Before Matt Groening was the most celebrated cartoonist of a generation that created a global cultural phenomenon he was an underground comic artist. In fact, it was his indie comic Life in Hell that originally drew the attention that would lead to him working on an animated series of shorts for The Tracy Ulman Show. Life in Hell was about the trials and tribulations of living in the real-life equivalent of Hell on Earth: Los Angeles, California. In one strip, Groening uses his anthropomorphic rabbits to show the 9 ways to die in LA. For seven frames the rabbits die in mostly conventional ways like shootings, drug overdose, and fire, but the final two causes of death listed side by side with almost identical pictures of a rabbit sitting at a desk with a depressed look on his face were “Failure” and “Success”.
Those animated shorts for The Tracy Ulman Show would go on to become The Simpsons, and within a few years Groening had enough success to kill him several times over. Usually it takes an artist decades and multiple attempts to claw their way to the top, so what do you do when you knock your first try out of the park? For Groening the answer was to take another shot. Groening would pitch Fox a new show in 1998, but instead of a moderately-grounded satirization of the American sitcom he would pitch a wild sci-fi workplace comedy set in the year 3000 starring, among others, a recently-thawed everyman originally from the year 2000, a vulgar and violent robot, and a badass cyclops woman. Futurama would share a lot of DNA with The Simpsons, with the writing staff led by former Simpsons writer David Cohen, but the show would truly shine when it embraced its sci-fi setting to tell stories that The Simpsons could never tell.
The show has a lot of episodes that could be considered perfect. A lot of people would point to episodes like “Jurassic Bark” that focus on the grief that Fry and his year 2000 friends and family experience from his accidental 1000 year freezing, and the events that follow his disappearance from that time period as being perfect, and while I agree about the excellence of those episodes I wanted to highlight the S2 episode “War is the H-Word” as a perfect episode.
“War is the H-Word” is one of the Futurama episodes that leans into the sci-fi the most. Fry, Bender, and Leela (after assuming a fake male identity) are shipped off to another planet to fight in a war against a race of hyper-intelligent brain ball aliens. This episode has all the hallmarks of a sci-fi B-movie that made Futurama so special: laser guns, a planet-destroying voice-activated bomb, the disembodied head of Henry Kissinger, and pork-flavored bubble gum. From beginning to end the episode is a hilariously clever parody of sci-fi war films, complete with the ultimate realization that our Earth heroes were actually the bad guys the whole time.
While not reaching the same heights of success as The Simpsons, Futurama would etch out its own space in popular culture. The show has a devoted cult following that brought the show back from the brink of death multiple times through strong rerun ratings and DVD sales. The show would end its 14 year run after 7 seasons in 2013, but even today there’s cry from fans for a new season with a recent crossover with The Simpsons perhaps whetting audience’s appetites.
It’s been over 40 years since Matt Groening published the first strip of Life in Hell and to go back now and look at the strips, especially those published before The Simpsons premiered, is a really interesting look into the mind of someone that would end up becoming rich, famous, and critically-acclaimed beyond his wildest dreams. It’s a real shame Groening stopped making new strips in 2012 because I sure would like to know if he still has an equal amount of fear of success and failure after having so much of one and so little of the other.
Matthew Daugherty is a young writer from Cleveland, Ohio with a love of pop culture, politics, and the intersection of the two. As a part-time writer and full-time crank, Matt can be found shouting into the void on Twitter at @mdaugherty1221.