The unnamed couple's clear, plastic tarps with strategically-placed black tape from "Space Pilot 3000", the futuristic club clothes everyone wears at The Hip Joint on "Love's Labors Lost in Space" and Leela's costume on "Bend Her" can now be identified as styles associated with Lady Gaga, Nicki Minaj, or Kesha.
In the episode "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" the scene where Amy and Leela make fun of the size of Fry's "equipment" and how it doesn't hold to their 31st century standards. Both Amy and Leela would end up having sex with Fry later on in the show. First Amy, then Leela. #
The Couch Gag from the final original series episode? "See you onsome other channel." Doubly hilarious, considering that Futurama went from being rerun on Cartoon Network's [adult swim] block to rerun (and revived) on Comedy Central, and triply hilarious now that Comedy Central cancelled it and being rerun again on FXX, then picked up for new episodes by Hulu.
During the time between the Fox cancellation and the four direct-to-DVD movies, you could say that the show, like Fry himself, was frozen in suspended animation.
A January 2002 comic titled New Year's Rockin' Evil, Bender asks the What-If Machine "what would happen if I travelled back to 1999?" A few years later he does in Bender's Big Score.
When Bender asks Farnsworth to make a woman out of him, Farnsworth misunderstands and says they should "just remain friends". We later find out that he actually has had experience with Robosexual relationships in "Proposition Infinity".
The idea of Bender getting a sex change operation after winning some Olympic gold medals and marrying a rich TV personality is very similar to the story of Caitlyn Jenner. The fact that Bender only cares about himself during all this mirrors the controversies that Jenner is not a good transgender role model.
In "Overclockwise" Mom spies on Bender and Cubert using the X-Cube 360's camera. Two years later, Kinect 2 on the Xbox One was announced to be mandatory and still listening even when left on standby, making people paranoid that Microsoft was trying to spy on them (though it would later turn out that the Kinnect would not listen during standby).
In "The Cryonic Woman", a man who was unfrozen claims he did so because he wanted to meet Shakespeare, his reasoning being "I figured time was cyclical". Although Fry's response is "Nope, straight line", "The Late Phillip J. Fry" shows that ultimately, due to the universe repeating eternally, time is cyclical after all.
In the first segment of "Anthology of Interest II", after Bender is transformed into a human, he and Amy are attracted to each other and they share a kiss. Eight years later, the episode "Proposition Infinity" focuses on Bender and Amy becoming a couple, without the former turning into a human at any point.
The second segment features the Earth being invaded by classic 1980s arcade game characters. Years later, this winds up being the basis for Pixels.
In the fourth film, Into the Wild Green Yonder, Straw Feminist Frida Waterfall has a quirk of feminizing and masculineizing words ("I will fem-unicate your man-formation"). Cut to present day and the rise in popularity of terms such as "mansplain" and "manspread."
At the end of "Three Hundred Big Boys", Dwight invests Hermes' last penny from his tax refund in five shares of Amazon, and Hermes calls him a risk-taker. As of the time of this edit, fourteen years after that episode's airing, one share of Amazon is valued at $852.60, more than twice the entire refund.
Pamela Anderson's head mentions Baywatch: The Movie, which would eventually be released in 2017. Bonus points for Walt saying that movie "hasn't been made yet", almost as if the writer of that episode somehow knew it would be made at some point or another, but it wasn't filmed entirely in slow motion like Pamela Anderson's head claimed in the episode.
Fry buys Ted Danson's skeleton at auction for $10,000, explaining, "I have an idea for a sitcom". In 2017, NBC released The Good Place, a sitcom about dead people... starring Ted Danson.
The episode ends with Zoidberg repeatedly yelling for "MORE!"
The "Pastorama" recreation of 20th century New York features a fake movie theater advertising Star Wars 9: Yoda's Bar Mitzvah. Around two decades after that episode aired, a ninth episode of Star Wars actually would hit theaters—not to mention a Star Warstelevision series featuring an infant member of Yoda's species (who will presumably be just the right age for a Bar Mitzvah before too long).
Near the end, Leela is mistakenly crowned Miss Universe before Zapp clarifies that he hadn't opened the envelope, forcing her to give up her crown to the real winner. At the 2015 Miss Universe pageant, Steve Harvey actually did mistakenly announce the wrong winner before correcting himself.
"The Honking" has Calculon reference being first attacked by the Were-car in 2019. In January of that very year, an autonomous robot called Promobot was run over by a self-driving Tesla Motors car in what was dubbed "the first robot hit-and-run accident."
In "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences", Matt Groening's head announced a new series called "Futurella" which he premieres at a comic convention only for it to be instantly cancelled by Fox before it even makes it past the title screen and him commenting how fast it was. Years down the line and the advent of streaming services, cancelling shows almost near instantly is pretty common for online series within their premieres (as most seasons are uploaded in full then episode by episode) if they're not very popular or behind the scenes deal not working out. The most prominent example being 2019 version of Swamp Thing which was axed by DC Universe only after showing one episode.
In "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" Bender remarks on how disgusted he is at how humans "shoot DNA at each other to make babies." Several seasons later in "The Bots and the Bees," Bender would learn, much to his displeasure, that robots can also reproduce through sexual intercourse, as he ended up with a biological son.
"Proposition Infinity" has the Planet Express crew go to a planet called Tornadus. Three months later, Pokémon Black and White would come out, which would introduce a legendary Pokémon with that name.
In "Time Keeps On Slippin'," Fry sets up a romantic "time-proof shelter" to protect him and Leela from the time skips, flirting, "When we're together in here, baby, time will stand still." Jump cut to Fry with a black eye after a brutal rejection. The retroactive irony comes from the Comedy Central finale, "Meanwhile," in which Fry and Leela do get married, and time literally does stand still for every character except them.
Farnsworth listing not having to talk to his parents as an upside to being elderly in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", as the Comedy Central episode "Near-Death Wish" would later reveal that his parents are still alive and on the Near-Death Star.
While it commemorates the ending of American slavery, rather than being a day where anything goes, Juneteenth (June 19th) is also known as "Freedom Day".
In "I, Roommate," when Leela suggests Fry get a new place instead of cramming himself in Bender's tiny closet, Fry flirts back, "Is that an invitation?" Of course, Leela quickly turns him down, snarking "Love your enthusiasm." It took over two decades, but in "Related to Items You've Viewed," with Fry and Leela now being an Official Couple, Leela moves in with Fry and Bender.
The Sun God in the video game boasted about his plan of harvesting his victims' bones to create an army of bone-bots, with the Hulu run's episode "Rage Against the Vaccine" featuring a canonical robot made of bones.
At the end of "Raging Bender," the Commissioner of the URFL gives the Squashed Flat Bender a coupon to Bed Bath & Beyond as a comically lame reward for his crushing defeat. As of April 2023, Bed Bath & Beyond is no longer in business as a retailer, making the gift card appear even more useless since the store would have been gone for nearly a thousand years in the show's time.
The "Jurassic Tank" scene from "Thief of Baghead". In 2015, Jurassic World would feature a Mosasaurus as the first prehistoric marine animal to appear in the films, and also an attraction in the titular new park.
In "That's Lobstertainment!", Bender hijacks of the presentation of the Best Actor category at the Academy Awards and announces Calculon as the fifth nominee of the actual guy; this alarms two Academy chiefs, but they decide to keep quiet "like with Marisa Tomei". This was a reference to conspiracies that Tomei's win for My Cousin Vinny was underserved and that presenter Jack Palance read the "real" name wrong, but the Academy was too proud to admit they made any mistake. However, at the 2017 Oscar ceremony, La La Land was erroneously announced as the winner for Best Picture, only for the error to be acknowledged and the actual winner revealed on-air just moments later, proving beyond a doubt that the Academy does not keep quiet on something like this.
The Quantum Gemerald from "Less Than Hero" looks like a much smaller version of the Master Emerald from the Sonic the Hedgehog games. Sonic Adventure 2 would show the Master Emerald as smaller than in previous appearances, even inexplicably shrinking to fit in Knuckles' hand at one point. And then fast-forward to 2022, the sequel to the 2020 live-action Sonic film would feature the Master Emerald, which is portrayed as small enough to carry in one hand.
