Fear of a Bot Planet

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Futurama episode
"Fear of a Bot Planet"
Episode no.	5
Prod. code	1ACV05
Airdate	April 20, 1999
Where	United States
Writer(s)	Heather Lombard, Evan Gore
Director
Opening subtitle	Featuring Gratuitous Alien Nudity
Opening cartoon	Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny in "A Corny Concerto"
Guest star(s)	None

Space Pilot 3000 Episode Two: The Series Has Landed I, Roommate Love's Labours Lost in Space Fear of a Bot Planet A Fishful of Dollars My Three Suns A Big Piece of Garbage Hell Is Other Robots A Flight to Remember Mars University When Aliens Attack Fry and the Slurm Factory
List of all Futurama episodes...

"'Fear of a Bot Planet" is the 5th episode in season 1 of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on April 20, 1999.

1 Plot
2 Characters
3 Future products
4 Future gadgets
5 Cultural references
6 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

While attending a New New York Yankees blernsball game at Madison Cube Garden, the crew is called back to the office for a delivery mission. The delivery is to Chapek 9, a planet inhabited by human-hating robots, so Bender is assigned the duty of performing the actual delivery.

Upon arriving at the planet, a resentful Bender is lowered to the surface using the ship's winch. Fry and Leela receive a rushed message from Bender, who has been captured by the robot separatists for being a human sympathizer. Fry and Leela disguise themselves as robots, and infiltrate the robot society.

After hiding out in a robot movie theater, Fry and Leela blend in with the crowd at the opening ceremonies of the daily human hunt. There they discover Bender is alive and playing the robots' prejudice for his own benefit.

Fry and Leela reunite with Bender during the hunt in an abandoned robot porn shop (the porn is actually the layout of a memory chip), but he refuses their offer of rescue. Before Fry and Leela can leave, the other robots arrive and they are placed on trial for being human. After being sentenced to a life of tedious work, they are dropped through a trap door, where they meet the five Robot Elders. The Robot Elders command Bender to kill Fry and Leela, but he refuses.

The Robot Elders reveal that humans are just being used as a scapegoat to distract the populace, and that many of the supposed special powers humans have that robots fear are in fact made up. Fry threatens to breathe fire on the robot elders, throwing them into a state of confusion. The crew escapes, and is pursued by a horde of robots. As the crew escapes on the winch, Bender remembers that he never actually delivered the package. The package falls to the ground, and the robots are showered in much-needed lug nuts.

[edit] Characters

Characters who make their first appearances in this episode are:

The Robot Elders

[edit] Future products

Future products in this episode are:

Slurm

[edit] Future gadgets

Future gadgets which appear in this episode:

The Ceremonial Kill-a-ma-jig

[edit] Cultural references

The title comes from the album Fear of a Black Planet by Public Enemy.
The robot-populated planet of Chapek 9 is named after Karel Čapek, the Czech playwright who popularized the term "robot".
When Fry and Leela are initially discovered, the discovering robot cries the shriek from the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and later heard the well-known phrase "Intruder alert!" from the 1980 video game Berzerk about humans fighting robots.
The horn that sounded the hunt for humans was the start-up sound for the Apple Macintosh of the early 1990s (mainly the Quadra).
The construction robots Fry and Leela talk to build with Tetris blocks.
The movie posters at the robot movie theater are:
- Barbot Streisand in Yentltron (a parody of Barbra Streisand and Yentl)
- Buff Bot the Human Slayer (a parody of Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
- I Was a Teenage Human (a parody of I Was a Teenage Werewolf)
- It Came From Planet Earth (a parody of It Came From Outer Space)
A billboard on Chapek 9 parodies the Got Milk? advertising campaign with a sign reading "Got Milk? Then you're a human and must be killed".
In the blernsball game near the start, a sign in the audience says "Glorx 3:16", a reference to the John 3:16 signs seen at many sporting events held by Rollen Stewart, aka "The Rainbow Man." Known for wearing a rainbow clown wig, Stewart was spreading the word that "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."