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Oh my god! Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! OH…MY…GAWD! Futurama’s back in a big way! Compared to this, Family Guy coming back is like a turd coming back when the toilet overflows. I’ve perhaps never been so excited in my life. Holy cow do I love Futurama; I’m even prepared to call it a better show than The Simpsons.

Bender’s Big Score is the first of four direct-to-DVD Futurama movies, and if the quality of this one is any indication of what’s to come then we’re all about to add the four greatest DVDs in history to our collections. For fans of the TV series, it’s got just about everything you could want.

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On the one hand, “Treehouse of Horror V” is an episode of the TV show The Simpsons and not a movie, so it shouldn’t really count for review here. On the other hand, go fuck yourself. In our TV intensive society, the annual Simpsons Halloween special has become something of a tradition along the lines of A Charlie Brown Christmas; the particular holiday season isn’t complete until you’ve seen it. Granted, the new “Treehouse of Horror” episodes have aired after Halloween a number of times in recent years, so the holiday season actually was complete before you saw it, but I maintain it didn’t seem complete. Thus, I feel like a “Treehouse of Horror” review is not only justified but necessary, and baby I can’t fight this feeling anymore.

Of the many Halloween specials The Simpsons have thrown our way over the years, the fifth one is doubtless the best. It aired in the show’s sixth season, squarely within that “golden era” of seasons three through eight, and a big heaping helping of that gold went right into this show.

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Season 10 of South Park was released on DVD Tuesday, and so I’d like to borrow the title of a two-part episode that season and talk to you about the Cartoon Wars. When people talk about TV cartoons nowadays, the discussion tends to focus on the “big three:” South Park, The Simpsons and Family Guy. I personally feel that King of the Hill is also of extremely high quality, but for one reason or another discussion usually excludes it in favor of the other three, and so that’s the tack I’ll take today. In the South Park episodes in question, Cartman takes it upon himself to use a controversial image of Mohammed on Family Guy to get not just that episode but the entire series taken off the air. He can’t stand Family Guy, you see, and when Kyle suggests that Cartman should like it, Cartman vows to kill him where he stands.

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone admit that the negative attitude about Family Guy portrayed in the show is a similar one to their own, albeit highly exaggerated. They don’t like Family Guy. Their two part episode “Cartoon Wars” repeatedly makes reference to the fact that the style of joke seen on Family Guy is completely irrelevant, unrelated to the nature of the characters, the situations, or the plot proper, and that this makes for a poorly-written, inferior kind of show. As a long-time fan of The Simpsons, I’ve listened over and over to all the episode commentaries yet available, and it’s clear from those that much of the creative staff of that show feels that Family Guy is a second-rate show as well. I say that, while it’s true that the jokes are usually just pure gags, with no connection to what’s going on in any individual episode, this does not make a less quality show. Fuck all that, Family Guy is perfectly fine.

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