Space Pilot 3000

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Futurama episode
"Space Pilot 3000"
Episode no.	1
Prod. code	1ACV01
Airdate	March 28, 1999
Where	United States
Writer(s)	David X. Cohen, Matt Groening
Director	Rich Moore, Gregg Vanzo
Opening subtitle	In Color
Opening cartoon	Little Buck Cheeser by MGM (1937)
Guest star(s)	Dick Clark as himself and Leonard Nimoy as himself
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...

"Space Pilot 3000" is the first episode of Futurama's first season. It originally aired in North America on March 28, 1999.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Characters 3 Professor Farnsworth's inventions 4 Future products 5 Future gadgets 6 Cultural references 7 Foreshadowing 8 Trivia 9 Goofs 10 External links

[edit] Plot

Just after midnight on January 1st, 2000, New York pizza delivery boy Philip J. Fry is accidentally cryonically frozen when he falls inside a cryogenic chamber while delivering a pizza to a prank call (I.C. Wiener) at a Cryonics Lab in New York City. It is discovered he was recently dumped by his girlfriend, Michelle. He is defrosted in New New York City one thousand years later, on December 31, 2999. After defrosting, he is brought to fate assignment officer 1BDI, Turanga Leela.

Unhappy with his permanently assigned career of delivery boy via a "career chip", Fry flees the cryonics facility into the city, with Leela in pursuit. While trying to track down his extremely-great-nephew, Professor Hubert Farnsworth, Fry befriends a suicidal robot named Bender when he attempts to use a suicide booth which he believes to be a phone booth. He also meets the disembodied head of Leonard Nimoy, and discovers the ruins of old New York.

Leela abandons her job in the cryonics facility, and joins Fry and Bender as job deserters. The three find Professor Farnsworth, and he hires them as the new space ship crew for his package delivery service by giving them the last crew's career chips, recovered from the belly of a space wasp after one of his suicidal missions.

[edit] Characters

Characters who first appear in this episode are:

• Philip J. Fry
• Mr. Panucci
• Michelle
• Turanga Leela
• Terry
• Bender
• URL
• Smitty
• Richard Nixon's Head
• Professor Hubert Farnsworth
• Leonard Nimoy's Head

[edit] Professor Farnsworth's inventions

Professor Farnsworth's inventions in this episode are:

• The Relative Box

[edit] Future products

Future products which appear in this episode are:

• Slurm (billboard)
• Bachelor Chow (billboard)
• Olde Fortran Malt Liquor
• Def-Con Owl Traps (billboard)
• Smart Sausage (billboard)

[edit] Future gadgets

Future gadgets which appear in this episode are:

• The Probulator
• Suicide Booth
• Career Chips

[edit] Cultural references

• Fry is playing a video game called "Monkey Fracas Jr." at the pizza place, narrating it as he plays. The game starts out as a space shooter similar to Asteroids and/or Defender, then approaches a Saturn-like planet at the end of the level. At that point, the planet breaks in half, and an ape resembling Donkey Kong emerges. The ape throws barrels at the spaceship and destroys it. The game's name itself is a parody of Donkey Kong, Jr.
• Fry's narration is a parody of the opening narration that appeared in both Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. "Space; The Final Frontier..." becomes "Space; It seems to go on and on forever...". Fry's narration is preceeded by the Star Trek theme song.
• Fry's costume is based on James Dean's costume in the film "Rebel Without a Cause".
• When Fry is frozen in the cryonic chamber, time is seen passing outside the window until the year 3000. New York City is leveled by aliens, rebuilt as a medieval city, leveled again by aliens and rebuilt as New New York. This is a parody of the scenes in the film The Time Machine based on H.G Wells' novel when the inventor pushes the lever forward on his Time Machine and sees the world, and time, moving forward very rapidly.
• The sounds of the doors opening and closing in the cryonics facilty are the same sound effects used in "Star Trek: The Original Series"
• When Fry walks out of the lab, an ad on a taxi behind him reads "Got protoplasm?", a reference to the series of "Got Milk?" advertising slogans.
• Above streets of New New York, when Fry steps out of the cryonics facility, there is a billboard for Angelyne, who is essentially famous for having billboards of herself along Hollywood Blvd. since the 1980's. In the Futurama billboard, Angelyne still looks the same, but us breathing through a mask hooked up to an oxygen tank.
• In the bar, Bender drinks "olde fortran malt liquor".
• The woman feeding what appears to be fish food to the head of Leonard Nimoy is wearing the typical uniform of an employee of Hot Dog on a Stick.
• When Fry knocks over Nixon's head, he says "You just made my list", a reference to his Enemies List.
• The two policemen who try to arrest Fry at the head museum are using weapons which visually are similar to lightsabers used in the Star Wars film series, however they are functionally more similar to nightsticks, rather than a Jedi's weapon.
• Leela's Fate Assignment Officer number, 1BDI, is a reference to the fact that she only has one eye (1BDI sounds like "one beady eye").
• When the police pound on the door of Planet Express, a brick drops out of Bender. This is a reference to the colorful colloquialism "shitting bricks." It may also be a reference to one of the tracks on the 1986 album "So What If We're On Mystic!" by punk band NOFX. Bender "shits bricks" yet again in the Episode "Bendin' in the Wind," after eating some potato chips made with Olestra. The FOX Censors were not pleased with this visual joke - but they continued to use it in the promos for the Series Premiere anyway.

[edit] Foreshadowing

• Before Fry falls into the freezer, a scene shows a strange shadow cast on the wall behind him. It is revealed in "The Why of Fry" that the shadow belongs to Nibbler, who intentionally pushes Fry into the freezer as part of a complex plan. This is proof that the creators of the series always had the idea of Nibbler's importance from the very beginning. However, "The Why of Fry" shows in the same scene Fry's own shadow alongside Nibbler's indicating a subtle yet ultimately-profound change in the timeline. Also Nibbler's eye can be seen popping out of the bin.
• During the countdown scene at the end of the episode (in the year 2999), France is shown, yet the inhabitants there use the English language instead of French. It is assumed that French in the future is a dead language; this idea is supported in a later episode where Professor Farnsworth invents a Universal translator that only translates into "an incomprehensible dead language", which is revealed to be French.
• Fry's full name can just be seen on the computer screen when Leela is assigning his career, but his first name is not spoken in dialogue until "The Problem with Popplers".
• At the very end of the episode, Professor Farnsworth offers Fry, Leela, and Bender the Planet Express delivery crew position. When prompted about the last crew, the Professor says "Oh those poor sons of B...B-But that doesn't matter now, the point is I need a new crew!". The Professor then produces an envelope labeled "Contents of Space Wasps Stomach" which contains the necessary career chips. This alludes to "The Sting" where the crew (Fry, Leela, and Bender) visit the hive of a swarm of space bees to collect honey, and the fate of the previous crew is revealed when the original Planet Express Ship was found with the black box intact.
• You can see Leela's parents in Old New York, but there are subtle differences from where they are introduced as her parents in the fourth season.

[edit] Trivia

• About thirty seconds into the episode, a sign for a bar in the town is labelled "Akbar", a reference to Akbar and Jeff from Matt Groening's comic strip Life In Hell.
• Down the street from "Akbar" is a sign for Parking - "PARK $42.00". During the show's title sequence, this same sign appears in the year 3000 - and parking is apparently still $42.00.
• If you freeze the opening title sequence, you can very quickly see a sign in Alien Language 1, which translates "3D RULEZ!"
• Riding through the Tubes during the title sequence are Amy, Hermes, Kif, Zoidberg and Zap Brannigan.
• Also riding in the Tubes during the show's title sequence is a man reading a newspaper, the headline of which reads "MOON PIE FIGHT IN MARS BAR" a pun on two types of confections/sweets with "spacey" names.
• The countries and their cities in the first countdown scene appear in this order: New York; Paris, France; Rome, Italy; Cairo, Egypt; Greece; China; India; a tribal village in Africa; Tokyo, Japan; and the entire Earth.
• The cities, and places in New New York in the second countdown scene appear in this order: The Planet Express spaceship; New New York; Cairo, Egypt; Paris, France; an alien home; the Applied Cryogenics lab in New New York; the Head Museum in New New York; and the Planet Express spaceship
• Originally, the first person entering the tube network declared "J.F.K., Jr. Airport" as his destination, a pun continuing the idea that in the future, New New York would have similar landmarks that were in old New York City. This was inspired by the flurry of streets and institutions across the United States being named and renamed after his father, the Former and Late President John F. Kennedy, shortly after his famed assassination in 1963, in particular New York City's JFK International Airport. However, after John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s death in the crash of his private airplane, the line has since been redubbed on all subsequent broadcasts and the DVD release to "Radio City Mutant Hall", a line which is inconsistent with the series' describing mutants as underground. The original version was heard only during the pilot broadcast and the first rerun a few months later. The line "JFK Jr. Airport" can still be heard on the original Animatic on the DVD Special Features.
• The building Fry slams into at the end of his ride on the Tubes is all that is left of the Empire State Building. On the DVD Special Features, this scene's earlier Animatic shows that all that is left of the Empire State is the top five or six floors and its iconic tower.
• According to Matt Groening (on the DVD Commentary), the inspiration for the Suicide Booth was the 1937 Donald Duck cartoon, "Modern Inventions," in which the Duck is faced with - and nearly killed several times by - various push button gadgets in a Museum of the Future.
• On the shelf behind which Fry and Bender attempt to hide in the Head Museum are the heads of Johnny Carson, Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, Elizabeth Taylor, Dennis Rodman, Simpsons and Futurama creator Matt Groening and Barbra Striesand.
• As Bender and Fry escape from the head museum, shortly before entering the remains of Old New York a scrawling on the wall reads "Venusians Go Home" in Alien Language 1.
• As Fry is going through the tube, Blinky of The Simpsons makes a cameo.
• The Planet Express spaceship has the same "Groening-esque" overbite as all of Groening's characters from "The Simpsons", Futurama and his comic strip "Life in Hell".
• In one sequence, the moon is shown to be decorated with the numbers "3000", an allusion to the logo of Mystery Science Theater 3000, of which Groening is a long-time fan.
• The Dianoga Creature from Star Wars Appears.
• The date December 31, 2999 will, in fact, be a Tuesday, as Bender says right before they enter the Head museum.

[edit] Goofs

• Although Fry entered the freezer at midnight on January 1, 2000, he wakes up early on December 31, 2999. There are many different explanations for this, the simplest being that the freezer clock is not accurate enough to accommodate a thousand years. A more complex (and more likely) argument involves the difference between a Gregorian year (which averages 365.2425 days per year) and a tropical year (which averages approximately 365.2422), leading to a discrepancy of 0.3 days or 7.2 hours... placing Fry's "awakening" at 4:36pm, December 31, 2999. Another possible solution is that the company that is used to orient the newly awakened people would choose the time in the same day to be awakened that best fit their schedule.

• All of the countries shown should not have had the New Year's countdown at the same time.

• When Leela pulls up her sleeve on her left arm, her futuristic arm band is on her left arm. However, when she takes off her jacket to drive the Planet Express ship, it's on her right arm.

• After Bender tears the bars off the wall when trying to escape the Head Museum, during one of the closeups although Bender's arms are holding a pair of bars, the original bars can still be seen attached to the wall.

• Fry wakes up in the same building in New New York as he was frozen in 1000 years earlier - he looks out the window to see New New York but he is later exposed to the decaying remains of Old New York buried under street level of the new city. This is most likely due to the fact that since New New York is built on top of Old New York, the tops of some skyscrapers protrude above street level. An example is the top of the Empire State Building. (shown in a deleted scene)

[edit] External links

• Episode Transcript

Preceded by: "n/a"

Futurama episodes

Followed by: "The Series Has Landed"