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• Anvilicious / Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped:
  • Proposition Infinity.
  • "Decision 3012" is a completely transparent analogue to Barack Obama's candidacy, the Birther movement, and the illegal immigration debate.
  • "The Cyber House Rules": Fitting in is overrated and not worth it, your quirks are what make you special (and real friends love you for them), and people who can't accept who you really are don't love you as much as you think they do.
  • "The Luck of the Fryish" and "Cold Warriors": Even if they don't always show it, your family members love you.
• Broken Base: The made-for-DVD movies and the Comedy Central episodes. Either they're just as good as the FOX episodes or they're an inferior copy of the infinitely better FOX run.
  • Ditto the first couple episodes, where the voice acting was kinda off (especially for Bender), everyone's characterizations weren't fully developed, and most people thought the show was So Okay Its Average (or dismissed it as "The Simpsons in space").
• Cargo Ship: Scruffy owns a robotic Washbucket with a female voice. In one episode, Amy gets her brain switched with the Washbucket, and Washbucket declares her love for Scruffy. Scruffy declares his love back, but turns her down because she's a robot even in Amy's body. She leaves the room, and he curls up and cries.
• Designated Villain: Parodied in "Benderama" with the unattractive giant who attacks the city because he's sick of people making fun of him.
  • There's also the parody example of the Ball aliens that Earth went to war with. As it turns out, it was the Earthican forces that were the invaders, the Ball people were just harmless aliens that only wanted to bounce. When Fry realizes this, he's understandably confused.
• Ear Worm:
  • "Weeeee're whalers on the Moon..." Repeated many times within the episode, and the characters are clearly sick of it.
  • "Call Robo-Rooter when you flush a towel! And we can also help with an impacted bowel. Robo-Rooter!"
  • "Pop a Poppler in your mouth/When you come to Fishy Joe's!/What they're made of is a mystery/Where they come from no one knows!/You can pick 'em, you can lick 'em/If you promise not to sue us/You can stick one up your nose!"
  • Also the Robot Hell song.
  • "Freedom, freedom, freedom, oy! Freedom, freedom, freedom, oy!"
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Seymour.
• "Funny Aneurysm" Moment:
  • In I Dated A Robot we see a video about how humans dating robots will destroy the world. Then we get Proposition Infinity and discover robosexuals are both common and repressed. Bonus awkward for the original tape being a high school health class video approved by The Space Pope.
  • In the pilot episode, the line about the Stop & Drop Suicide booths being "Americans' favorite suicide booth since 2008" becomes a bit wince-worthy in light of 2008's economic meltdown and the invention of an actual suicide machine in the same year.
  • One of the stations in the New New York tubeway system is given as "J.F.K., Jr. Airport". After the real-life John F. Kennedy, Jr. died when his private plane crashed, the line was replaced with "Radio City Mutant Hall" (though the original line can still be heard on the full-episode animatic that appears on Futurama volume one DVD).
  • Fry's last line before he got cryogenically frozen was "Here's to another lousy millennium". Fry doesn't know how right he is: 2000 to 2010 has had scandals, invasions, a major terrorist attack on American soil, economic failure, and natural disasters and is considered by many to be the worst decade ever (even worse than the 1970s).
  • In "The Lesser of Two Evils", the main characters visit a theme park modeled on 2000s New York. There's a brief scene where the stock market drops from about 11,000 to 7,200, similar numbers to the real-life 2008 crash. (Fortunately, it jumps right back up to 11,000, and all the stock brokers who jumped to their apparent deaths float back up into the building via jetpack). Considering that the scene was supposed to be a "distorted history" take on the crash that started the Great Depression, that makes this a sort of bizarre case of life imitating art imitating life.
• Genius Bonus: All the jokes, references, and continuity errors are more understandable if you know anything about college-level math and science.
  • The series has a number of particularly extreme examples in which complicated jokes (possibly made in a fictional language) are hidden in the background and can only be seen for a split-second, requiring a very devoted fan to pause and get the absolute most out of episodes.
  • Everything's playing at the Aleph-Null-Plex!
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In The Beast With A Billion Backs, Fry's polygamous girlfriend, Colleen, joins him when everyone goes to Heaven with Yivo. Colleen was voiced by Brittany Murphy [in what is now her last voiceover role, not counting her role as Luanne Platter on King of the Hill], who really did end up in Heaven (all too soon) in December 2009 (and was joined by her husband not too long after).
  • In "The Series Has Landed," Leela angrily shoots down Fry's enthusiasm on seeing the original Moon Landing site by calling it, "just a crummy plastic flag and a dead man's tracks in the dust." It was a bit mean the first time it was shown, but understandable, since it is the 31st Century and all. But now that Neil Armstrong is really gone...
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The unnamed couple's clear, plastic tarps with strategically-placed black tape from the first episode ("Space Pilot 3000"), the futuristic club clothes everyone wears at The Hip Joint on "Love Labor's Lost in Space" and Leela's costume on "Bend Her" can now be identified as something from Lady Gaga's wardrobe.
  • The Couch Gag from the final original series episode? "See you on some other channel." Doubly hilarious, considering that Futurama went from being reran on Cartoon Network to reran (and revived) on Comedy Central.
  • In "Bend Her", 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"
  • In "Lesser of Two Evils" in the Old New York theme park there's a marquee that says Star Wars 9: Yoda's Bar Mitzvah. Not only did Disney purchase Star Wars with plans to make a sequel trilogy (episodes VII, VIII, and IX) but it was announced in February 2013 that there would be a Spin-Off movie based on Yoda.
  • 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.
• Nausea Fuel: Fry drinking a tub of beer that others have spat out in "Fun on a Bun".
  • Fry drinking bathtub eggnog that turns out to be scented bathwater for Zoidberg in "A Tale of Two Santas."
    • Speaking of characters drinking bathwater: Bender drinking the alcohol-flavored water Professor Farnsworth was bathing in and commenting on the flavor being a fine cognac with a hint of aged scrotum on "Benderama."
  • Bender as a morbidly obese human.
• Never Live It Down: Leela's one night stand with Zapp. Mostly because he references it every single time they share a scene, though the later episodes don't mention it at all.
• Painful Rhyme: In "Fry and the Slurm Factory", the Grunka-Lunkas use terribly forced rhymes in their songs.
  Grunka lunka dunkity-gredient
  You should not ask about the secret ingredient!
• Seasonal Rot: the Comedy Central episodes and the made-for-DVD movies are said to be inferior to the original FOX episodes (though most fans will argue that there's really no difference between the two, except that the jokes are dirtier than what FOX allowed).
  • In-universe: in "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on Television," Fry comments that Everybody Loves Hypnotoad has been going downhill since season three.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Zoidberg