The Extras special/finale was almost harrowing, not only rubbing his face in his failed ambitions but having his not-a-girlfriend slide steadily and realistically towards homelessness — a grim cautionary tale rather than a comic commentary. Yes, there was a happy ending and I was grateful for it. But was it a real…

Connie's father yells at Hank to keep that "sex fiend" Bobby away from her. Hank expresses appropriate concern over his son's inappropriate behavior; but the moment he's alone casts an intensely grateful look to heaven.

"Dinner, like youth, shall be served."

Meanwhile, Fry and Leela are settling into a mostly taking-for-granted mode.

Not counting the whole episode where the heads of the original cast (and "Welshie") end up on a planet where the sole inhabitant traps them in an eternal convention.

I seem to remember Sideshow Bob complaining about his attempted murder conviction. "Do they give the Nobel Prize for attempted physics?"

There have been some angel sitcoms. The Smothers Brothers did one where deceased Tom returned as an angel tasked with doing good deeds, dragging ladies' man Dick into his assignments. I remember a catchy a theme song by the brothers ("His brother Tom was lost at sea without his water wings; and now he is an angel who…

There was a short story, adapted for an interesting but extremely low budget Norman Corwin series in the 70s, about a widower who brings in a Stepford-style robot to function as mother to his kids and, implicitly, his wife. The gist was he became bothered at his growing romantic attachment to the robot, which was…

It's a little hard to get behind television-generated spinoffs. I enjoyed future Batman and grown-up Static Shot when they cropped up in a time-travel episode, but otherwise they seemed to exist outside my DCAU, like the toony Teen Titans (Robin was stripped of his history and even his unmasked identity). Also, saw…

Speaking as an old guy who grew up on the Filmation versions of DC, BTAS through JLU was what I always hoped for but never got on Saturday mornings. 
 Filmation shows were no better animated than Hanna Barbara's, but the heavy black outlines and background detail (somebody tried to make metal look like metal) seemed to…

SHERLOCK JUNIOR: Buster Keaton is a projectionist who fantasizes being a movie super-sleuth after making a hash of a real mystery: the theft of a watch from his girlfriend's father (he ends up blamed for it). While Keaton's dream plays out, back in the real world the girl quickly and efficiently identifies the real…

Pretentious anecdote:

And Disney World has a pretty impressive Twilight Zone RIDE, packed with objects evoking specific episodes (broken eyeglasses, that little fortune machine with a devil's head)

Yes, Moby Dick. In each 6 or 7 miniute episode, two kids would run up against a new hostile civilization ("Guards! Seize them!"). Moby would come to the rescue, smashing into things headon. They were always at the bottom of the sea, with diving masks but no air tanks.

Just want to comment that HB took Scooby-Doo pretty far afield from the original formula for a long stretch. Pardon if my chronology is wobbly: