20 Years of the World of Tomorrow

Certain media, if it hits you at the right time, has a way of impacting you in lasting, even formative ways. Perhaps it can help shape your sensibilities and your understanding of the world. Or maybe it can just revitalize your interest in a genre in a completely new way by showing you how dynamic that genre really is. There have been a handful of such media in my life, and one of them has been Futurama. Since discovering it,  I have seen T.V. animation that has been more challenging, more artistically impressive, and more revolutionary, but Futurama remains my personal favourite animated series.

That’s not to say the show is without its’ feats of quality. Indeed, Futurama is still one of the smartest comedy series I’ve ever seen and perhaps the most consistently creative. Its’ fans know just how quotable it is, and few sitcoms have earned their emotional peaks so well.

Futurama was already set in the future when it first aired on March 28th 1999, nine months ahead of when its lead character, naive and pathetic pizza delivery boy Philip J. Fry, was cryogenically frozen on the eve of the new millennium. But though he awoke a thousand years later, the world hadn’t really changed all that much. His instantaneous hopes to start his life over with a clean slate were pretty quickly dashed by him once again becoming a delivery boy, but this time for an intergalactic courier business. That’s one of the shows’ greatest strengths, as rather than create the future as a dystopia or a utopia, both ideas rife with possibility though also unsustainable, the thirty-first century is rather a warped facsimile of the present day -allowing the show great freedom to comment on current issues and topics from the vantage point of an exaggerated but recognizable reality. The setting of the show, New New York, is a lot like regular New York, only it (and the universe) has fun, bizarre, and crazy nuances in the

corners of everyday life. “Space Pilot 3000” makes this evident fairly quickly with the presence of coin-operated suicide booths; and that kind of casual, darkly humourous minutia extends to things like the annual murder-pillage spree of Robot Santa, and in perhaps the single most world-epitomizing one-off joke in the series, the wholesale capitalization of Soylent Cola, a soft drink that is widely known and accepted to be (as its name suggests) made of people. Aliens and robots inhabit the world and live alongside humans, the Moon has become an amusement park, Mars is (in perhaps a nod to Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson basing his Martian landscapes off of Arizona and New Mexico) known for its ranch country and one prestigious university, and cryogenics is a business -Fry being not the only person from the past living in this future. And most of that’s just in the first season.

This compellingly unique world frequently combining the familiar with the insane, was the perfect playground for the series’ writers, largely made up of Ivy League math geeks –resulting in a plethora of subtle, esoteric jokes long before Rick and Morty ruined that concept. Led by the brilliant David X. Cohen, whose Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segments directly predicted a lot of the sensibility of Futurama, they routinely came up with wonderfully funny stories and fresh sci-fi concepts unlike anything else on television. This was a show where mutants live in the sewer remnants of old New York, where Atlanta is a sunken kingdom, where bacteria from cheap food can enhance ones’ strength and talents, and where the entirety of our universe exists within a cardboard box. Simultaneously, the show had a way of reworking familiar concepts such as American politics (“A Head in the Polls”, “Decision 3012”), the entertainment industry (“That’s Lobstertainment!”, “Bender Should Not Be Allowed on T.V.”), professional sports (“Raging Bender”, “A Leela of Her Own”), and music (“Bendin’ in the Wind”, “Forty Percent Leadbelly”). And that’s not even to mention the numerous fun parodies, from conventional sci-fi

staples of Star Trek, Star Wars, Independence Day and Starship Troopers to more offbeat spoofs of Animal House, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Goodfellas, and A League of Their Own.  At its best, the show used these frameworks to great effect in its stories, often smartly plotted, well-characterized, highly imaginative, and full of excellent jokes. The humour on Futurama, especially in its original run, could sometimes reach Douglas Adams levels of sharpness, or else typically match golden-age Simpsons in quality and ingenuity.

This delightfully eccentric series likewise equalled its’ predecessors’ talent for creating and developing strong, engaging characters. The central ensemble makes

for a wonderfully odd and diverse cast: Fry the hopeless yet earnest and lovable nitwit protagonist, Leela the assertive and authoritative cyclops captain, Bender the crass and amoral robot jerk, Professor Farnsworth the ancient and senile crackpot scientist, Amy the superficial Martian-born intern from a wealthy family, Hermes the tedious Jamaican bureaucrat, and Doctor Zoidberg the impoverished lobster-like alien quack and company punching bag. Over the course of the series, all of them are fleshed out and defined; and though the central trio of Fry, Leela, and Bender get the most attention, each of the others are given their due of episodes. I’ve always loved the “gang of misfits” sitcom trope and Futurama has one of the best examples. It’s immensely talented voice cast of Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Tress Macneille, Maurice LaMarche, Phil LaMarr, Lauren Tom, David Herman, and Frank Welker brought these and a slew of memorable secondary characters to life; including the

narcissistic starship captain Zapp Brannigan, his beleaguered first officer Kif, Leela’s carnivorous pet Nibbler, evil corporate autocrat Mom, robot actor Calculon, the Professors’ juvenile clone Cubert, Lrrr and Ndnd -rulers of the Planet Omicron Persei 8, news anchors Linda and Morbo, Scruffy the janitor, and Earth’s President: the disembodied head of Richard Nixon.

In spite of all this surreal nonsense, its wild and absurd characters, one of the series’ most endearing features is the emotional investment it earned. Like Fry, you come to love the weirdness of this world, and each of its characters connects in some human way (except Horrible Gelatinous Blob, because he’s a horrible gelatinous blob). They were written so well it wasn’t difficult to relate to and sympathize with the feelings of Fry, Leela, Zoidberg, Amy, even Bender. Eventually, the relationship between Fry and Leela in particular became one of the 

cornerstones of the show and indisputably its emotional centre –to the point each of the prospective series finales was heavily focussed on it. And for me, relatively one-sided though it often is, it’s one of the sweetest relationships in television. While Fry’s devotion to Leela borders on obsessive at times, there’s a tangible purity to it as a result of his simple nature. He routinely makes sweet or grand gestures, trusts her wholeheartedly, defends her honour as best he can, and in a life or death situation, Fry is (and has been) willing to sacrifice himself for Leela every time. His whole arc in Benders’ Big Score is essentially learning to put Leela’s happiness above his own, and you feel immensely for his heartache. It’s not entirely an unrequited love either, which is part of the reason the relationship works so well. Leela is often touched by his expressions of his affection,

and episodes like “The Sting”, “Rebirth”, and “Overclockwise” explore to some degree her feelings towards him, which are a little understandably complicated.  But in the moments when she displays heartfelt warmth in return, it’s immensely tender and wonderfully romantic; a coupling that, though it’s incredibly sappy to say, gives one faith in love.

Yes, Futurama has touched my heart on more than a couple occasions. It’s given me joy on a lot of others, and even challenged me from time to time. I first encountered it in reruns about a year after the show was cancelled the first time. It aired in a late night time slot just as my weekday curfew was being extended. I’d been a fan of Star Wars since I was seven but I’d never seen science-fiction presented as pure comedy before. Suddenly this whole new avenue through which

to consider my favourite genre was opened to me. And the nature of the shows’ humour really attracted me as well. Not only was it transgressive in the way that I knew my parents wouldn’t approve of me watching it (which of course made it all the more alluring, and was likewise what drew me to Family Guy, Clone High, American Dad!, The Critic, Robot Chicken, and other staples of mid-2000s Adult Swim); but I had no problem understanding the humour or relating to it. That kind of comedy that has a way of making you feel smarter was a Simpsons emblem as well, which I would learn years later when I started watching it -entirely because I liked Matt Groening’s other show so much. But the biggest reasons I became so devoted to the show was its stories that endlessly entertained me, its world that endlessly fascinated me, and its characters who I grew to know so well. Fry is still one of my favourite T.V. characters; his lonely existence, good-natured heart, awkward tendencies, and even parts of his idiocy striking a chord with a kid who often felt just as lost, dumb and insignificant. Through my teenage years I must have seen every episode of Futurama’s first four seasons a half dozen times. As they came out, I watched the direct-to-video movies as soon as I could as well and eagerly anticipated the series’ return to Comedy Central when it was announced in 2009.

That part of the show is frowned upon by a chunk of the fandom and even just general viewers and critics. Most regard the two seasons (broadcast over four years from 2010 to 2013) of the Comedy Central revival to be inferior to the original Fox run. And while I definitely agree that the later material had nowhere near the consistency of its network predecessor, and the stories and experimentations were not always well thought through, I do think this period of the show was better than it’s given credit for. There are some really good episodes in there that maintain the shows’ core spirit, and even a couple I would rank among the series’ greats. “The Late Philip J.

Fry” might be my favourite episode, and “Meanwhile” is just as good if not a better series finale as Fox’s curtain call, “The Devils’ Hands Are Idle Playthings”. And remember, this era of the show is what gave us the now classic “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore” meme. Essentially if you were to add up the best of the post-2001 Simpsons episodes you’d have seasons six and seven of Futurama.

Fry may have been frozen nineteen years and three months ago, but it was twenty years ago that Futurama was born. And for twenty years it’s made us laugh, cry, and wonder, and continues to do so. Whether or not another revival will happen in some form or another (two years ago, they launched a mobile game, Worlds of Tomorrow and a one-off tie-in podcast “Radiorama”), the series will live on -it’s too unique not to and just beloved enough. I know I’ll continue to watch and celebrate (maybe with another tribute or two before the years’ end). The year 3000 may never come but Futurama isn’t going away; so let’s raise a glass of champaggin to another two decades  of its weird and wonderful, hysterical and heartwarming, colourful and crude, and a little bit chaotic world of tomorrow!

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