Thursday, April 25, 2013

After the Quake


The story of “super-frog saves Tokyo” reminds me of the episode of Futurama called “Godfellas” where Bender is drifting in space and small creatures inhabit his body. Bender becomes a god and the creatures who worship him ask him for help. Eventually rival factions start and a nuclear holocaust kills most of them. Bender doesn’t know what to do to remedy the situation and becomes frustrated. Eventually Bender meets what appears to be God and gets help being reunited with Fry and Lela.

It seems like Katagiri is in the same situation. He is just drifting in life and tries to help people as best he can like his siblings with their college educations. But Katagiri never gets any recognition and especially at his work, where he is apparently excellent at collecting unpaid loans. This appears to be the reason Frog selects him to help save the city. If the city knew that Katagiri helped save the city would they care? Or perhaps he is just insane altogether. The parallel is that in Futurama Bender is eventually saved by God and Tokyo is saved by a random debt collector. Perhaps it was fate or maybe just happenstance? Whatever the case, I agree with the ending of the Futurama episode: “When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”

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