Meanwhile there is a whole generation that doesn't understand this joke

euroweld@feddit.de to Futurama @lemmy.world – 772 points –
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I never understood why Al acts like having sex with his hot wife is a chore. Boomers sure are different.

As a millennial who is now the same age as Al, I get it a lot more. When you are 40, come home from a job you hate that doesn’t pay enough, and are physically and mentally exhausted, yeah, sex isn’t as appealing, even if married to Katey Sagal. You just want to plop down on the couch, turn off your brain, and be left alone. Peggy being horny is just a reminder that his wife refuses to work (neither outside nor inside the home) and has more energy.

But also remember they originally offered the role to Rosanne Barr, which would have been even more understandable.

Rosanne Barr would have absolutely ruined the show and it would never have been as popular.

Al Bundy spends all day working on his hands and knees for women only to come home to more demands from a woman he’s not emotionally attracted to.

It’s supposed to be ironic that he can’t derive joy from the one bright spot in his life, a sexy wife who’s DTF.

DTF?

Dancing the Fandango

It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this grim fandango
And will four years before we rest.

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It's also a nod to sooooo many married couples who got together for all the wrong reasons

Al nailed Peg because she was hot, not because he actually liked her. Peg got knocked up

Suddenly, Al, who was a star at the time and had many gals, is stuck with one annoying chick he only liked when he was drunk at a party.

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Not everyone has, or keeps their desire for sexual activity

No matter how hot an individual may be, somebody, somewhere, is tired of fucking them.

The whole show is peek boomer "haha wife bad/annoying" humour.

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This episode aired 23 years ago.

We've moved into boomer territory when we joke that kids today don't get a joke older than the actual kids today

Oh fuck me. For a moment I started to think "no. Married with Children was already over 23 years ago" then I quickly realized that holy shit, Futurama is already over 23 years old.

And the reference is a show that ran until 1997. So a small slice of the audience was too young at the time.

And when did the MWC episode air?

Which one? The final episode aired on June 9, 1997.

I assumed it was a shot for shot parody of an episode. Guess it could just as easily be of all of them.

Oh, no, it was a common scene that indeed could have been any of them.

Reddit once voted the end of an ep of Archer as the greatest moment in TV history or some such.

The moment in question was a shot-for-shot homage to an episode of Magnum PI. No one seemed to acknowledge this.

Was it the end of the LA arc when he gets shot in the pool? Or wasi t from the Vice season?

had to turn my vpn on to watch it in the Uneducated States

Blocked in Canada too. Thanks for being out of NBC Universal's reach, Deutschland.

It does also require a knowledge of the acting credits of Leela's voice actress, though.

I actually had forgotten that Leela is Katey Segal. I thought it was funny without that extra context.

Unfortunately I'm exceptionally good at matching voices. I knew it was Peg Bundy before I finished episode 1, and then I went online to verify that.

That was one of Futurama's weaker episodes even if you understand the actor allusion. If you don't get the reference, a lot of screentime is spent on a couple of the characters behaving in slightly strange ways for no apparent reason.

It's one of my favorites (when I saw it two decades ago) but I guess I get the references. I just thought Fry pretending not to know what a video game was and the internet being full of ads and sex still relevant? Bender also stealing everything was a delight.

“This one’s got NO eyes!”

(Prys off all the jewel eyes)

I remember the joke before that being:

"this statue's only got one eye"

"lazy sculptor"

then when the "no eyes" bit came up ... I was cracking up.

The internet being full of ads and sex is still relevant (ads possibly moreso) but yeah it's not as fresh as it was. If anything the Napster episode aged worse than the plain internet one, but I think it holds up as an episode better.

Married With Childrens last episode aired in 1997 so it was in recent memory, and I'm sure you could watch a rerun of MWC same day this episode aired (March 19, 2000).

...if you cared to, which at least some of the audience likely did not. I'm sure the demographics of a live action present day dysfunctional family sitcom and a sci-fi cartoon don't perfectly overlap.

Then 23 years went by.

Multiple generations.

I guess it depends on how restrictive your parents were with TV access, Millennials born between 1990 and 1995 could have easily seen Married with Children and then Futurama and understood the reference from a young age, but Gen Z wouldn't be very likely to see Married with Children at all, and I dispute the existence of a Gen Alpha yet because there is no way Gen Z are old enough to have kids with opinions in any sizeable demographic so therefor it isn't a generational gap.

Married With Children would have ended when millennials were somewhere between 16 and 1.

It doesn't really matter how strict your parents were with TV. Most millennials weren't really in the target demographic for it when it was airing; they'd have been more likely to be watching Rugrats, Power Rangers, All That, Dragon Ball Z or whatever if left to their own devices.

They'd have watched it if it were something their parents watched. I literally never deliberately turned on Friends or Will And Grace, but since my parents watched them, I saw a bunch of them. Married With Children wasn't a show my parents followed, though, so the Futurama episode would have gone over my head.

It really seems like a reference aimed mostly at the oldest millennials, gen X, and boomers.

I tell you what, I didn't exactly stick to age appropriate television from a young age. I could be an outlier, I guess.

As someone who watched rugrats and dbz, All that, and a Lil power rangers....YOURE FLIPPING WRONG! I also watched the heck out of MWC and also Roseanne.

  • Older Mellinial

I'm only 27, not American and I had never heard of married with children before. I can remember watching fresh Prince of Bel air and friends (repeats) and some other shows. Plus I'm on the oldest end of gen z and if I'd had a kid at 16/17 then they'd certainly be old enough to have opinions.

They'd be 10 so probably not opinions that matter, no. But if you were born in 1995 then I don't think your parents were millennials, were they?

I am refiering to generation alpha. (2010 on since there is not really an agreed on date.)

To be Gen Alpha you must be the child of Gen Z who had to be the child of Millennials.

So if you agree that a millennial was born in 1980 and had kids at 18 who then had a kid at 18 then a Gen Alpha would be like 6 or 7 years old maximum.

To be Gen Alpha you must be the child of Gen Z who had to be the child of Millennials.

This is not true. I'm a millennial (1989) but my parents are boomers (1950s), not Gen X, as are the vast majority of my friends. Not everyone has kids in their early 20s, infact the average age to have your first kid in the UK is 29.

Listen if there is no generational gap between you and boomers, then you're just a Gen X, mate. One generation to the next, no skipping.

Literally not how it works at all. Generations are defined on the year you were born, not who you were born to.

Mick Jagger was born in 1943, making him part of the Silent Generation. When his wife had their latest kid, in 2016, Jagger was 73. That child is not a baby boomer.

You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation#List_of_named_generations

Do you know what the word Generation means? Literally in no other context is it defined that way, but you're using Wikipedia as a source so clearly I don't expect you to have any learning capacity at this point. Maybe you really are Gen Alpha at your mommy's tablet.

Ok, I think this is just trolling at this point. No way someone can make this argument in good faith AND throw out that weak of an insult.

Its like its totally impossible for a word to mean 2 slightly different things is different contexts.

Yeah if only we had some sort of non profit organization to run some sort of massive online wiki to keep this all straight for us.

If only that organization had a citation method at the bottom of every page where anybody with half a brain could find actual sources.

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I think it was a banger insult, just enough not to seem unreasonable. If I wanted to alienate the opposition then discussion would very quickly become meaningless, like your comment for example: completely devoid of any relevant context, only an attack on my person.

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I can't believe you're this confident about something so basic and somehow you're wrong

Also, what, can't win an argument without infantilizing your opponent? I mean it's clear you know nothing about this topic and just assume you can "debate" about it using google or whatever, ironic coming from the guy who discounts wikipedia. That's better than anything you'd know by a good margin anyways.

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generation noun gen·​er·​a·​tion ˌje-nə-ˈrā-shən

1 a : a body of living beings constituting a single step in the line of descent from an ancestor

b : a group of individuals born and living contemporaneously

c : a group of individuals having contemporaneously a status (such as that of students in a school) which each one holds only for a limited period

d: a type or class of objects usually developed from an earlier type

Socially, named generations like millennials use definition 1b, because some people are grandparents at age 30, and others don't become grandparents til they're 80.

I think those definitions pretty well support my argument, honestly.

While the generations align less and less over time in my definition, it on average stays very accurate since most human life cycles align pretty closely, especially considering female fertility usually starts at puberty (but is very rarely utilized in developed nations before 18) and declines between ages 30 and 50. I still think it's a really weak definition if you give out arbitrary date ranges which inevitably leads to random smaller generational definitions and too many varying opinions on what generation starts or ends where.

Nobody is becoming a grandparent at 30 unless they had kids at an age that depicts failure of a society, for example age 15 and their kids had kids at 15, which is very very far from average or even a sizeable demographic unless you're a family of 16th century nobles.

I still think it's a really weak definition if you give out arbitrary date ranges which inevitably leads to random smaller generational definitions and too many varying opinions on what generation starts or ends where.

The point of generational cohorts like millennials or the silent generation is that being born at a particular time in history has an affect on people.

The silent generation's earliest memories were depression and war. The great recession impacted millennials in their early career or in high school.

Age ranges captures that and makes it easy to measure things without having to find out when someone's great grandparents were born.

And yeah, 30's on the young side. Lauren Boebert was in the news recently as a teen mother who became a grandmother at age 36.

Your definition slips pretty quickly, though. Some siblings have really long age gaps. Some women first give birth at 18 or 19, others not til they're 40.

It doesn't really "slip pretty quickly", it slips over the course of many generations. The average is close enough that extreme cases can be sorted into outliers. My definition still very clearly describes people growing up in different historical eras the same as the other does, it simply takes away the self-identification privileges that these other commenters prefer.

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Yes, as I have nephews that are gen alpha, that is how that works. You have kids now that are not gen Z and are around 10 that never knew MWC. Just because someone is young does not invalidate their status as people (yet, don't give them any ideas).

The problem is there are people in the comments who seem to think they're Gen Alpha, Millennial, or Gen Z without realizing they skipped generations in their calculation.

Yes and yet you are the only person that seems to think this is how generations work, that somehow you can skip at all.

I think you've replied to the wrong person. I'm the one saying that you cannot skip.

Wait, no. You are the one that thinks you can skip!

As in the whole concept of skipping generations is insane in this context.

You almost got me there.

I'm saying it goes in sequence, that it can't go from Gen X > Gen Z without a Millennial intermediary. Therefor I am in fact the one saying there is no skipping.

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Nonsense. Cultural history transferrence is a thing, I did not have to have watched Gilligan's Island or the Honeymooners to get the references in every 80s tv show, it became clear from the context and its own meta joke.

So no, just like a GenX-er did not need to have been a Baby Boomer to undestand the "One of these days Alice, Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon!" reference, a Gen Z-er can quite easily get references about Gen X series from the frequency and context they encounter them.

I can confirm this. I am a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000. I am Gen X. They were self-described "post-boomer(s)." I didn't get some of the references to pop culture older than me, but often the delivery made it funny anyway. And people much younger than me who love the show feel the same way.

Tbh one of the coolest parts to me is that I can learn about other old movies and stuff that they reference, and then when I rewatch the mst3k ep I get other jokes that didn't hit for me watching the first time.

My mom (border of gen x and boomer) explained all the references to me when I was a kid watching Futurama for the first time. Honestly, Futurama and seeking out information related to the references (either my parents would tell me or I'd look it up in the 2010s when I really started having access to the internet) is probably the biggest way I learned about past culture. At this point I'm explaining the references to my kid but he really is just so far removed from it. Because they're from like 4 generations ago and have been referenced so much since. Still interesting but I do feel like it, "hits different" as the teens say.

Not to mention, streaming services are just about everywhere. If you look at the right time, sometimes you can even find entire seasons of shows on YouTube.

Do some of the people from older generations commenting suddenly forget about the rest of the internet or what? Lol

Some of us also have parents who collect DVD, CDs, Blu-Rays and more. I find it hard to believe that an entire generation would just be unaware especially with how all over the place media is

Only fans of Married with Children would ever get the joke. Plenty of people who grew up while it was running didn't necessarily see it though.

I mean I am like 30+ and I didn't get this joke.

Leela's voice actress played Peggy Bundy on Married with Children. Ed O'Neill played Al Bundy and is playing the shape shifter pretending to be one of Leela's supposed alien race (she's not an alien, but she didn't know that yet then). They are re-enacting the look and dynamic of Married with Children in this scene.

EDIT: I was mistaken, the voice actor is not Ed O'Niell, as kindly pointed out below.

Is that Ed O'Neill? Shit I never made that connection, he sounds way different.

Futurama, Modern Family, Wayne's World. Guy is an American national treasure.

It was not Ed O’Neill. He was voiced by David Herman, who also voiced Scruffy and Leela’s father.

They should have used the voice of Ed O'Neill. Then the joke would be PERFECT!

To my knowledge, Ed O'Neill has never voiced in a Simpsons or Futurama episode. Which seems kinda weird since he was a fellow Fox alumni.

Oh, thanks for the correction. I thought that was the Joke but it was just Leela doing Peg again then.

Oh wow, my mind immediately went to Amy Winehouse when I saw that hair

I'm 35 and got the joke

I'm 25 and did not

Incase you still don't, it's referencing a late 80s to mid 90s sitcom Married with Children. It's surprisingly good. Katey Segal who voices Leela played one of the main characters, Peggy.

i recognized all the characters, but my TIL was that they were preformed by the same actress 🤯

Well I didn't get it at first but I certainly watched married with children. Mainly because there wasn't anything else to watch at the time on TV.

There's a joke?

The voice actor for Leela (Katey Sagal) played Peggy Bundy in the tv show Married… with children, which was hugely popular in the 90s. The above picture was a very common scene from the tv show. Peggy with huge hair, sitting on the couch with her husband watching tv and eating junk food. So, it’s a fun reference to her previous work.

In my headcannon Peggy left Al behind and joined up with a biker and his gang, creating a whole new life for her. Al meanwhile took the kids, left chicago for california and used his knowledge about sales to create a solid closet company. Out of that lead infested house, Kelly got her act together and met Phil - while Bud Was finally done with overcompensating.

Unfortunately that new life was full of hardship and abuse, if Sons of Anarchy is her sequel.

Peggy then eventually married Josh Lyman, who became a pilot after leaving President Santos. They had a son who became the greatest detective that the NYPD has ever known!

So, it’s a fun reference to her previous work.

So then not a joke, but a reference. I understood the reference but failed to see the joke. Maybe I am just overly pedantic.

No worries! I always thought of a “joke” as something that was intended to make me laugh. When I first saw this, I laughed as I didn’t expect a reference to her old show. So I personally consider it reasonable to call it a joke. Either way, this all has made me want to go back and watch an episode or two of Married with children. Cheers!

I watched this Futurama episode back when it aired and was disappointed to see this reference make it to the screen. It wasn't clever and they spent too much time on it. The term "cringe" has managed both to come into and go out of vogue in the intervening years.

Yep. You're the type of motherfucker nobody enjoys having a conversation with.

I don’t see any in the image. Do I need the audio or knowledge of the Futurama universe to get it?

Katey Sagal speaks both Charakters and play one real and in this episode...

I'm glad you asked. Mind if I ask you how old are you, and where are you from?

I didn't get it, and I'm 29 from Canada

Same and I got it

I didn’t know they were the same actor originally but with reruns it’s not like they weren’t on at the same time

Well, I now need rule34 of Leela as Peggy, specifically those clothes with the top pulled down.

If you find one on your travels please feel free to share ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

I've been drawn to Futurama because of Katey Sagal. I'm a huge fan of MWC. Watched both of them dozens of times.

I was absolutely blown when I discovered that Peggy and Leela are played by the same actress.