In 1988, the
science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf began
on BBC2. The first episode sees Dave Lister frozen in time and wake up in the
far future.
In 1999,
shortly after Red Dwarf had seemingly
wound up for good, the science fiction sitcom Futurama began on FOX. The first episode sees Philip J. Fry frozen
in time and wake up in the far future.
Okay, it’s
an overly simplistic comparison… but it’s a rather good one to make, as it does
highlight the differences and similarities between the two shows.
For starters,
Red Dwarf begins already set in the future (about two hundred years or so),
whereas Fry was contemporary of the viewers, hailing from 1999. And whereas
Lister was in suspended animation for three million years and awoke to find
himself stranded in deep space and the last human being alive after a radiation
leak wiped out everyone else on board the titular ship, Fry was accidentally
cryogenically frozen for a mere thousand years and awoke to find himself in the
vibrant, busy Earth of tomorrow.
Before we
get on to the main bit of meandering I’m going to be doing for the next few
thousand words, it’s worth considering the two shows’ production histories. Red Dwarf went off air in 1999 as a
massive success, BBC Two’s biggest show, with the intention of making a feature
film, but that fell through and the BBC later declined to produce more series.
By contrast, Futurama started well,
but suffered from erratic scheduling and a lack of care from the network which
meant it was cancelled in 2003, with the final episodes quietly burnt off in
the summer.
In 2007,
cable channel Comedy Central noted that repeats of Futurama had been doing quite well on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim,
and subsequently hammered out a deal with FOX for four direct-to-DVD
feature-length specials which Comedy Central would also syndicate, with each
special split up into four parts. The show was subsequently given a proper
revival on Comedy Central after the success of these, with 52 new episodes
produced between 2010 and 2013; the high cost of the show’s animation prevented
its relatively small new channel from being able to order any further episodes.
In 2008, digital
channel Dave noted that repeats of Red
Dwarf had been doing quite well for them, and subsequently produced a
three-part miniseries, Red Dwarf: Back to
Earth. The show was subsequently given a proper revival on Dave after the
success of this; 18 further new episodes have been produced to date, with full
new series airing in 2012, 2016 and 2017.
Right,
that’s the other side of the camera dealt with. There are a number of common
sci-fi concepts, tropes and themes; let’s compare the two shows for some of
them.
ALIENS & ROBOTS
Red Dwarf, of course, doesn’t have any
aliens in it – only genetically engineered lifeforms. Anyone who’s watched even
one episode of Futurama is probably
aware it doesn’t follow the same rule.
But there’s
one thing that’s interesting to note: the crew of Red Dwarf, for much of the show’s run, are the last human being, a
hologram simulation of his dead crewmate, a creature that evolved from the
ship’s cat and a service droid. Despite Futurama
most definitely not having the same rule about no aliens, the regular Planet
Express crew are remarkably similar in some ways, and also don’t have any
aliens: there’s a guy who was frozen in the 20th century; a bender
robot; Leela, who thinks she’s an
alien but turns out to actually be a mutant human; Zoidberg, who isn’t a creature
who evolved from lobsters but an alien who bears a strong resemblance to a
lobster (but there’s definitely a parallel with the Cat there somewhere), and
then three other humans, including Amy who was born and grew up on Mars. It’s
even amusingly lampshaded in “How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back”, in
which it turns out Fry is under the impression that Hermes was “some kind of
outer-space potato man”.
FLASHBACKS
In the third
ever episode of Red Dwarf, “Balance
of Power”, Lister has a flashback to before he got put into stasis and all his
friends were still alive. Writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor intended these to
be a regular way of highlighting Lister’s loneliness, but this would prove to
be the only such one; flashbacks to before the accident appear in later
episodes such as “Dimension Jump”, “Ouroboros”, “Blue” and “The Beginning” for
various plot-related reasons (as well as "Samsara", which takes the unusual approach of flashbacks that don't involve any of the regulars but show what happened to the crew of a derelict spaceship they're exploring). With the exception of “Blue”, these flashbacks
are usually right at the beginning of the episode to foreshadow later
developments. Futurama takes a rather
different approach.
One of the
most popular types of Futurama
episode is when they flashback to Fry’s life in the 20th century,
and then weave the flashbacks throughout the episode, telling a story over two
different time periods. This gave us a list of episodes which makes any Futurama fan smile: “The Luck of the
Fryrish” was the first such episode, and was followed by the likes of “Jurassic
Bark”, “Cold Warriors” and “Game of Tones”; in fact, these episodes form a sort
of story arc about Fry’s life before he got frozen. There are also other uses
of flashbacks; “When Aliens Attack” features a similar use to that of the Red Dwarf episodes mentioned above,
opening with a flashback scene that sets up the ‘present-day’ events to come. And
there’s a scene in the very first episode, “Space Pilot 3000”, where Fry
discovers the ruins of Old New York and flashes back to being there with his
girlfriend that is strikingly similar to the flashback in “Balance of Power”.
GOD
In
“Godfellas”, universally considered one of the greatest Futurama episodes of all and very possibly my favourite single
episode of television of all time, Bender accidentally becomes God to a group
of tiny aliens, and then meets an entity that is implied to be God (he neatly
surmises it later: “First, I was God, and then I met God!”), or possibly the
remains of a space probe that collided with God. The entity’s ultimate lesson
to Bender: “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything
at all.”
In “Krysis”,
which isn’t, the Dwarfers discover a space station where scientists were
working on an experiment to be able to communicate with the Universe. The
appearance and voice of the Universe are strikingly similar to the God entity
in “Godfellas”. The entity’s ultimate lesson to Kryten is that there is love in
the universe, and also his clothes really suck. Erm. Best to move on from this
one, I think. (I don’t actually think “Krysis” is an especially bad episode, but there’s
very little that can stand up to “Godfellas” for me and that’s not its fault.)
MINDSWAPPING
The Red Dwarf episode “Bodyswap” features a
fairly straightforward take on this plot, between Lister and Rimmer. Okay,
that’s an oversimplification of the episode – I recently read a very good
comment on Ganymede & Titan on how it’s about the psychology of excess –
but the bodyswapping itself is pretty simple. The Futurama episode “The
Prisoner of Benda” has an altogether more interesting concept – the
mindswapping machine can’t be used twice on the same pair of bodies. Meanwhile,
a whole host of body swaps are taking place between all seven regular
characters and two guest characters. How to solve this? Simple – the writer of
the episode, Ken Keeler, comes up with a mathematical theorem to show how many
extra bodies are needed to be able to swap everyone back into their original
bodies:
Red Dwarf features a fair few hard
scientific concepts, as of course does Futurama,
but the mathematical side of the latter show is often far more interesting
(Keeler, who holds a PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard, is far from the
only mathematically-minded writer on the show – Jeff Westbrook has an Erdős number of 3). There’s quite a
bit on this in the book The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets
if you want to learn more.
PARALLEL UNIVERSES
Red Dwarf features parallel universes in
the imaginatively titled “Parallel Universe”, “Backwards”, “Dimension Jump”, and
as a plot thread for the introduction of the parallel Kochanski in Series VII. All
of them are based on one difference – in “Parallel Universe” all men are women
and vice versa, in “Backwards” time runs backwards, in “Dimension Jump” Rimmer
is a suave hero as the result of being held back a year in school, and
Kochanski hails from a reality where she, not Lister, was in suspended
animation and became the last human being alive. (You could also include the
mini-series Back to Earth in this, in
which it turns out that Red Dwarf is
just a TV show and they’re taken to ‘our’ dimension, but that turns out to be a
dream in homage to Blade Runner, so
I’m not sure it counts with the rest.)
Futurama first features them as a
throwaway joke in “I Dated a Robot”, in which there is only one parallel
universe and the difference is that everyone there wears cowboy hats. They’re
covered more extensively in “The Farnsworth Parabox”, which starts with a
parallel universe where coin flips have the opposite outcome… and then takes
the concept to its logical extreme as we are introduced to dozens of other
parallel universes, including ones where everyone is a woman, people have no
eyes, everyone is a robot, everyone is a hippie, or a bobblehead, a Roman
Empire universe, Pirate universe, Leprechaun universe, one that’s very cold,
one with loads of octopuses in it…
The overall
feeling I’m getting as I’m writing this article is that, based on the subjects
mentioned so far, Futurama is a lot
more ambitious. Which maybe isn’t terribly surprising – you’d think that you
can manage a lot more with animation than you can with a studio sitcom. But
actually, I’m doing Red Dwarf a huge
disservice by saying that – it’s hugely ambitious in itself. See, for example,
the Red Dwarf episode “Polymorph” and
compare it to a Futurama episode that
goes along similar lines (as homage to Alien),
“Murder on the Planet Express”. You’d probably say that Red Dwarf wins out on imagination and creativity there for managing
to realise its monster so well for a sitcom shot in front of an audience in
1989. In “Twentica” it manages to realise an alternative version of historical
America astonishingly well in a
studio. And who says ambition needs to look impressive anyway? “Marooned” is
rightly considered one of the greatest episodes of Dwarf of all time and most of that is a two-hander between Lister
and Rimmer – something Futurama never
even attempts.
Anyway, just
thought I’d try and redress the balance. Where were we?
NOTE: Due to this article ending up being
absurdly long, I’ve ended up splitting it into two and this seems a good place
to make the break. See you this time next week for, among other things, an
unnecessarily long comparison of the two shows’ attitudes to time travel.
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