What was the third gag in the “Reincarnation” episode of Futurama? - Movies & TV

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In the “Reincarnation”
episode of Futurama, they broke the episode up into three segments,
each of which used a different style.

The first
one was in an old-fashioned Max Fleischer style and the main gag was that Fry
accidentally created a new color unlike any other color previously known, which of
course we couldn’t see because the segment was in
black-and-white.

The second act was in 16-bit
video-game style—which Community had recently done—and the gag was
that the professor’s fancy microscope was able to zoom to a super-microscopic level,
allowing him to see the smallest form of matter in all its “beautiful, intricate,
detailed” glory and thus allowed him to discover a grand-unified-theory. The gag of
course being that because the segment was in 16-bit, we could not see the detail the
professor mentioned and only saw a single
pixel.

The final part was in anime style. I did
not notice any specific gag about something that we would be unable to see because of
the style used.

href="http://theinfosphere.org/Reincarnation" rel="nofollow">This page
mentions a communications issue between the two races which seems like it could work
because of how anime programs are (poorly) dubbed into English, but that would be pretty
weak compared to the previous two. It also mentions Zoidberg doing an intricate dance,
but the camera simply panning over him standing still. That really sounds like the
second one, but I don’t see how it has anything to do with doing the segment being anime
or why it would have been different had they done it in their normal
style.

Does anyone know what the
third gag was (or if there even was one—which would really surprise me if there were
not).

Answer

Okay, I think I figured it out. The reason
that Zoidberg’s “intricate dance” was a joke when done in anime style is because anime
tends to use limited animation frames resulting in a jerky motion, sort of like stop-go
or claymation. For example, instead of smooth movements like many of today’s cartoons,
even modern day anime seems to still use a more 60’s style with few intermediate key
frames (like many smaller animated GIFs).

As
such, instead of Zoidberg doing a smooth, flowing dance like the in-show characters see,
we should have seen a simple, jerky dance, but instead they just
showed a slow pan across his body.

For example,
what the characters saw may have been something like
this:

src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/TqAl4.gif" alt="Zoidberg dancing
smoothly">

While we would have
only seen this:

src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qi1wS.gif" alt="Zoidberg dancing
jerkily">