Aloha Mars

[vovat]

As of last week, I am the proud owner of the Futurama Volume 1 DVD set. Yeah, I know. Volume 4 is already out, and I'm behind the times. I ended up waiting until the first one went on sale. I'm not sure if I'll do the same for the rest of them, or, for that matter, whether those ever WILL go on sale. Anyway, last night, I watched the first seven episodes with commentary. There were some interesting things said, especially the unused ideas for the pilot. Some of the commentaries were better than others, though. For "Love's Labors Lost in Space," there were several periods where nobody said anything, and then they would talk about the animation. I'm sure that's interesting to some people, but I'm more into the story than the technical aspects. When I watch a commentary, I often see something on the screen that the commentators are totally ignoring, and think, "Hey, why aren't you addressing THAT?" That's probably common, though. I also watched the animatic, which was kind of cool to see, but difficult to watch. There was also a script for the pilot, which I tried to read, but couldn't get through. The thing is, if that script were online, I'd probably be all over it. I have a hard time reading things on a TV screen, though, and I was kind of tired anyway.

I had a dream last night that bethje and I went to a convenience store to buy some hot dogs and potato chips, and it ended up costing over $90. It turned out that we had gotten some kind of premium chips, which were really expensive. We had already eaten them, so we ended up having to pay, but I was really pissed off, and walked around some mall being mean to people.

Comments

[revme.livejournal.com]

The Futurama sets are my favorites. The later ones are even better -- although the first season's probably my least favorite anyway. But yeah; I love the commentaries. I typically don't watch Anamatics, unless there's, like a bonus commentary on that (I'm kind of an animation geek, so I get into that stuff sometimes; on the... 3rd, though, there's a Animation-Devoted Commentary on "Roswell That Ends Well", which I made it through but was really boring.), but yeah. I ended up buying all the Futurama sets pretty much the day they came out. Usually a special trip to Costco, heh. Lots of cool information, though. Especially on the later sets when they start talking about Harry Stephen Keeler. Ken Keeler (no relation) is a huge fan of H.S. Keeler's stuff. And even won an contest for writing in the other Keeler's style. But yeah, I like the idea of including scripts and the like, but that seems basically made for, say, DVDRom supplements or, better, hardcopy stuff (like the Seinfeld set came with).

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the later seasons of Futurama were definitely better overall, but even the first had its share of great episodes.

I did like the part in the animatic where Fry saw his old apartment. There were a few other bits in it that didn't make it to the finished episode, too. Still, it wasn't that much payoff for sitting through the whole thing.

Is "Roswell" one of the episodes that has two commentaries? I would hope that there isn't JUST the animation one, since there's a lot to be said about the story there, what with the time paradoxes and references and everything.

[revme.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. I rewatch the first set all the time, too.

But yeah -- one of the most amusing animatics I've seen though is on the 5th Season Simpsons where they have the intro to Treehouse Of Horror; most of the tombstone jokes are different (including one labelled "A Woman's Right To Choose", heh. Gee, I wonder why they changed that one? I wonder if the network had anything to do with it... couldn't be!).

Roswell's got two commentaries, the normal, fun one and the dry animation one. I think they realized it'd be a bit of a waste otherwise.

[bethje.livejournal.com]

revme brings up a point. What if you were to just read the scripts on your computer, since you do have a DVD-ROM (unlike me)? And since I don't have one, I don't know for sure, but I assume you could switch back and forth between that and the other applications you're using.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I might try doing that at some point. I've never actually put an actual DVD in my DVD-ROM drive, but it might be time to try that.

[revme.livejournal.com]

Hm, I wonder how that would work. I was mainly thinking doing it as a txt file or PDF, but I wonder how that'd work. I've never tried that either. It's still in a not-too-elegant format, mainly the weird DVD-pagey-through thing, and I'm not sure how the resolution would work out, but you do sit closer to a computer monitor and in a more "I'm going to read something" position than when you typically watch TV, so...