Fittingly for a show about the future, Futurama was ahead of the curve in all sorts of ways.
Who would have thought that a world full of alcohol-powered robots and Smell-O-Scopes
would end up resembling our own?
Here's all the times that Futurama freakishly predicted the future.
One of the most ubiquitous pieces of technology in the world of Futurama is the wrist-mounted
computer.
Though they never get an official name, Leela typically refers to hers as a "wrist thingy."
Leela has used her wrist thingy as a phone, a clock, a remote control for the Planet Express
ship, and basically everything else.
Ever since the days of The Jetsons, we have longed for wristwatch computers, but when
Futurama premiered, they were still a distant dream.
The closest thing we had at the time was Samsung's SPH-WP10, a wrist-mounted cell phone that
weighed 50 grams and had a battery life of 90 minutes.
Over the past few years though, this dream has more or less come true, with smartwatches
like the Apple Watch that can now approximate many of the functions of a smart phone.
Of course, unlike Leela's wrist thingy, the Apple Watch can't record someone rapping and
then analyze the success rate of their rhyme-busting.
In many ways, our modern world doesn't look all that different from 1999 when Futurama
first premiered.
Most of our technological progress in the past two decades has been in the realm of
computers, rather than jetpacks and flying cars.
However, we have had one major change to the skies of our cities, and that's the development
of quadcopter drones.
In recent years, technology surrounding unmanned aerial vehicles has progressed by leaps and
bounds, leading to widespread availability of cheap quadcopter drones for pretty much
anyone who wants one.
Believe it or not, Futurama kind of called this one.
Floating camera drones appear all throughout Futurama in lieu of human camera operators.
However, no one in the Futurama-verse figured out that drones can be used to make deliveries.
It's a good thing, too, or else the Planet Express crew might be out of a job.
In the episode "The Lesser of Two Evils," Fry, Leela, and Bender visit Past-o-Rama,
a theme park that is supposed to recreate late 20th/early 21st century New York.
It's not exactly accurate.
The only clearly predictive element of scenery is the marquee at the theater, which advertises
"Star Wars 9 — Yoda's Bar Mitzvah."
When "The Lesser of Two Evils" first aired, the newest Star Wars film to come out was
Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and given how poorly received that film was,
the thought that we'd eventually get an Episode IX was far from certain.
This isn't the only time that one of Futurama's joke movies ended up actually getting made.
In the episode "A Fishful of Dollars," Fry meets the head of Pamela Anderson, who tells
him that she starred in "Baywatch: The Movie."
"Hello Fry.
Remember me from Baywatch the movie?”
“Uhh….”
“It was the first movie to be shot entirely in slow-motion."
18 years later, a theatrical Baywatch film did hit theaters, with Anderson providing
a cameo.
In the world of Futurama, robots like Bender are powered by alcohol.
Out of all the wacky elements from Futurama's setting that might actually come to pass,
there's no way that we're going to actually get machines that run on beer, will we?
We present to you the newest innovation in automotive fuel: beer.
Created by New Zealand-based brewery DB Export, Brewtroleum is an ethanol fuel made from the
yeast and grain waste products left over by the brewing process.
Okay, so it's not actually beer, but finding leftover bits of biomass from other industries
and processing those waste products into ethanol fuel could be the future of biofuels.
It's frequently less work, and according to some reports, growing crops explicitly for
use as biofuels could contribute to food shortages.
So if you want the full Futurama experience of sharing a beer with one of your robot friends,
it turns out that finding the fuel is easy.
The hard part is finding a robot that runs on diesel.
You could always try the BigDog robot that was developed by Boston Dynamics back in 2005,
which does have a gas-powered engine.
Just don't make the mistake of sharing a beer with your flesh-and-blood dog, too.
Even though Futurama takes place in the 31st century, most of the prominent celebrities
in that world are the same ones we have today.
However, in most cases, all that's left of them is their heads, which are kept alive
in jars full of liquid.
We might not have cracked the science of preserving heads in jars yet in our century, but through
new advances in computer-generated imagery, we are fast approaching a world where celebrities
never die.
Ever since the debut of the infamous Tupac "hologram," the genie has been out of the
bottle in terms of using technology to virtually resurrect the dead.
In Star Wars: Rogue One, motion capture and CGI meant that the late Peter Cushing could
reprise his role as Grand Moff Tarkin, and a digitally de-aged Carrie Fisher could make
a cameo as Leia.
After Paul Walker's unexpected death during the production of Furious 7, a mixture of
visual effects techniques recreated his likeness for the last few scenes he was unavailable
to film.
An especially controversial recent example is the virtual casting of James Dean in the
film Finding Jack.
Say what you want about preserving a head in a jar — at least in that case the dead
celebrity can voice an opinion.
Futurama wasn't the first work of science fiction to posit using computers to create
immersive simulated experiences.
Novels like Neuromancer and films like Brainstorm told stories about virtual reality decades
earlier.
However, Futurama seems to be the first work of fiction to predict how quickly this technology
would be used to recreate and gamify totally mundane experiences.
Futurama first presented its take on VR in the episode "The Series Has Landed."
When the Planet Express crew visits an amusement park on the moon to deliver a package, they
swing by a video arcade to play some games.
First, we see someone playing Skeeball.
Then, we see someone playing Virtual Skeeball.
And finally, we see Amy playing Virtual Virtual Skeeball, wearing a VR headset and just sitting
in a chair.
A couple decades later, a pair of games shockingly similar to Virtual Virtual Skeeball come along
in the form of Job Simulator and its sequel, Vacation Simulator.
These comedic games use the magic of Oculus Rift technology to create immersive simulations
of completely mundane situations.
"Hello human, welcome to an accurate simulation of office worker."
These sorts of tongue-in-cheek games obviously aren't the only thing that virtual reality
is being used for, but they do speak to a larger cultural trend that Futurama predicted
— no technology, no matter how awe-inspiring, can keep blowing our minds forever.
Eventually, everything becomes a punchline.
Professor Farnsworth has created a lot of iconic inventions over the years, such as
the Coolometer, the What-If Machine, and the Fing-Longer.
Perhaps his most memorable is the Smell-O-Scope, which allows its users to smell objects at
an astronomical scale.
As Farnsworth puts it:
"That's my prize-winning smell-o-scope.
If a dog craps anywhere in the universe, you can bet I won't be out of the loop."
As silly as this device may be, it's not too far off from a real-world invention known
as the Nasal Ranger.
Unfortunately, the Nasal Ranger can't smell objects at long ranges — if you aren't in
the same space as a given odor, with actual bits of it entering your nose, there's no
way to smell it.
However, this "field olfactometer" can be used by a trained operator to quantify just
how strong a smell really is.
The Nasal Ranger allows its user to inhale ambient air filtered to varying degrees, as
determined by an adjustable dial.
By changing the tolerance of the filters, an operator can discover just how much a stench
needs to be diluted before it is no longer offensive.
According to a segment of Modern Marvels all about the Nasal Ranger, any scent that can
still be detected when one part of it is diluted with 15 parts clean air is "a nuisance."
As cool as the Nasal Ranger is, we're a little disappointed that its creators opted to measure
stinkiness with dilution ratios, instead of the Smell-O-Scope's far more scientifically
exact "Funkometer."
In "I Dated a Robot," Fry discovers a service that sells robotic companions with the personalities
and appearances of celebrities.
But shortly after Fry purchases one based on Lucy Liu, circa 2003, he learns a terrible
truth.
This company is programming its robots by kidnapping real celebrity heads and forcefully
scanning their brains.
In the end, Fry rescues the real Lucy Liu and the other kidnapped celebrity heads.
Finally, he destroys his unlawfully acquired Liu-bot, in keeping with actual Lucy Liu's
wishes.
Though realistic robots are still a ways off, we're getting closer every year.
One company recently released a version of a doll with a customizable robotic head capable
of speech and limited movement.
As a joke, comedian Whitney Cummings purchased one customized to look like herself, and incorporated
the robot into a stand-up special.
Perhaps predictably, shortly thereafter the company Realbotix reported a deluge of requests
from customers for Whitney Cummings robots.
However, Realbotix rejected these requests, since they didn't own Cummings' likeness.
Another form of entertainment this episode unintentionally predicts is deepfake adult
entertainment.
The latest trend on many adult streaming sites are videos that have been edited with facial
replacement technology to impose celebrities' faces onto the bodies of adult actors without
the consent of the given celebrities.
When the crew goes to watch "All My Circuits: The Movie" in the episode "Raging Bender,"
we see that movies have changed a bit since the 21st century.
As robot businessman Calculon is finishing some paperwork, he receives a phone call alerting
him that a fight scene has broken out at the special effects warehouse.
An announcer asks the audience to choose what happens next:
"If you want Calculon to race to the special effects battle, press 1.
If you want Calculon to doublecheck his paperwork, press 2.”
The audience selects "2," and Calculon spends the next few minutes sitting at his desk,
flipping through papers.
The promise of interactive films has been on the frontier of cinema for decades.
The first interactive movie was the 1967 Czech film Kinoautomat, but surprisingly few films
have followed in Kinoautomat's tracks.
Since the premiere of "Raging Bender," much of the hype around interactive films has been
realized in narrative-driven video games like Her Story, The Stanley Parable, or the work
of Telltale Games.
Black Mirror recently experimented with the potential of streaming services to create
interactive fiction with its mind-bending special "Bandersnatch."
It was, like many interactive movies, praised for its novelty, but criticized for not having
much depth beyond its high concept.
One instance of Futurama's uncanny prescience came in an episode that ended up predicting
not a technological trend, but a news story.
In "The Lesser of Two Evils," Leela, Fry, and Bender find themselves at the Miss Universe
pageant.
As the crew is watching the show, one of Leela's exes, Zapp Brannigan, is presenting the award.
When Zapp notices Leela as he opens the envelope, he calls out her name in surprise.
However, the pageant staff misinterprets this as Zapp announcing Leela as the winner, so
they drag her on stage and give her flowers and a crown.
Moments later, Zapp corrects the error, and Leela is stripped of her crown and flowers
to be given to the actual winner.
In 2015, the actual Miss Universe pageant had a mix-up of its own.
Moments after Miss Colombia was crowned Miss Universe, comedian Steve Harvey, who was in
charge of presenting the winner, realized that he had misread the piece of paper he
was given and accidentally named the wrong winner.
When he started to explain, the audience thought he was kidding around at first, but he clarified
that this was no joke.
The actual winner was Miss Philippines.
It was a fiasco worthy of an animated sitcom, but given that this was happening in the real
world, everyone involved found it a whole lot less funny.
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