The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz
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| Futurama episode | |
| "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz" | |
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| Episode no. | 37 |
| Prod. code | 3ACV05 |
| Airdate | March 4, 2001 |
| Writer(s) | Dan Vebber |
| Director | James Purdum |
| Opening subtitle | Now With Chucklelin |
| Opening cartoon | Coco The Clown |
| Guest star(s) | Phil Hendrie as Free Waterfall Sr. |
| Season 3 January 2001 – December 2002 |
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| List of all Futurama episodes... | |
"The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz" is the fifth episode in season three of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on March 4, 2001.
Contents |
[edit] Plot
This episode opens with Professor Farnsworth giving the crew an extremely controversial mission: towing a dark matter tanker through the solar system, and past the penguin preserve on McPluto in order to avoid a tollbooth. Leela refuses to take part, and the Professor makes Bender the new captain. Leela joins the protesters from Penguins Unlimited.
After initially failing to stop the tanker, Leela and the protesters race ahead to intercept the tanker at McPluto. Meanwhile aboard the Planet Express ship, Bender lets his new power go to his head. Fry gets fed up with Bender's captaining, and rejects both his leadership, and his friendship. A distraught Bender goes on a sobriety binge, and takes the tanker on an erratic course over Pluto. The tanker collides with an iceberg, and spills dark matter across the landscape.
For his part in the disaster, Bender is sentenced to community service, cleaning up the spill alongside the Penguins Unlimited environmentalists. However, when the police officers supervising his work are distracted by a round of platonic hugging, Bender dons a tuxedo and blends into the colony of penguins.
Leela sets off to search McPluto for Bender, while Fry inexplicably decides to take the Planet Express ship and search for Bender in space. That night, Bender is mauled by an orca, and the damage causes him to shut down. When he reboots, his boot loader reinitializes him with penguin-like behaviors.
Back at the Penguins Unlimited facility, it is announced that the dark matter has increased the penguins' reproductive speed by tens of thousands of times. Whereas one penguin usually lays one egg a year, the penguins (both males and females) are now laying eggs at a rate of six every fifteen minutes, which go on to hatch in 12 hours. In order to save the penguins from mass starvation, penguin hunting season is declared. A reluctant Leela agrees to take part, but her first shot hits Bender in the head, causing him to reboot into his normal personality.
When the hunters arrive, Bender leads a large force of penguins in an assault. After the penguins succeed in driving off the hunters, Bender takes off his tuxedo. Unfortunately, as he had taught the penguins to hate anything that wasn't a penguin ("If it ain't black and white, peck, scratch and bite"), he and Leela come under attack. The penguins corner them on a floating slab of ice, but Fry arrives in the ship to save them. When it lands on the ice, it tips the block, sending the penguins sliding into the gaping mouth of an orca. Leela and Bender board the ship, and everyone returns to Earth. Leela states that nature will set things right and the episode ends with two penguins picking up guns and aiming them at each other.
[edit] Characters
Characters making their first appearance in this episode:
[edit] Cultural references
- The title of this episode comes from The Birdman of Alcatraz, a semi-historical person featured in a 1955 book and 1962 movie of the same name.
- The idea of the tanker running out of control due to its drunk captain, devastating the local wildlife, is borrowed from the true story of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and its devastation of millions of acres of Alaskan wilderness. The name of the dark matter tanker, the Juan Valdez, is a pun on the Exxon Valdez and named after the fictional spokesperson for the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia.
- Penguins Unlimited is a reference to the environmentalist organization Ducks Unlimited.
- After being thrown by the orca, Bender makes the same sound as R2D2 from Star Wars after being shot by Jawas.
- When Leela finds Fry and Zoidberg playing video games, she calls them "Kong Donkeys", an obvious reference to video game character Donkey Kong.
- Bender leading the penguins with "We will fight them on the beaches!" is a reference to a famous speech by Winston Churchill.
- The drink offered to Bender by Zoidberg is called "Olde Fortran Malt Liquor". Its name is a play on the fact that Olde English is a malt liquor, which is named after a human language, and consumed by humans, while Olde Fortran is named after a computer language, Fortran, and consumed by robots.
- The song Bender sings while sober-though in the show robots who dont drink act like drunk humans -at the helm is "Greenland Whale Fisheries," a folk song once popularized by the Chad Mitchell Trio.
[edit] Trivia/Goofs
- Professer Farnsworth is shown using the Fing-Longer, even though at the end Anthology of Interest he was using the What If machine to see what would happen if he had invented it, implying that he had not, but of course this is after implying he went ahead and made the invention.
[edit] Foreshadowing
- When Bender is revived by Leela, he identifies her as "human", showing that she is not in fact alien as she believed, but a mutant human (later revealed in the episode "Leela's Homeworld")
[edit] Continuity
- The second appearance of Phil Hendrie is in this episode. He appeared in "The Problem with Popplers" as Free Waterfall Jr. and appears later in "A Taste of Freedom".
