Futurama Casts Seth MacFarlane as Fry's Dog, Fans Respond...Badly

"Jurassic Bark" is the episode of Futurama that most shows off what the show can be at its very best. Emotional, smart and still funny, the episode won awards and is still cited with some reverence by fans of the series who tear up just thinking about it. In the episode, the gang finds Fry's fossilized dog from the 20th Century and, along the way to attempting to clone him, Fry shares memories of life with Seymour and, in a heartbreaking final sequence, it showed what happened to Seymour after Fry went to the future at the start of the series. You can check it out below, but only because I enjoy sharing the misery.

So when advertisements for the show's upcoming seventh-and-final season showed Fry and Seymour reunited, fans were exuberant. Until today. Entertainment Weekly has the news that Seth MacFarlane will voice Seymour, who will apparently speak briefly during the seventh season. "This will be Seymour's first and only spoken dialogue," Futurama executive producer David X. Cohen tells EW. "Since Seth voices Family Guy's talking dog, Brian, we thought it would be funny to have him blatantly rip himself off for our benefit. As an added bonus, the only person he can sue is himself, so we're off the hook." Given the photo above, it's probably a fairly safe bet that there will be a "dry martini" joke in there somewhere. Sigh. The fans of have not, in general, reacted positively to the news, as you can see at right. That small sampling of MacFarlane-hate is actually pretty representative of the comments thread--although honestly I did quit once I got about 200 comments that were about 85% negative. Beyond that it seemed excessive and that frankly there was no statistical likelihood MacFarlane would suddenly get a surge of popularity.