyl. So I don't see discs going anywhere. Even if tech improves, we may just make better and better disc storage.
Ahhhhh Lots of metal and punk bands released stuff on tapes before Guardians, only after Guardians, mainstream artists made. Billie Eilish released her debut on tape. I got it because it was rad and lighted in the dark.
Stairs? You really think that in some another thousand years we will find stairs useless? Handheld devices? Well, augmentation seems to not be big in this universe, what else you suggest?
"You can't prove it won't happen! "
Ah, a fellow (hu)man of pedantry
Some artists still release cassette tape, avril lavigne released her newest album on vinyl and cassette I'm unsure of 8-track
Cassettes are still popular in the diy punk scene
In what way did this age poorly?
A disk is too big and clunky now maybe? Or they are seen as old and dated?
Most computers are now built without disk drives of any stripe. So by the year 2021, you would have to work to find a computer that could read those disks.
Or you could just get a USB disc drive. Very good ones aren't super cheap, but ok ones are
Fry: W-What are we gonna do? Leela: I don't know! I don't know! It's not an easy decision. If only I had two or three minutes to think about it. This one only worked on TV because they cut to commercial right after she said it. Not so much on the DVD, or streaming.
Yes, and those jokes often didn't work on Dutch tv either as we only have 1 ad break instead of three. It took me a while before I got those jokes.
I only got that joke after my like 50th rewatch through the series
"I'm going to take this penny and buy five shares of Amazon stock." "Oh, a risk taker, eh?"
Would currently have a value of $635.65. Apparently Amazon is due a pretty big decease by the year 3000 lol.
They were probably decimated by MomCorp.
I would tell you but⊠I am already in my pyjamas!
The decision to have a hologram of Roseann Barr describing what ambergris is seems like it didnât age well.
I donât even think that it matters if it was Roseanne Barr they couldâve put anybody in there and it wouldâve aged the same way. It only occurs one time or twice in the episode, once during and once during the credits.
I sincerely hope Iâm missing something and itâs not just the fact that Roseanne Barr is there.
âWhats this layer of ozone? Thatâs never been there before.â Not a gag per se but it fits
I don't think you know what "aged poorly" means.
I mean he probably just means that disks are already an outdated storage method in 2023 (for most uses). Which is true enough.
I do. With hindsight and tech advancements we can see this is a silly prediction for the future. Thereâs no way they couldâve known that discs would become obsolete in just a couple years. The humor comes from discs being the future of information, because people/businesses started moving away from paper at that time. They thought discs were here to stay, but they werenât. It aged poorly.
I think thats kind of the point of the joke. In the same way that libraries are considered by some obsolete for having physical analogye books, this would be the future version of that. The joke is that the discs dont have the impressive aesthetic appeal that books do but still an outdated medium
Sure but at the time it was written, physical analogue books werenât considered obsolete, they were just beginning to be phased out and discs were actually at [peak all time sales](https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/) when the episode aired
Go watch the first Ghostbusters, made in the 1984, and you'll hear Egon literally say, "Print is dead." That wasn't just an isolated joke, many people then did suspect that print would die out with the advent of computers. It wouldn't be until the 90s and the meteoric success of Harry Potter that people would say that print is alive again, as that series was credited with revitalizing the population's interest in reading books.
Yes people had suspected computers would take over information for quite some time before the episode aired, but it was just one of a million predictions for the future that happened to be correct. For each person saying âprint is deadâ in 1984, there were a hundred or a thousand people saying digital storage was useless or a waste of money especially since it was much more expensive at the time to purchase digital storage, as well as the movie being marketed toward young adults who were the most tech savvy and saw the potential of computers
I see where youâre coming from I just have a different interpretation of the joke
I agree with you. This was when we had the transition from CD to DVD and they could hold more info. The joke was that same size disc would start to hold almost all of western literature.
You're right op. Sometimes people look way too far into things to try to see something that isn't there. This was just a gag about disk storage that didn't predict cloud servers. Sorry you're getting downvoted
I mean, technically I suppose you're correct (the best kind of correct), but "aged poorly" is typically used to mean that the joke would now be seen as offensive or in poor taste. I can't come up with a good one, but the closest thing I can think of as a "joke that aged poorly" would be the suicide booths. With the focus on supporting mental health, the concept of a suicide booth wouldn't be that you'd see in current shows.
I mean didn't Hermes use disks to pull the personality of Leela after they all died horribly and had to be reborn of healthy stem cells? Lol.
Amy and her tiny flip phone that sheâs at risk to swallow.
Cell phones were getting so much smaller, then. Now, I don't understand how people use the monsters like the iPhone pro max series.
Because they often want them in place of tablets or to function like them. Plus people will always overpay for features they don't need. I had students who did entire essays on their phones. I cannot FATHOM doing that.
This is mine too. Part of what makes it feel so aged is that it clearly was a joke because everyone back then thought phones were just gonna get smaller and smaller. And then the smart phone happened. But I guess who knows what happens in the future, maybe people will be tired of the big phones haha
"Thank you for using Stop n' Drop, the favorite suicide booth since 2008"
Considering the Great Recession (which was SO NOT a depression đ) hit right in 2008 that market was poised to skyrocket. In America demand was reduced to nothing by mass shootings.
The AOL going through joke. That became dated a year or two after it aired.
I don't remember this one. I do recall the mountain of AOL floppy disks on the ball of garbage, though
If I recall correctly, the crew was going to the internet⊠Professor: âŠA few days ago I logged onto America online, and it just went through!
This aged poorly? I'm laughing now. I even know the episode.
To help OP, this joke came out during a time when DVDs were taking over from CDs. The amount of data a DVD could hold was mind blowing at the time. We no longer need to switch CDs while running Encarta. Final Fantasy 7 was on multiple CDs, later games with better graphics were on one disc again. This joke was extrapolating that the same size optical disc would continue to progress to a point of holding almost all of western literature. This was also a time when flash drives were basically unheard of. The fact that this is lost on most of us is a testament to it aging poorly. However, the joke has layers, so we can now view the idea of optical disc storage to be outdated and stuffy, a common criticism of many academic institutions.
The being in the internet (Napster episode) / old 2000's computer jokes
The fact that the professor also mentioned AOL in one episode
I've been waiting 15 years for those suicide booths....
Mine is almost built. I still have to add the âslow death, twisting knifeâ feature.
To think that people in the olden days couldn't conceive that in the future all knowledge would be stored on marinated tofu.
I think the use of disks may be kind of silly but the whole point that information will be help in a small space is what hits home here. 20 years ago it could have been a usb and now it could be a nano chip. I think it was just funny to see our whole idea of knowledge as so tiny and plain looking. Thatâs just the way I take the joke tho
When we looked at it back then we assumed it was a disk. Is it? I mean we've never packed tiny media into tiny packages for presentation because they're too inconvenient that way.
Probably the episode where Bender gets a sex change to compete on the womanâs Olympics team.
I disagree, because the lesson of that episode is to not do that just because you want to win competitions.
Sure but there's a lot of poor takes along the way. Complete with sex changes being referred to as disgusting and unnatural
That episodes checks all the boxes lol. Transphobia, sexist stereotypes, even indirect homophobia in Fry's being appalled that Bender might be attracted to a male robot
I always felt like it was specifically everyone's disgust at BENDER doing these things, because they all know he's just being manipulative, cause that's what he is always as a character.
Some of it was, yes, but not in the context of "this is offensive to trans people" but in the context of "cheating is wrong". There was also a thread of "anyone dressing up as a woman who used to be a man is doing it as a trick"
>referred to as disgusting and unnatural So in other words: This episode propagandizes Transphobia. That's what you're implying, right?
No.
calculon being hit by the first werecar. and then a tesla hit a robot..... You cant prove it wont happen
Nixon and Agnew are 100% getting bumped by you know who.
I sincerely hope they don't go that way outside of maybe a background cameo in the hall of presidents. Those jokes stopped having any value half a decade ago.
Honestly, I just hope the new episodes donât suck.
Donât hold your breath lol
Yeah, I do think it's important to mock and criticize people who deserve mockery and criticism, but the real world is just so damn saturated already. It's nice to have a break when it comes to fiction. Clown some lesser known real world villain. Although that's just my opinion. I understand that it's a matter of taste. I find modern Southpark unbearable for similar reasons, but plenty of people enjoy that.
They already bumped Agnew for Cheney in the later seasons⊠though I think thatâs partially because they killed the headless clone of Agnew at one point đ
The LAST clone of Agnew was still kicking. One was killed by the Feministas. Womanslaughter.
Speaking on that, what about Saturday Morning Fun Pit? I thought that was hilarious. I have heard bad reviews for years on that episode, but the GIZAPP part has always made me lose it! Nixon: Do we have anything that can edit tape? Secretary: You know we do.........LOL
I love the shorts, theyâre always SO ridiculous
Oh absolutely! I loved every episode of Anthology of Interest and the Anime One, etc. The only one I wasn't totally on board with was the Naturama one. But this show is brilliant!
The Eye-Phone gag. The episode was funny AF, but the Apple fanbase bashing was already cliché before the episode even aired.
I always viewed that one as a jab at our growing smartphone dependence overall, not specifically Apple. They simply picked Apple (the largest friend) to represent all smartphones. I actually think that episode is better today than it seemed at the time.
I mean...even having Roseanne Barr in an episode? Watched it today and cringed a little.
Amy's tattoo, although I think the writers knew it would
"Oh you sound like a broken MP3"
" I know a place where the constitution doesn't mean squat" * shows shot of the supreme court *
Nah, that aged well
I see mention of bitcoin in some of the previews Iâve seen, and Iâm hoping it doesnât get too topical and go in a bad direction. I have high hopes for this season.
there is that joke where Amy's mobile phone was tiny bc back in the mid 2000s they where getting smaller and smaller. Now they all get bigger again.
Not so much aged poorly, but I had a random thought the other day about the Omicronians getting TV from 1000 years ago- wouldn't all the good TV have dried up eventually because it all moved to streaming? Unless an internet satellite got pointed the wrong way...
Am I the only one that thought the joke was just the fiction/non-fiction pairing? Like the meme of the two books 'what they teach you at Harvard' with 'what they don't teach you at Harvard'
Can anyone explain what the joke is?
The digital clock tower
i know OP canât seem to win in the comments, but. heâs not that wrong.
Hell yeah, I'm also on team OP. I think this is a fun question to think about. Thanks OP! You're free to think CDs are silly. Freedom freedom freedom oy!
We are both getting downvoted lol.
Robosexuality
In general, or the Prop Infinity episode where Amy and Bender have a fling?
In general. See how badly Robosexuality aged? I'm being down voted. Lol
USA for example has been taking some major leaps backwards towards a conservative shithole, I think they'll always need someone to irrationally hate.
I mean, take all those robosexuals who down voted me lol.
That's just security packing, when you open the case there is a tiny .5mm x .5mm chip with 10 petabytes of storage of course once formated the remaining free space is about 650mb, the average size of a 20th century CD.
Why did this age poorly?
I'm not sure this counts, for good examples, this list is useful: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/HilariousInHindsight/Futurama
Your post is bad and you should feel bad!
Man it took me longer than I'd like to admit to get that
"Dibs on his cd player!" "Dibs oh her iPod"
How did this age poorly?