Um, woah. That was easily one of the worst episodes of Futurama I've seen. The humour just kept missing even despite the attempt at parody. It was cute, but nothing terrible "ha-ha" funny and I didn't dig the middle Purple Berry skit at all, I guess the end message was the veil of consumerism but....*shrug* It shoves it down your throat on three separate occasions
Yes, it was being blatant about it. No, that's not what was funny about the episode. It was all of the subtle touches they added to make the segments like the programs they were parodying.
The Scooby Doo parody was pretty much the most direct but even then it was mostly aimed at the low budget-ness of all Hanna Barbera cartoons making them feel like cheap pieces of crap most of the time (and why the more obscure ones are basically forgotten outside of channels like Boomerang, because they really were cheap pieces of crap and are now garbage).
The Purpleberry one was pretty much directly riffing off the Smurfs and Strawberry Shortcake, like how all the characters were named after nobility like Princess Purpleberry, Lady Lavender, Viscount Violet, Magistrate Mulberry, and Lord Loquat, how a show that preaches friendliness and tolerance has a recurring villain, or how the only friend made was another noble bearing gifts, or how every time the show's status quo got changed it was to introduce a new product, or how a show aimed at younger audiences would have commercial bumpers have intentionally misspelled words in an attempt to both bee funny and bee condescending when most of the demographic probably wont even catch the joke leaving only the feeling of condescension.
And then there's G.I.Zapp which was pretty much a G.I.Joe filter on a Zapp Brannagin heavy short with everyone sporting more "American" faces, stuff like spotty animation cropping up every so often, and the dichotomy of having the heroes violently destroying things like Kindergartens and not batting an eye, but flipping out over a loss of a single main character prompting wanton and wholesale slaughter of the bad guys by the "good" guys, especially jarring if another "good" guy died earlier in the episode but nobody cared since he wasn't even named let alone a main character.
