Futurama
“Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you.”
That Trek tribute came over the airwaves over a backdrop of what reminded me of Nintendo’s Life Force. I had never put forth so much effort into watching a series premier before or after that Sunday in late March of 1999. I watched it in my girlfriend’s parent’s living room, pretty much sitting in awe with my mouth open for the entire half hour, excluding commercial breaks where I excitedly repeated the lines as best as I could, if only for my own amusement. I hadn’t cared about The Simpsons for about two years at that point, feeling it had become a hollow vessel for celebrity cameos. I still respected its edgier early seasons, but something about it seemed very corporate now. I thought maybe Matt Groening was given Futurama as some sort of Simpsons blood money, but when I was younger everything was a big conspiracy to me anyway.
If you haven’t seen it, the premise of the show was simple: a simple guy, Fry, with no future gets cryogenically frozen and wakes up 1000 years in the future. He befriends an alcoholic robot, Bender, while trying to escape his career assignment officer, Leela. The series makes a lot of comical assumptions about the future, including the use of “suicide booths,” where suicide has presumably been legalized and price at twenty-five cents. Bender is himself a model of inefficiency, a hyper strong and intelligent humanoid robot with emotions, whose sole purpose for existing is bending girders. By the end of the first episode, Fry’s actions had shown Leela that she hated her line of work, and Bender, who himself was attempting booth-suicide, felt compelled to tag along since Fry considered him a friend, though voiced his concern over appearing to be a “robosexual.” The three end up conveniently (it is television) being offered jobs by Fry’s distant descendant, Professor Farnsworth (named after the inventor of television), in a interstellar delivery agency.
As the series progresses, most episodes use delivery assignments to drive the plot, for example delivering a sign labeled “Please do not drink the Emperor” to a planet populated by water-like beings who for some reason periodically relax in bottles. Other episodes rely on individual characters, and sometimes the relationships between them. The show doesn’t pretend the plot devices don’t exist, going so far as to have the Professor refer to one in an episode as a “flimsy-pretext.” Futurama also does have celebrity cameos like the Simpsons, but in a way that pokes fun at its predecessor. The usual celebrity appearance is simply a caricature of their severed head, kept alive in glass jar of clear liquid. According to cannon, this technology was invented by Ron Popeil, who himself made a cameo inside a jar.
The series went on to introduce more members to the cast of regular characters. Among them were Amy, the wealthy, Asian grad-student from Mars, Hermes, the Professor’s business manager and accountant, who was a Jamaican bureaucrat, and Dr. Zoidberg, a lobster-like alien who, although terrible at his profession, was the company doctor. Fry’s interactions with these and others really captured the “fish out of water” theme of the show perfectly. Being somewhat dimwitted allowed Fry to ask embarrassing questions and generally find himself in uncomfortable situations very quickly but seemingly be oblivious at the same time. Somehow, that made him and Futurama in general more likable. Towards the end, Futurama became a Simpsons for “the rest of us” who weren’t “the rest of us,” which could be what led to its cancellation on FOX. In that vein, it showed that being alone in a world you don’t quite understand isn’t that bad, which was part of its draw.
To me, the series never had a “jump the shark” moment, but I would imagine some fans would argue that when Leela begins to accept Fry’s romantic advances more and more, especially in later seasons and the more recent straight to DVD movies, some of the spirit of the show is lost. I watched Futurama fairly regularly in college, and was usually treated to reruns that someone graciously made available on the dorm network by nefarious means. When I left the dorms, a lot of my TV watching habits left as well, since our basement apartment got terrible reception, and eventually I stopped watching all together rather than struggle with the rabbit ears. I know it’s sad that as a society today we have “TV moments,” but I have to admit I always get a little smile on my face when I remember the first time I heard that line that opened the series.
Plus drunk robots are awesome.
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