Semantic Nonsense: Back to the… past?

Back to the… Futur

If you haven’t noticed, Futurama returned today. Somehow. Again. Would that we all have as many lives. Or at least Young Justice did.

The fourth run of the classic Matt Groening sci-fi series came at the hands of Hulu, as Comedy Central had already gone above and beyond by reviving it twice already. You can expect 20 new episodes with an option for 20 more should Hulu shut up and take our money.

It’s hard to judge a show from a single episode, even when there’s 140 episodes that came before it. But aside from the bizarrely meta plot (a parable about getting the show revived so thinly veiled it would make Star Trek writers blush), it looked, sounded and felt like a new season of Futurama. Considering it’s been 10 years since the last one, that’s incredible. Time will tell if the wheels come off that wagon, and once complete it shall face the judgment of Quarantine Control.

Of course, Futurama wasn’t the only 90s classic cartoon comedy continuation Hulu helped exist. We just finished 2 and 10/13 seasons of Animaniacs, after all.

But Hulu can’t take credit for Warner Bros. next reboot, which the public got its first glimpse of this past weekend.

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Back to… school

If you were worried that the reboot (originally announced in 2020) was a casualty of the HBO Max’s roadmap during Discovery’s violent assimilation merger of Warner Bros., I don’t blame you. While the show never got cut from HBO Max’s roadmap, there wasn’t exactly a lot of trust remaining in it.

Fans lucky enough to attend the San Diego Comic Con were treated to a screening of the first two episodes of the show. The rest of us will have to wait for the currently undated Fall premiere, which will be shown on both Max (allegedly) and Cartoon Network.

While the show has my curiosity and perhaps even my attention, I’m not sure who it’s for. My cynical expectation would be that it’s simply nostalgia bait for my age group, who are plenty old enough to have kids they can force to watch it. Despite that, I can’t shake the impression that it’s absolutely not intended for as young an audience as the original.

Based on the reviews of the episodes from Con-goers and the more recent interviews and promotional materials, Tiny Toons: Looniversity is leaning much harder into the university angle than Tiny Toon Adventures did (and apparently also leaning much harder into Sweetie Bird’s screen time as well). We apparently can expect deep cuts into that life experience that are much more prominent than a mere occasional bone thrown to any parents watching the show.

Naturally, there’s little choice but to wait and see where the writing lands. It’ll probably end up having a lot of toonish slapstick, sure. But if the original series’ dumbed-down satire gets the chance to operate at full power, there’s potential for us old-timers to enjoy it beyond nostalgia. That being said, I’m not sure how kindly the humor of the setting will land for me. After all, while us kids who grew up watching Adventures have long since left college, most of us are still paying for it.