Review: Futurama “The Futurama Mystery Liberry”

Overview

Futurama is reimagined in the form of classic children’s mystery books.

Our Take

“The Futurama Mystery Library” refers to a library managed by Levar Burton and featuring three parody bits of Futurama sending up various classic children’s mystery books. Whether you’re a fan of Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, or Leroy Brown, Futurama lays claim to all of these adventures that shows just how cute it is when the characters dress up in outfits that they usually do not.

Now that we got that intro out of the way, I want to talk about the real juicy bit for this week’s episode of Futurama, that being the excellent production value of the show’s send up of The Adventures of Tintin. Clearly this portion of the episode took a LOT of time and resources and it helps showcase the fact that Futurama is home to some of the best animation producers on Planet Earth. I don’t even want to spoil anything because if you’re a fan of Futurama, the show finally gives us a short episode that blows away most shorts episodes that come from the likes of The Simpsons and Family Guy. 

Unfortunately, the majority of the funny dialogue seemed to come from the show’s guest stars, the aforementioned Levar (his book burning comments had me going) and the legendary Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the latter of whom gets some solid one-liners as well. The rest from the cast came across as fairly standard, and I’m beginning to think that the show is forgetting about the fact that it’s not on cable television anymore and is actually on Hulu, therefore, the show should try and be a bit more risky and assertive with its dialogue. The premise of the episode is standard fare, its the dialogue that really has to drive home the paradoxical elements of the special and I’m not sure it does.

Overall, the episode’s going to get higher points simply based on The Adventures of Tintin portion of the episode that is, quite simply, mind-blowing. Otherwise, I would’ve stripped this one for parts.