Futurama

Futurama Episodes—Television (Fox). Premiere Sunday, 28 March 1999. Opening credit for production: "The Curiosity Company in association with 30th [sic] Century Fox Television (A News Company Corporation)"; end credits: 20th Century Fox as author for legal purposes. Matt Groening, creator. Developed by Groening and David X. Cohen. Premiere script credited to Cohen and Groening. Animation by Rough Draft Studios, Inc., and Rough Draft Korea. Premiere dir. Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo (dir. computer graphics). Billy West (Fry), Katey Segal (Leela), and John Dimaggio (Bender), featured voices.

In New York City on 31 Jan. 1999, pizza delivery-boy Fry delivers a pizza on a crank call to Applied Cryogenics ("No Power Failures Since 1997") and gets frozen in a cryogenic tube for 1000 years, with images outside a window as time passes combining THE TIME MACHINE (1960 film) with flying-saucer attack images, plus a touch or two, perhaps, from Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). Awakening near the dawn of the 30th c., Fry meets the one-eyed humanoid alien Leela, who has him strip and get into a machine to be probed. The machine determines that he is fit only to be a delivery boy, and Leela wants to implant his "career chip" to "permanently label" him as "a delivery boy." Fleeing, Fry encounters the depressed Bender at a "Stop'n'Drop" suicide booth. They avoid suicide and eventually team up with Leela and Fry's great, great ... (etc.) nephew: an old wearer of thick glasses (even in 3000 CE) and a potentially-mad scientist. This gang of four will use the nephew's space ship for cargo hauling, making Fry a SciFi, futuristic delivery boy. See for a futuristic New York City and other SF icons, esp. a wise-ass if depressed robot (cf. Sherman in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''). (RDE, 04/04/99)