Just about every scene of Futurama is dense with layers upon layers of jokes and references,
and even hardcore fans can have a hard time catching them all. Here are some of the most
obscure — and easy to miss — moments from the hilarious sci-fi saga.
In the 2002 episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before," Star Trek lover Fry is dismayed to
learn that after the show's fandom became a religion, its fans all died in the Star
Trek Wars. Then, to make matters worse, the only copies of Trek episodes and movies were
dumped on an abandoned planet. Fry and company steal away Leonard Nimoy's head from the Head
Museum and journey to that world to get the tapes. It is on this forbidden world that
an energy cloud named Mellvar keeps the original Star Trek cast. Mellvar keeps them eternally
young, but also forces them to do Star Trek things, like participate in a never-ending
convention and act out his fan fiction.
In this Trek-reference-laden episode, veteran Trek actors Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner,
Walter Koenig, George Takei, and Nichelle Nichols all voice their animated counterparts,
with one glaring omission: James Doohan, who portrayed Enterprise chief engineer Montgomery
Scott, a.k.a. Scotty. Instead of the Scottish guy, they've got a Welsh guy named Welshy.
"Nichelle! George! Walter! Jafartis! And Welshy!"
"Welshy?"
Supposedly, Doohan's agent said no to the part, leading the Futurama folks to come up
with their own explanation for Welshy.
"We did some musical specials in the 2200s but the guy who played Scotty had trouble
yodeling."
Every episode, Futurama offers a one-liner at the bottom of its title screen. Some past
examples include: "As seen on TV," "For external use only," and, on the 2010 episode "The Prisoner
of Benda," the joke is "What happens in Cygnus X-1 stays in Cygnus X-1." That's a two-fer
of a reference. First, it plays off of the long-used, universally known Las Vegas tourism
slogan "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas."
However, Cygnus X-1 is a real thing. It's a stellar-mass black hole, a 700 light years-wide
cosmic entity said to have formed from the collapse of a star. As black holes have tremendous
gravitational pull and suck in anything that dares come near, well, what happens in Cygnus
X-1 really does stay in Cygnus X-1. That sucks.
The 2000 episode "War is the H-Word," in which Fry and Bender join the Earth Army and go
off to fight an alien race of spheres, is a full-length riff on the Robert Heinlein
book and 1997 movie Starship Troopers. But there's a much more subtle, sci-fi themed
easter egg hiding in the beginning of the episode.
In an establishing shot of 7-11, there's a sign in the window that offers "Free bag of
Ice-9 with 6-pack." On the surface, that's a funny number/wordplay joke. On a deeper
level, it's a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's seminal 1963 novel Cat's Cradle. The novel
follows a well-meaning scientist who develops ice-nine, which is used to quickly solidify
liquid or murky terrain to make life easier for marching soldiers, only for it to infect
the ocean and likely turn all water on earth to ice, killing all life. In other words,
it is a natural promotion for people buying beer at 7-11.
In the 2011 Futurama episode "Overclockwise," young clone Cubert Farnsworth gives Bender
the robot a powerful upgrade to his operating system, "overclocking" him to the point where
he gains superpowers. Speed-reading is among his new abilities, and he devours every book
on the big shelf in the Planet Express conference room in a matter of seconds. Among the titles
he instantly reads: Calculus, Advanced Calculus, the NNYC Phone Book, The Basketball Diaries,
The Oxford English Dictionary, and Decline and Fall of the Romulon Empire.
He also puts away Wuthering Gattaca, evidently a combination of Emily Brontë's Wuthering
Heights and the 1997 Ethan Hawke sci-fi movie Gattaca. Then, for just a fraction of a second,
a book called How I Conquered Your Planet appears in Bender's hands. That's actually
a real book, although an obscure, self-published one. It's a 2006 sci-fi detective novel by
John Swartzwelder, a veteran staff writer for The Simpsons.
Like most every character on a continuing cartoon series, Philip J. Fry wears the exact
same clothes in almost every episode of Futurama. Blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a red windbreaker.
He doesn't much care that his old-fashioned clothes make him stick out in New New York,
probably because his outfit was also a bit outdated for 1999. All things considered,
it probably doesn't bother Fry, because his choice in clothes make him resemble one of
the coolest dudes who ever lived in any century. His clothes match exactly the ones worn by
bad boy actor James Dean in the 1955 classic of juvenile delinquent cinema, Rebel Without
a Cause.
No one else on Futurama sounds quite like Dr. Zoidberg.
"The gymnasium? Excellent, excellent. For some reason, I'm frisky as a squid on Tuesday."
According to voice actor Billy West, he got the voice by combining impressions of two
different entertainers, both of whom are almost completely forgotten to modern audiences.
One of them is "marble-mouth George Jessel," a vaudeville comedian and early film star
who had his own radio show in the early '50s. The other major Zoidberg component is Canadian
character actor Lou Jacobi.
When the series introduced Zoidberg's uncle in the 2001 episode "That's Lobstertainment!"
writers went back to the old Hollywood well. Harold Zoid, a star from the "silent hologram
era," has a name and character which riff on silent film comedian Harold Lloyd.
There are a handful of "fun facts" about the American presidents that virtually everybody
seems to know. For example, most people know that future Futurama Earth President Richard
Nixon was the only American president to resign, and that Grover Cleveland is the only president
to ever serve two non-consecutive terms in office. Futurama writers buried a clever,
jokey reference to this bit of historical knowledge.
In the 1999 pilot episode of Futurama, Fry discovers that scientists have learned to
keep human heads living in jars indefinitely, and that the noggins of many individuals take
residence in New New York's Head Museum. The Head Museum features a Hall of Presidents
— home to the actual, living, suspended-in-solution heads of past Commanders-in-Chief, including
Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Andrew Jackson, and Grover Cleveland. In fact, because he
was president on two separate occasions, the Head Museum actually holds two Grover Cleveland
heads.
In the early seasons of Futurama, Leela feels alone in the universe. Not only is she unhappily
single, but she believes she's an orphan and possibly the last living Cyclops. In the 2000
episode "A Bicyclops Built for Two," all her dreams look to come true when she falls in
love with a man named Alcazar, who pretends to be the last male Cyclops. She travels with
him to their supposedly empty home planet of Cyclopia, where he lives in a castle.
He's a lovely guy... until the morning after they sleep together. Suddenly, Alcazar — or
Al, as he prefers to be called — is a selfish chauvinist pig. He demands she make him breakfast,
then insults her cooking. Before long he's sitting glumly on an old couch watching TV,
trading insults with a dissatisfied Leela, who has done her hair the way Al likes it.
This end result closely mirrors the premise and action of Married... with Children, the
early Fox hit on which Katey Sagal, who voices Leela, starred as big-haired Peggy Bundy opposite
Ed O'Neill as rude, crude Al Bundy.
The word "Futurama" is a pretty good title for a show set in the future about a man from
the 20th century who's astounded by all that the far-off 31st century has to offer. But
Futurama co-creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen didn't just make up that word. According
to a first season DVD commentary, it won out over some other, invented ideas, including
Doomsville and Aloha, Mars. "Futurama" implies optimistic, future-forward thinking, and it
happened to be the name of an attraction in the General Motors pavilion at the 1939 New
York World's Fair.
The ride took visitors through a miniature landscape of an America 20 years hence, which
included such novel concepts as widespread ownership of cars that used radio signals
to keep their distance from each other, which they'd drive on an intricate, countrywide
highway system. With the New York World's Fair in 1964 came Futurama II, which included
such Futurama-worthy predictions as underwater hotels and moon tourism. A slogan of the 1939
iteration promised a look into "the world of tomorrow," and Groening and Cohen made
sure to pay homage to the original Futurama.
"Welcome to the world of tomorrow!"
"Why do you always have to say it that way?"
In "The Route of All Evil," Cubert Farnsworth and Dwight Conrad go into business and direct
competition with their dads, creating Awesome Express and scoring a lucrative contract to
deliver the Daily Supernova newspaper to strange and distant points in outer space.
During one of these bike-pedaled-spaceship deliveries, they zoom past an asteroid occupied
by an innocent-looking blond boy in a pale green outfit. He catches the paper gratefully,
but unfortunately, when Hermes and Dr. Farnsworth try to one-up their sons, he doesn't fare
quite so well. He's knocked into the void of space by the force of the paper. Little
did Hermes know that he might have just gotten rid of royalty. That little space boy is the
title character from the famous children's book The Little Prince, which follows a lonely
little boy who lives on a tiny asteroid.
Captain Zapp Brannigan is as odious as they come, a staggeringly mediocre man who somehow
becomes a 25-star general in the Democratic Order of Planets with command of its most
important space vessel, the Nimbus. He's utterly incompetent and is constantly saved from complete
ruin by his number two, Kif. Brannigan sails through life with unearned confidence, enacting
reckless military strategies and thinking he can seduce any woman he pleases.
In the 1999 episode "Love's Labour's Lost in Space," Zapp tries to seduce Leela by laying
in bed in his robe, with his paunch clearly visible inside the outfit. Behind him on the
wall hangs what appears to be his official captain's portrait. His arms are crossed and
his head bowed as if deep in thought, which seems to suggest a soulful, thoughtful leader
of men. He's none of those things, of course, which is why it's hilarious. It's also an
exact re-creation of a famous painting: Aaron Shikler's official presidential portrait of
John F. Kennedy. Zapp would compare himself to a revered politician, wouldn't he?
In the 2001 episode "Roswell That Ends Well," Fry microwaves a metal popcorn container on
the Planet Express ship. Fry's mistake upsets the balance of radiation and sends the ship
back through time and space, crash-landing the crew in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.
To return to the future, Professor Farnsworth needs microwave technology of some kind, and
the microwave antenna at the local military base would work. He warns Fry that acquiring
it could be tricky, as Fry's grandfather Enos works at that base, and if he killed him he'd
erase his existence. Fry tries to protect his grandfather as best he can, and to prevent
harm, he locks him in a house... which he doesn't realize is located on a nuclear weapon
testing range.
The test kills Enos almost immediately, and Fry tries to comfort Enos' fiancée, a diner
waitress named Mildred... but they wind up sleeping together. Fry figures that since
he didn't blink out of existence when Enos died, then Enos must not have been his grandfather.
As it turns out, Mildred is still his grandmother; she just became pregnant by Fry. As Professor
Farnsworth tells Fry:
“Oh, a lesson in not changing history from 'Mr. I'm-My-Own-Grandpa, let's just get the
hell out of here, already, screw history."
Farnsworth's mockery is actually an explicit reference to "I'm My Own Grandpa," a hit novelty
song by the duo Lonzo and Oscar. It's a strange tune that details the odd circumstances by
which a man becomes his stepmother's stepfather, and thus, by default, his own grandpa. Fittingly
enough, the song was released in 1947.
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