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It's like Friends, with homicidal robots. "You're watching Futurama, the show that does not advocate the cool crime of robbery."
An Animated Series / Fantastic Comedy about a pizza delivery boy named Philip J Fry who is accidentally cryogenically frozen on December 31, 1999 for 1,000 years, emerging on the eve of New Year's Day 3000 to find a world of space travel, robots, aliens, mutants etc. He tracks down a distant relative, a demented old inventor who hires him as a delivery boy, and goes on to have various adventures.
Started as a Fish Out Of Temporal Water series, but slowly abandoned the notion of everything being new to Fry (as he became used to everything), and became simply an ensemble comedy set in the future.
Perhaps a bit too much focus was put on the robot character Bender, and robot society in general. The show also suffered from the overuse of celebrity heads in jars, which appeared so often that some wondered if the show might be better titled Presentrama. However, when the show did manage to effectively utilize its Science Fiction setting, such as in the multi-episode arc involving the brainspawn and the Nibblonians, the results were often fantastic.
Unlike many other Western animated shows, Futurama has a well-established canon and occasional dramatic moments. Particularly notable episodes include "The Why of Fry", "The Sting", "The Luck of the Fryrish", and "Jurassic Bark" (whose tragic ending had the producers getting hate mail from viewers who had cried).
Also notable in that a large portion of the staff were highly educated, leaving all potential Did Not Do The Research moments up to the Rule Of Funny and is the cause of many mathematical, engineering or scientific jokes ranging from subtle to extremely obscure.
FOX canceled the show in 2003, citing disappointing ratings. For its part, the show's staff, including creator Matt Groening, complained bitterly about Executive Meddling with Futurama's time slot (it ran on Sundays and was often pre-empted by football, sometimes not even being shown in many markets some weeks due to the fact that football games often overrun their timeslot), air dates and stories. Still, strong DVD sales and the show's solid performance in re-runs on Adult Swim and Comedy Central prompted the network to re-visit Futurama...in the form of four made-for-DVD movies ( Bender's Big Score, The Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender's Game, and Into the Wild Green Yonder).
It is now confirmed that Futurama has been renewed by Comedy Central for a new 26 episode run. The first new episode, titled Rebirth, is scheduled to air on June 10th, 2010. After a brief flirtation with the idea of replacing the show's voice actors, FOX reached deals with the original and much-loved actors.
This series shows examples of:
- Action Girl (Leela, named after an Action Girl from Doctor Who)
- Affectionate Parody - almost anything you can name, especially in the fields of science and science-fiction.
- Alien Tropes (All sorts)
- Alternate Universe: One episode implies there are an infinite amount, though another one features only one other alternate universe: a Cowboy universe.
- Well, see, the Cowboy Universe is a parallel universe. All those others are orthogonal.
- Does that mean "box-shaped"?
- Amazing Technicolor Population (though they may just be aliens)
- American Accents (despite being set in the future, stereotypes associated with accents still apply, even with respect to alien life forms. Amy comes from a rich family and has a valley girl accent, while Zoidberg and his species speak with Yiddish accents and sometimes display Jewish stereotypes.)
- In addition, Amy is Asian, and her parents speak with ridiculously abrasive, stilted, cliche "YOU PAY NOW, NO TICKIE NO LAUNDRY" Asian accents, despite being wildly rich (and her father seemingly always dressed like a cowboy farmer).
- Lampshaded in Wild Green Yonder where it's revealed that he took accent eradication classes from Jackie Chan.
- And The Adventure Continues: (In the fourth film Into the Wild Green Yonder, once many of the hanging romatic plot threads are tied up, the Planet Express crew is on the run from the Earth military. However, they come across a massive wormhole. Professor Farnsworth warns that it could transport them trillions of light years away, with no hope of returning to Earth. Despite this, crew enthusiastically decides to fly into it anyway.)
- And You Were There (inverted)
- Animated Series
- Asian Airhead: Amy Wong.
- Author Appeal: Deliberately parodied at numerous points. But I mostly remember while the future doesn't have Fry's "primitive notions of modesty", the only characters who seem to have no sense of modesty are Farnsworth (over 150 years old), Hermes (obese), and Cubert (twelve, overweight, and only really immodest when he's first taken out of his cloning vat). Also, humans have been genetically engineered to have larger penises, or it's possibly an oblique reference to Fry being circumcised, which according to Arthur C. Clarke is illegal in the year 3001. And of course there are the giant Amazon women. There's a speculative fiction fetish for nearly everyone, and they're all going down.
- Axe Crazy: (Roberto, the criminally insane, psychotic stab-bot)
- "I was built by a team of engineers tryin' to create an insane robot. But it seems... they failed!"
- He's not crazy, he's just not user friendly!
- The B Grade: The reason that Professor Wernstrom hates Professor Farnsworth is because Farnsworth gave him an "A" minus in college because "Penmanship counts."
- 100 years later, he gets his revenge by giving Farnsworth "the worst grade imaginable! An A minus, minus!" Which drives the point home that either he just doesn't understand the grading system because he's always been at the top of it, or that grade inflation has gotten really bad in the 30th century.
- Or simply that since they're all brilliant they can't possibly imagine having a grade lower than A—.
- Bad News In A Good Way: "Good news, everyone!" "Uh-oh, I don't like the sound of that."
- Back For The Finale: (A single scene of Into the Wild Green Yonder, depicts up to two hundred fifty minor and recurring characters that have ever appeared in the series.)
- Bad Ass Santa: Robot Santa.
- Bare Your Midriff: Amy's default pink tracksuit.
- Basement Dweller: Melllvar. Used as a Take That to Star Trek fans.
- Well a Take That to the obsessive and annoying ones yes. It should be pointed out that Fry is also a big fan of Star Trek but isn't subjected to the level of parody that Mellvar is.
- Beard Of Sorrow: Subverted when Bender stopped drinking, he developed a beard-shaped patch of rust.
- Being Good Sucks
- Beleaguered Assistant: Kif is practically the poster boy for it.
- Big Eater: Nibbler (and the rest of the Nibblonians). Let the Feast Of A Thousand Hams begin!
- Big No: In Mars University, when Pr. Farnsworth realizes his pet monkey wants to be only decently smart and get a degree in business, instead of a being a genius.
- Fry cuts loose with one after invading aliens destroy his sand castle.
- Bilingual Bonus (The "alien writing" seen in the background of many scenes are actually ciphers. Fans made a game of decoding them, and the messages are often shouts-out.)
- In the global warming episode, the crew goes to Kyoto and passes a "Curious Pussycat" billboard that states "I love you more than your mother."
- Bizarrchitecture: When Fry and Bender are looking for a new apartment.
Fry: I don't know if I want to pay for a dimension I'm not going to need.
- Bizarre Alien Biology (Zoidberg and Kif)
- Blind Idiot Translation: The German dub suffers from this - starting even before Fry gets frozen. "Doomsday Prophets cautiously upbeat" - "Weltuntergangspropheten vorsichtig verprügelt" (which translates back to English as 'End of the world prophets beaten up carefully'). What kind of moron did they hire for that translation?
- Boot Camp Episode: Fry and Bender enlist in order to take advantage of a discount for recruits, with the understanding that they can quit unless War were declared. Three seconds later, "War were declared."
- Brain In A Jar: Heads, actually, typically involving present-day celebrities (such as the pickled head of Stephen Hawking in a way-cool rocket).
- Also parodied, as they have the head of every US president going back to Washington.
- Also inverted, as Vice President of Earth, Spiro Agnew is a headless body.
- Breakout Character. Bender.
- Brother Chuck: Robot 1-X, who is introduced as a new Planet Express staff member in "Obsoletely Fabulous" and is gone without a trace in the next episode.
- ...only to show up again in one of the movies! Take that, continuity!
- Buttmonkey (Zoidberg and Kif, presumably unrelated to their biology)
- Caffeine Bullet Time: Fry, in the episode Three Hundred Big Boys
- Captain Obvious: "Bender, on the screen! It's that guy you are!"
- "Ow! Fire hot!"
- "Ow! Fire indeed hot!"
- Of course, those last two were only uttered because a race of giant evil brains made the everybody in the world stupid, except for Fry. Well, stupid-er.
- Catch Phrase (Farnsworth's "Good news, everyone!", Bender's "Bite my shiny metal ass!")
- I'm Scruffy... the janitor.
- Sometimes, this is "I'm Scruffy, a janitor". As if reading his name from the dramatis personae.
- Second.
- I'm on break.
- Hermes has two: "Great [animal] of [place or diety that rhymes with animal]!" and euphemisms involving green snakes and sugarcane.
- The first one is lampshaded in a scene in one episode, where Hermes is so weak from fatigue that he can only say, "Great... something, of... someplace."
- "We're boned", said mostly by Bender and sometimes by Leela.
- Channel Hop (twice over)
- Charlie And The Chocolate Parody: in the episode "Fry And The Slurm Factory".
- Chirping Crickets
- Clark Kenting: Fry, Bender, and Leela somehow manage to pull this off in the episode "Less Than Hero."
- Comatose Canary
- Compliment Backfire
- Concealing Canvas: In Bender's Big Score
- Context Sensitive Button (The antennae on Bender's head seems to do everything from cooking popcorn to interrupting TV signals and it's a metaphor for a penis on top of all that. He also seems to have a lot of room inside of his case, having something emerge that is essential to the plot.)
- At one point, he decides he needs to make room for some treasure he wants to steal and produces three goldfish bowls from his chest.
- Once, it even hung open like a beer gut after he had gorged himself, an occurence that was immediately lampshaded by Amy: "And Bender, your beer belly is so big your door won't even close - and that doesn't even make sense."
- Continuity Nod: All four films that comprise Season 5 contain a number of nods to previous episodes, arguably to the point of Continuity Porn.
- Convection Schmonvection: Happens a few times.
- Lampshaded in one episode thanks to Farnsworth.("PROFESSOR. LAVA. HOT.")
- Couch Gag (the tagline below the logo at the beginning of the theme song; the animation clip at its end)
- Crack Pairing: Yivo/The Universe.
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: "The Sting" Fry jumping front of a giant bee to save Lila and getting impaled for his trouble. The moment they fix him he goes to Lila's room and spends three weeks never moving from her bedside continuously talking to her in an attempt to rouse her from her coma. God duh-amn!
- Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming: Watch "The Luck Of The Fryrish". Now.
- Crying Indian: Subverted. It looks as though he's crying about the litter, but it's because the slurm can reminded him of his ex girlfriend.
- Cypher Language (The alien languages found throughout the show can be decoded to reveal hidden messages.)
- Death By Sex (Death by "snu-snu.")
- Decided By One Vote ("A Head In The Polls")
- Deliberately Cute Child (Tinny Tim: "I'm sorry, sir. I'm only programmed to make lemonade and write signs with cute backward letters like these.")
- Darker And Edgier: The movies are definately edgier, most likely due to the writers being free from network television handicaps.
- Deus Ex Nukina (Nixon wants the Brain Balls dead.)
- Development Gag (One of the crew members justified his six years of graduate school all for the sake of Bender and Flexo's serial numbers joke, i.e. "We're both the sum of two cubes.")
- Devil But No God (Seems to be one of the driving principals of Robotology; the Robot Devil is even a reoccurring character.)
- Though, Bender did meet God once.
- Although it wasn't really God, but the remains of a space probe that collided with God.
- "That seems probable."
- Disability Superpower (Fry's lack of the delta brainwave grants him immunity to the evil Brainspawn's powers.)
- Dogged Nice Guy: Alright, so Fry may be an Idiot Hero but Leela does treat him pretty awful sometimes, especially in the four movies after the show was Un Canceled. He deserves it on occasion but this troper felt bad that she rejected him so thoroughly even though he's shown considerable devotion and caring towards her more than once. Your Mileage May Vary, of course.
- Dojikko (Amy, for comedy reasons. The creators wanted to have a female slapstick character that's always getting herself hurt, since they're almost always male.)
- Doomy Dooms Of Doom: All the time. In one memorable example, after Earth is invaded by aliens, this exchange took place:
Professor Farnsworth: Dear Lord, they're back!
Amy: We're doomed!
Hermes: Doomed!
Bender: (takes a deep breath) DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO— (scene cuts away)
- I'd say the best example is during The Farnsworth Parabox, with the parallel benders doing a nifty reverb-double-DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
- Benders Big Score gave us countless Doomsday Devices, a Platinum Doom-Proof Vest, and the Doom Meter, Which measures exactly how doomed something is.
- Downer Ending ("Jurassic Bark", among others)
- Driving Stick: The Planet Express ship has a manual transmission whose first gear is notoriously difficult to engage without grinding. Since transmissions are strictly a wheeled-land-vehicle thing, this is purely Rule Of Funny.
- Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion
- Ensemble Darkhorse (Zoidberg & Branigan)
- Everyone Meets Everyone (Twice in a row: Fry, Leela, Bender and Farnsworth meet each other in the pilot; the first three meet Hermes, Amy and Dr. Zoidberg in the second episode)
- Everythings Better With Dinosaurs (T. rexes are inexplicably alive and well in the year 3000 and are used to give children rides in petting zoos.) Presumably they were cloned.
- T. rexes ("the humblest of God's creatures") actually defeat an alien invasion in a episode of The Scary Door. A random Stegosaurus also shows up grazing on the White House lawn in one episode.
- Evil Foreigner: When Bender joined the "Ultimate Robot Fighting League", he was shown as an All American Face squaring off against a montage of stock Heel characters. One such was named "The Foreigner." His antagonizing of the crow?
My customs are different than yours!
- Evil Old Folks Mom. Professor Farnsworth had a tendency to fall in love with her and leave her (again) when he discovered she was evil. This happened several times.
- Evil Twin (Bender's model-brother Flexo, who is actually the good twin, parodying AI Is A Crapshoot and... he even has a goatee! Another episode parodies the Mirror Universe style of Evil Twin.)
- "You mean Bender is the evil Bender? I'm shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked."
- Expository Theme Tune: Parodied with the New Justice Team.
- Fan Disservice: The ancient Professor and fat Hermes often get naked for no reason.
- Fan Service (Not often, but in Jurassic Bark, Fry walks in on Leela and Amy wrestling in revealing outfits for no apparent reason. Fry's so obsessed with another issue that he asks them to leave.)
- Shortly afterward, Leela declares that Bender has been down in the lava too long and she is going in after him. She starts to tear off her skimpy outfit but is stopped by Professor Farnsworth who angrily reminds her that lava is hot.
- Probably provided to counteract the Downer Ending(Fry stopping the Professor from cloning his dog because he thought it had moved on. A flashback shows that the dog waited, obeying Fry's last order untill it died.).
- Happily, according to "Bender's Big Score," an alternate Fry was actually taking care of the dog all along.
- "PROFESSOR! LAVA! HOT!"
- "Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love?" has Fry accidentally hitting up the women's steam room, where naked Leela and Amy are relaxing. Amy moves the hand covering her chest, but just enough to keep it still covered.
- The straight-to-DVD movies kick it up a notch. The first one begins with a visit to the "Nudie beach planet." In non-sexual fanservice, all the Continuity Nods qualify.
- The third movie has a scene where the whole crew takes a group shower together.
- Amy and Leela hug near the end of the third movie and then make out for a little while for no good reason.
- ... What more reason do we need?
- The one with the worms has two fanservice scenes unless I'm getting my episodes mixed. One is of Fry, buffed up by the worms, ripping his shirt off. Another involves Leela lying on her bed in a VERY skimpy nightie.
- Fantastic Comedy
- Fantastic Religious Weirdness (Zoidberg is both stereotypically Jewish and a non-kosher shellfish)
- Fantasy Counterpart Culture (done purposefully by a group of colonists; they modelled the planet after Ancient Egypt. Apparently the ancient Egyptians taught them about space travel.)
- Fearful Symmetry (The "perfectly symmetrical violence" between the two Leelas in "The Farnsworth Parabox")
- Fetish Fuel: Loaded with it.
- The third movie. First, Leela gets a shock collar that shocks her every time she thinks about violent, profane, or perverse. Naturally, she gets shocked several times, and at one point winds up writhing on the ground, which can turn some people on, Or So I Heard. Later, however, she starts to associate the shock with the wonderful feeling of violence, and starts sighing and moaning when she gets shocked. Then they go to the fantasy world, and it's downhill from there.
- The second movie was worse, a monster from the other side of the anomaly with Naughty Tentacles.
- All 4 movies seems to have at least one of these, the first has the nude beach planet and the 4th has a large group of female characters that are put in prison, in the same cell, where they're encouraged to haze new inmates, and less beds then there are cell mates *one scene opens with Amy waking up in between two other women, fully clothed but fan tease is clear*.
- And the episode of a planet of all giant women in fur bikinis, who want to have rough sex with men.
- Or having loads of robot Lucy Lius.
- Fever Dream Episode ("The Sting")
- Fiction 500 (The Wong family. And Mom, probably.)
- Fidelity Test
- Finish Him (Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love. Fry dramatically refuses to kill his friend, and Zoidberg takes the opportunity to chop off his arm)
- Fire And Brimstone Hell (With robots.)
- Fish Out Of Temporal Water (Fry, of course, and later mildly deconstructed via his girlfriend)
- Flowers For Algernon Syndrome (Fry's intestinal parasites improving his body and mind to near superhuman levels, then revert when he kicks them out)
- Foreshadowing: Nibbler's eyestalk appears in a dust basket in a flashback to Fry's freezing in the Seymour episode.
- You can also see it during the same scene in the very first episode.
- Fridge Logic: How did Old New York end up underground?
- The Fun In Funeral. Bender's funeral in "A Pharaoh to Remember."
- Funny Background Event
- Fur Bikini (The Amazon planet)
- The Future
- Future Badass (Lars Fillmore in Bender's Big Score. Not actually a Bad Ass, nor technically from the future, but he is a look at a much, much more mature version of a present-day character.)
- Future Imperfect
- Geeky Turn On ("Dirty, dirty boy!")
- Gender Bender: Done with Bender himself. Of course how robots could have genders shouldn't matter. Rule Of Funny and all that.
- General Failure: Zapp Brannigan.
- Genius Bonus
- Getting Crap Pastthe Radar
- God Mode Sue: Depending on whether the plot calls for it, Leela can quite often appear to be one of these. This was actually parodied quite early on however in "Bender Gets Made," when she declares that she can still beat up the evil gangsters despite being temporarily blinded... and promptly kicks the crap out of Fry instead.
- Good News Bad News (Whenever the professor says "Good news, everyone!", he's inevitably going to announce something horrible)
- Parodied in one episode when he's announcing something even worse than normal and simply says "News, everyone!" in exactly the same tone of voice as normal.
- Good Night Sweet Prince parodied.
- Granola Girl: Done to death in Into the Wild Green Yonder.
- Hachiko
- Hand Wave ("I thought that machine made noses?" "It can do other things. Why shouldn't it? SHUT UP!")
- Hanging Judge (Judge Whitey)
- Happily Married (Leela's, Amy's, and Fry's parents.)
- Hard On Soft Science
- Have I Mentioned I Am Sexually Active Today - Zapp Brannigan is the page image.
- The Hedonist (the aptly named Hedonism Bot)
- Hellevator - In Robot Hell. There's also a slide.
- Hello Attorney ("Single Female Lawyer")
- Hermaphrodite - This is Hermes' actual name (but pronounced "Herm-Aphrodite") when he is turned into a
female centaur hermaphrodite centaur centaur with breasts in the third movie, 'Bender's Game'.
- ...which is technically the correct (the best kind of correct!) pronunciation of that word as a proper name.
- Heroic Sociopath - Bender on a bad day.
- Hey Its That Voice - The Robot Devil is Homer Simpson, Nibbler is Megatron (and a whooole bunch of other people)
- Historical In Joke - Where the whole "alien ship crashes in Roswell, NM" thing is "explained". Also, George W. Bush winning the 2000 US election in "Bender's Big Score".
- Holo-Shed Malfunction: Parodied to heck and back in "Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch".
- Human Popsicle (How Fry gets to the future.)
- Hurl It Into The Sun (Hermes and the box in "The Farnsworth Parabox")
- Also done with a shipment of popcorn kernels in "A Bicyclops Built for Two" and a shipment of candy hearts in "Love and Rocket", although in that episode it was a quasar instead of the sun.
- Hurricane Of Excuses (when Farnsworth doesn't want to go to the global warming conference in "Crimes of the Hot")
- Hypnotic Eyes - The ALL GLORY TO THE Hypnotoad.
- This has reached the levels of MemetALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD
- I'll Take Two Beers Too (Bender)
- If I Can'tHaveYou - Melllvar from Where No Fan has Gone Before.
Melllvar: If I can't have the original cast of Star Trek, no one will!
- I Know What We Can Do Cut - in "Time Keeps On Slipping," so the cut is a Time Skip.
- I Would Say If I Could Say
- Lots of ILLKILLYOU
- Impaled With Extreme Prejudice (spoilers)
- Inherently Funny Words - "Pazuzu!" Though it would be unwise to repeat it three times fast.
- Innocent Aliens: Dr. Zoidberg, who thinks most doctors are poor.
- Instant Home Delivery - in "The Route of All Evil," Cubert and Dwight order a pedal-powered spacecraft. The form says "allow four to six seconds for delivery." Cubert says it's more like seven.
- Island Help Message - Bender can barely spell "HELP".
- Because he had used most of his rocks to explain who he was and how he had come to be on the island.
- "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: I, BENDER, BID YOU HELLO! YOU DON'T KNOW ME, THOUGH YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF ME, BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT. LONG STORY SHORT... I NEED HELF"
- It Runs On Nonsensoleum - Anything Prof. Farnsworth explains. Lampshaded in one episode when Fry cuts a Farnsworth explanation short by saying that it's magic. Ironically, that Farnsworth explanation was one that used real-world science.
- It's Like I Always Say
- Jerkass - Bender on a good day. Zapp Brannigan is even worse, and far more smug, and far more sexist.
- Joker Immunity - Robot Santa
- Kangaroo Pouch Ride - Bender's Game had orc spear-throwers riding in giant war-kangaroo pouches.
- Kill All Humans - Bender expresses a desire to do this while sleeptalking, Fry hears him and is disturbed. "I was having the most wonderful dream..I think you were in it."
- Lie Detector - The truthoscope used durign the presidential debate on the episode A Head in the Polls.
- Limited Wardrobe - Lampshaded by Bender in regards to Fry:
- Bender: "You own one pair of clothes and your not taking them off while I'm around."
- Losing Your Head The Heads in Jars, Bender, Zoidberg
- Luke You Are My Father - Igner is Farnsworth's Son.
- Made Of Evil
- The Magnificent - The water people's rulers.
- Make Out Point (In the robot propaganda film)
- Mass Hypnosis (ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!)
- Matrix Raining Code (How robots "interface", If You Know What I Mean)
- Meaningful Name: Bender...in more ways than one
- Memetic Mutation:
"X does not work that way!" - Morbo
"Your X is bad and you should feel bad!" - Zoidberg
ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD.
"I'll make my own X! With Blackjack! And hookers! Y'know what; forget the X!" - Bender
"Good news, everyone!" - Farnsworth
"You've watched it! You can't unwatch it!" - Tales of Interest narrator
- Metaphorgotten. A lot. Especially Zapp Brannigan and Fry.
Fry: Bender! You can't date the ship! It would be like me dating a really fat lady, and then living inside her! And she'd be all (makes space travel motions with his hands) Vrrrroooom vrwooo bweeee zooom!
- Mermaid Problem
- Mind Screw ("The Sting")
- Mister Seahorse (Kif Kroker's species has "males" who become pregnant by absorbing genetic material from other lifeforms via skin contact. In another episode, Bender allows Fry and Leela to homebrew beer inside his torso and it's treated like a case of pregnancy. In one of the spin-off comics, Zapp Brannigan basically gets this with the intent of using him as a human weapon.)
- Mobstacle Course - Bender's cow catcher on Freedom Day.
- Morality Dial
- Mutants - a group of them live underneath the city in its Absurdly Spacious Sewers, including Leela's parents
- Misguided Missile
- Moral Event Horizon: In my opinion, Zapp Brannigan crosses the line in "Beast with a million backs", honestly, he completely takes advantage of Amy after Kif dies, just so he can have sex with her, this just makes me hate the guy even more.
- True, though it ''was' the point of the movie (real love, with all of the distrust and imperfections versus Yivo's love, which is perfect but not "real" - or too good to last).
- Negative Continuity - Strongly subverted between the 1st and 2nd direct-to-TV movies.
- New Powers As The Plot Demands - Bender's robotic abilities, Leela's armband
- Nightmare Fuel - The series is usually pretty funny, but when the Farnsworth Parabox universes appeared, it creeped me out with the "We don't see ANYTHING" line, only worsened by the fact they didn't have eyes.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed - Zapp Brannigan. The original concept for the character was "What if William Shatner was the captain of the Enterprise instead of James Kirk?"
- Obfuscating Stupidity: It's hinted that Amy might be doing this.
- Oddly Small Organization - "We're the Robot Mafia. The entire Robot Mafia."
- Opening Shout Out
- Our Werecars Are Different
- Out Of Character Moment
- Out With A Bang (DEATH... By Snu-Snu!)
- Parental Abandonment (Fry's parents went to get his dog pal at the cryogenics plant and didn't even realize he was frozen there. To be fair, they were hung over... and bad parents.)
- Fry's dad grew up without a father. Since Fry's dad's father turned out to be Fry himself, that's probably just as well.
- Pass The Popcorn
- Perfectly Cromulent Word (Intragnisent)
- Yup, he mispronounced intransigent which leads to the Mob boss's quip: "From the context it is clear what you meant".
- Pet The Dog (Bender pets a few things)
- Phlebotinum Killed The Dinosaurs: Fry finds out what really killed the dinosaurs.
- Phlebotinum Muncher (inverted; Nibblonians excrete starship fuel)
- Phrase Catcher (Wernstrom!)
- Planet Of Hats: the Neutral planet, robots, ancient Egyptians, and an entire cowboy universe.
- Later, other
parallel perpendicular orthogonal universes are found, each with its own distinctive quirk — a world of hippies, Romans, bobbleheads, robots, people who never had eyes who nevertheless know what "seeing" is, etc.
-
Including two gangster planets and a cowboy world!
- Player Punch: (of a sort) The "Jurassic Bark" episode will have you hating Bender until the end, only to be punched again during the end credits reveal.
- Every time this troper sees that episode, it feels like a little part of me dies.
- Pretend Prejudice: Bender's robot supremacism against humans.
- Pretty In Mink: When Bender is a lady robot, and dating Calculon, the TV star, he gets a fur coat as one of many extravagant gifts.
- Psycho For Hire: Clamps, the Robot Mafia's clamp-happy enforcer.
- The Public Domain Channel: A different old cartoon in every title sequence.
- Reset Button: Double Subverted on more than one occasion. In one episode, aliens cause untold devastation, and as Fry comments about how everything is back to normal, only to have the last shot be of all the devastation... which is promptly back to normal the next. Another one: Fry is fired from his job (for ruining Dr. Farnsworth's... everything), but Farnsworth was willing to forgive him because he couldn't even remember why he fired him. Then Bender reminds him exactly why, and Farnsworth tells him to get lost. He's back to working the next episode.
- Ret Con - No one can really decide if the first movie did this or not
- More generally the depiction of Fry's life in the 20th century has changed from a thoroughly miserable one to one that wasn't all that bad - he had a beloved pet dog, a brother who genuinely loved him (even if they fought a lot) and even his boss was pretty friendly despite his initial portrayal as abusive. He was 25 years old, lived with his parents, had a girlfriend that used him excessively when she wasn't dumping him, and had no prospects, but it wasn't the dank craphole the first episode portrayed.
- Ridiculously Human Robots - The robots, globviously.
- Riding Into The Sunset Ending - Except the sun in this case is a collapsed star.
- Rip Van Winkle - Fry, later his ex-girlfriend
- Robotic Psychopath - Roberto, Bender plays this for laughs.
- Rubber Forehead Aliens - Despite frequently averting this trope with great ingenuity, most of the cast are either human or humanoid - Zoidberg and Kif's species both have different stages of physical make-up, but for most of the time they're humanoid.
- Rule Of Cool / Rule Of Funny: Since the writers are keen on Shown Their Work, any unrealistic instances are most likely these tropes.
- Running Gag - ABANDON SHIP!
- Say My Name WERNSTROM!!!!
- Science Fiction
- Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale: Usually done intentionally for Rule Of Funny.
- Screwed By The Network (Resulting in an extended Take That in Bender's Big Score against the "Box Network")
- Shorttank (Leela, in a rare non-anime example.)
- Shout Out (Do you really want us to count them all?)
- Just to give you an idea, they do a Shout Out to Star Trek every time someone opens a door.
- Show Within A Show (All My Circuits, The Scary Door, and let's not forget Everybody Loves Hypnotoad)
- Silence You Fool (The robot elders.)
- Similar Squad (The Parallel Universe of anti-coin tosses)
- Simple Country Lawyer (The hyperchicken as well as Old Man Waterfall)
- Sleeves Are For Wimps (Leela's shirt.)
- Smart Ball
- Smoking Hot Sex (Referenced in "Amazon Women in the Mood", known informally as Snu-Snu.)
- Snap Back: Fry is fired at the end of season 2, but returns at the start of season 3 with no explanation given.
- Solid Gold Poop: Nibbler's crap is the crew's starship fuel.
- Space Clothes
- Space Is An Ocean+Two D Space: Averted. In one episode, protestors make a "peace ring" around an oil tanker-spaceship, planning to trap it. The spaceship moves 20 feet vertically, and then zooms off.
Leela: "Didn't you realize spaceships could move in three dimensions?"
Head Protestor: "No, I did not.
- Space Pirates (you know, pirates - but in space!)
- Space Whale Tear Jerker
- Spoof Aesop: The Beast with a Billion Backs: Bender explains that love cannot be shared and it's not truly love if you're not jealous.
- Squick The crunchy noises when the crew (frequently) get injured. Also, the splatty noises in the shower scene mentioned above.
- Stable Time Loop (Fry travelling back in time to become his own grandfather, the origin of the time code in Bender's Big Score, the twist ending of the video game of dubious canonicity)
- Status Quo Is God
- Straight Gay - implied with Fry's grandfather Enis. In "Roswell That Ends Well," Enis asks Fry "You ever think you date girls only 'cause you're supposed ta?" and expresses interest in a photo of a big burly male model on a calendar.
- Super Fun Happy Trope Of Doom (Mom's friendly surveillance company)
- Superhero Episode (Fry and Leela get superpowers from a miracle cream in "Less Than Hero", and form a team with Bender. Parody ensues.)
- Super Powered Robot Meter Maids (Bender seems to have much more gadgetry than would be useful or even practical for a robot whose only purpose is to bend girders)
- Sweet On Polly Oliver (Zap, when Leela posed as a man)
- Talking To Himself (Most of the main cast play multiple characters)
- Tear Jerker (The endings of "Leela's Homeworld", "Jurassic Bark" and "Luck of the Fryrish", all helped by the Medley Exit)
- This troper can never listen to the song "Don't You Forget About Me" without crying ever again thanks to Futurama.
- Also, "Time Keeps On Slippin'" and Bender's Big Score.
- And the end of "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings".
- And Into the Wild Green Yonder, mostly due to ending the Grand Finale with a Bittersweet Ending / Cliff Hanger.
- Also "The Sting".
- Techno Babble - subverted multiple times by many of the main cast. Scenes requiring a pseudo-scientific explanation often invoke the use of gibberish in the place of more traditional, partially plausible Applied Phlebotinum.
Bubblegum Tate: Hold up, Prof. What if we moved this here mass of chronitons to these algebraic coordinates?
Prof. Farnsworth: Yes, I see. Something with that many big words will surely stop the time skips!
- Ted Baxter (Zapp Brannigan)
- Temporal Paradox (Thinking about Bender's Big Score too much is guaranteed to make your head hurt. Paradox-Free Time Travel my ass!)
- Temporary Blindness
- Terraformed (Mars and the Ancient Egypt-style planet)
- Timey Wimey Ball (The Universal Time Code in Bender's Big Score is quite literally a Timey Wimey Ball.)
- The Teaser
- They Called Me Mad (The Professor called himself mad.)
- Token Evil Teammate (Bender. The number of times he's sold out his closest friends is astounding)
- Trojan Prisoner
- Trouser Space: While thinking he is a robot, Fry takes some sandwiches from his pants and offers them to his friends. They are not interested.
- Un Canceled
- Underwater City: Atlanta.
- Unusual Euphemism (Amy uses "Gleesh" for "Sheesh", words that rhyme with "duh" for "duh")
- As though!
- Snu-Snu, anyone?
- Let me axe you something...
- That might be "aks", actually...
- Uranus Is Showing: According to Professor, astronomers ended "that stupid joke" once and for all... by renaming the planet "Urectum".
- Virgin Power (In 'I Second That Emotion', Leela is a virgin sacrifice to lure out sewer monster El Chupanibre, despite the fact that the sewer mutants have seen Zapp Brannigan's website.)
- Villain With Good Publicity (Mom)
- Will They Or Wont They Fry loves Leela despite her mutation. Leela rarely reciprocates. What gives it a "will they?" component is the series' fairly strong implication that Leela can either choose Fry, Zapp Brannigan or Dying Alone.
- You know, it's really depressing when you put it that way. Then again, Universe 1 Fry and Leela seemed pretty happy together.
- It's less depressing when you think Fry has it within him to mature into someone like Lars.
- In Into the Wild Green Yonder, the big reveal that Leela loves Fry back, and has for some time manages to somehow come off as slightly depressing, since it manages to come out in the middle of the Bittersweet Ending.
- With Due Respect
- X Days Since: In one episode a sign counts the days since the last time a certain planet invaded Earth and in another episode there's one in a working ground for slaves counting the days since the last accident (and Fry accidentally nails his own hand to the sign while changing the number).
- When Fry enters the chryogenics lab, the sign says "No power failures since 1997," with the "7" being handwritten and taped on.
- You Will Be Beethoven: Fry replaces/becomes his own grandfather.
- You Will Be Spared
- Yuppie Couple: Number 9 Man
- Zero G Spot: The "Zero-G Juggs" magazine.
- Zero Percent Approval Rating: The ultimate summary of Bender's tenure as pharaoh.
- Zip Me Up (Happens in Bender's Big Score with Hermes.)
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