Futurama: "I Dated a Robot"

Futurama: "I Dated a Robot." Season 3, episode 15 (13 May 2001).

One of Fry's desires is to date a celebrity. As summarized in the wittily-written Wikipedia entry, Fry and Leela venture into the Internet to visit nappster.com and download a celebrity's personality. Fry downloads the personality of Lucy Liu into a blank robot, which begins projecting an image of her.

Fry and the Liu-bot begin dating, aided by her being programmed to like Fry. The other Planet Express employees, concerned about his relationship, show him the standard middle-school film that predicts the destruction of civilization if humans date robots.

Fry rejects the propaganda and continues his relationship with what later in the series will be called a Fembot. The relationship angers the robot Bender who dislike human competition, and (continuing with the Wikipedia summary) Bender sets off with Leela and Zoidberg to shut down Nappster. In the Nappster building, a broken sign eventually reveals that the company is actually "Kidnappster". Breaking into the back room, Bender discovers that Nappster has been kidnapping the heads of celebrities and making illegal copies of them. Leela grabs the real Lucy Liu's head, and the four take off. The Nappster CFO loads a backup disk of Liu, and creates a horde of Liu-bots ordered to kill.

See for the frequent Futurama motif of preserved living heads and the tropes, satirically handled, of uploading a personality into cyberspace and downloading it into a robot body, a female robot that looks like a human being — cf. and contrast the Robot Maria in METROPOLIS — and the question of human/robot love, and, when Bender starts dating a Lucy Liu robot, the question of robot/robot lust if not love. Note also motif of military formations of robots, and image that continued to the finale of season 2 of The Orville, 25 April 2019. Note that Napster did not continue in its 2001 form and now needs explanation to many Futurama viewers.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 26Ap2109