Danny Sichel messaged me to say:
The backstory to Nunsense is that a large group of nuns die of food poisoning. Food poisoning is not a comfortable death. Are we supposed to imagine, when attending this hit off-Broadway comedy, the previous group of nuns screaming in agony as they shit out their intestines?
Of course, Futurama used the same basic setup as regards the Planet Express crew prior to Fry, Leela and Bender. But they are cartoons, so the horrible deaths are more permissible, I suppose.
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Honestly? I’ve seen food cases of food poisoning that WEREN’T fatal, and I can say that being devoured by a space wasp was probably faster, less painful, and much more dignified. Of the two options I’d certainly pick that one.
Futurama milked humour out of a vast number of horrible happenings, not just death.
And it’s played for humour that the Addams family (movies and TV show) consider torture to be recreational fun.
Probably part of the reason that Futurama gets away with it os that the space bees is just a quick joke at the end of the pilot to get rid of the job problem. From the look of the wiki synopsis, the nun death is the actual core element of the play in Nunsense
The nuns have to die, one way or another, and I don’t know of any mass death that’s “comfortable”. I think it would have been funnier if they had all simultaneously stepped off a cliff while one of their sisters tried to line them up for a group photo by the sea–a photo that would have been meant for their holiday greeting cards, naturally–but it would still be a pretty bad way to go.
“We know that more than a hundred nuns have all simulatenously died on a small island off the south of france that used to be a leper colony. Your job is to go to the island and rescue any survivors.
Good morning, you’re on the Global Frequency.”
Ah, Global Frequency.
Heck of a concept. I need to see the TV pilot some time.
sadly, Bret, you didn’t miss much from the TV pilot. One of the joys of the GN was the ever-rotating cast of heroes. One of the first things they rigged up for the (American) TV pilot was setting it up for a recurring set of basically buddy-cop protagonists.
The backstory to Forever Plaid is they all got hit by a bus of kids on their way to see The Beatles. Theater has never worried much about pretty deaths.
George, other than Mirando Zero & Aleph, the cast of Global Frequency was going to rotate, with major characters getting killed off.
http://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2005/06/one-last-gf-question.html