Doctor Zoidberg
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This television-related article or section describes an aspect of the series in a primarily in-universe style. Please rewrite this article or section to explain the fiction more clearly and provide non-fictional perspective. |
| Futurama character | |
| John Zoidberg | |
 |
|
| Age | Unknown |
|---|---|
| Gender | Male |
| Species | Decapodian |
| Planet of Origin | Decapod 10 |
| Job | Staff doctor of the Planet Express Delivery Company. |
| Relatives | Uncle: Harold Zoid Cousin: Zoidfarb Brother: Norman |
| First Appearance | Space Pilot 3000 in the tubes of the opening titles but did not make official appearance until The Series Has Landed |
| First Line | Excellent, excellent! |
| Voiced by | Billy West |
Dr. John Zoidberg is a fictional character in the television series Futurama. He is an alien of primarily lobster-like form, though sharing many traits with octopuses and squids, for example squirting ink. The character traveled to thirty-first century Earth from the planet Decapod 10. On Futurama, he serves as staff doctor for Planet Express, even though he knows very little about the physiology of humans. Zoidberg is voiced by Billy West and speaks with a Yiddish-inflected accent.
Contents |
[edit] Character development
The name Zoidberg comes from a game that David X. Cohen made in high school called Zoid, based on the game Qix.[1] The game was rejected by Broderbund.[1]
One inspiration for Zoidberg was that he be the opposite of Dr McCoy on Star Trek. Whereas Dr. McCoy is a human who is often called upon to medically assist unfamiliar alien races (a task which he generally excels at), Zoidberg is an alien who constantly treats humans, whose anatomy and physiology he is unfamiliar with[2][1], and overall does a very poor job of it.
Billy West came up with Dr. Zoidberg's voice, which is inspired by actors Lou Jacobi and George Jessel.[3]
In Hongkong (Cantonese Version) Dr. Zoidberg was voiced by James Kazama (占士 卡查馬)[1]
[edit] Anatomy
Zoidberg is shown to have multiple redundant organs as he undergoes a live dissection (referred to as an alien autopsy by President Harry S. Truman) and survives the removal of several of his organs, including one of his four hearts, in the episode "Roswell That Ends Well". In "A Taste of Freedom" he remarks, during the court scene, that two of his three hearts are having a heart attack.
[edit] Early life
The series gives conflicting accounts of Zoidberg's childhood. In "A Taste of Freedom", he is seen in child form; but in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", when the crew reverts to their younger selves, he goes through rapid larval stages, including stages where he resembles a cuttlefish, slug, trilobite, clam, lamprey, anglerfish, sea urchin, starfish, sea anemone, and sea sponge, before growing into his present form. (When the crew were initially reverse-aged, they were 14 years old, so Zoidberg's form above might be post adolescence.) His age is never revealed in the series. While still a youngster on Decapod 10, Zoidberg was supposedly bullied by a hermit crab named Vinnie in a tide pool, further reinforcing the notion that Zoidberg has developed through larval stages.
[edit] Family
Zoidberg is the nephew of Harold Zoid, the famous silent hologram comedian, whose name is a play on both Harold Lloyd and the former practice of Jewish actors changing their names. Although Zoidberg is not human, let alone Jewish, he and his species have characteristics that are stereotypically Ashkenazic Jewish, including an Eastern European Yiddish-inflected accent. He has three parents: Norm, Sam, and Sadie. It is likely that two are his biological parents (the episode "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" indicates Decapodians only have two parents, who die during mating) and one is the woman who raised him (seen in "A Taste of Freedom"). He has a cousin named Zoidfarb. He also appears to have several siblings who budded from him in his sea sponge phase, including a brother called Norman ("Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles").
[edit] Current life
[edit] As a doctor
Zoidberg is an old friend of Professor Farnsworth, and is the staff physician at Planet Express. Although he claims expertise in human medicine, his knowledge of human anatomy and physiology is repeatedly depicted to be poor; he's mistaken Fry for a woman and a robot (which he pronounces [roʊbɨt], as did the writer Isaac Asimov in the audio tape versions of his books), which is frequently how he refers to Bender, plus the chart of human anatomy on his office wall is upside-down. He is often confused by the "strange" features of humans, such as their skeletal system, lack of multiple mouths, or the fact that blood is thicker than water (literally or metaphorically). He believes that humans have dorsal fins, that the heart is part of the digestive system, that humans are susceptible to fin rot, and even that the human gonads are in the neck; he has also alluded to forgetting that humans possess bones on more than one occasion. When he operates on the staff, he makes spectacular mistakes, such as attaching Fry’s severed arm onto the shoulder of his other arm. In "Parasites Lost", it is shown that Zoidberg has gleaned more information on anatomy through television commercials than through academic study. He is only directly questioned about his medical expertise in "A Clone of My Own", in which he claims unconvincingly that he lost his medical degree in a volcano. He also once made the claim that just because he thought he was a doctor, that didn't make him one, his fancy clothes did.
Zoidberg does show some skill in reattaching severed body parts. He reattached Hermes's head back to a doomed version of his body in reverse, having his head face backwards, in "Bender's Big Score". When Hermes realizes this and complains, Zoidberg exclaims, "I thought you were happy. Your tail is wagging." This happened after he successfully reattached Professor Farnsworth's severed hand. However, he proved the extent of his medical knowledge in "Put Your Head on My Shoulder", in which he was able to save Fry's life by attaching his head onto Amy's body, reattaching Fry's head to his own at the end. In the episode "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" he asks Fry whether or not disembowelment is fatal in humans.
[edit] Other aspirations
Zoidberg loves stand-up comedy, and often appears on Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater. His lack of talent usually results in his being pelted with rubbish and dragged offstage. His act resembles Yakov Smirnoff’s; "Earth, what a planet! Here, you enjoy eating a tasty clam. On my planet, clams enjoy eating a tasty you!"
In addition to his medical qualifications, Zoidberg claims to have mail-order degrees in "Murderology and Murderonomy" (although this was revealed in a What-If Machine simulation and may not be canon).
[edit] Poverty
Although he is a doctor, Zoidberg lives in crushing poverty. He has no home of his own (instead living at the Planet Express building in the maternifuge) and cannot afford shoes, which is probably why he wears sandals.
He is constantly hungry. He can only afford one "meal" a week, roughly the equivalent of a guinea pig. Although he prefers all types of seafood, he has an appetite for anything digestible. He often eats out of trash cans and has been shown eating a boot, a picnic basket, and a bag of Amy Wong's toenail clippings which he believes are potato chips under the claim that "a feast is a feast". He gets excited at the offer of free food and in one episode enters a pet show (pretending to be a "hard-shelled whooping terrier") to try and win a year’s supply of dog food. He starts twitching whenever someone mentions food. It's not clear whether this excitement is caused by his alien metabolism, his poverty, or both.
His poverty may spring from his belief that he is a shrewd investor when he is in fact, terrible with money. He regularly spends money on pointless purchases (such as eight copies of the same record) and makes bad business decisions, such as exchanging his (considerable) corporate stock for a sandwich (however, he later claims he would have settled for a hard roll with ketchup inside). It is later revealed that he owned 51% of Planet Express' stock at one point, having been given thousands of supposedly worthless stock certificates by Hermes Conrad, the bureaucrat of Planet Express, to use as toilet paper. Doctor Zoidberg complains of being denied credit in several episodes. Doctor Zoidberg harbors the incorrect belief that all medical professionals are as poor as he is (as he is severely underpaid). He also hates other medical professionals, and the very presence of another doctor will provoke him into picking a fight.
[edit] At work
Zoidberg seems to get along with his co-workers most of the time, though he is often treated like an annoying pet. He is frequently found in Professor Farnsworth’s laboratory and subsequently shooed away with a broom, etc. In particular, Hermes expresses his hatred of Zoidberg straightforwardly: calling him names, scapegoating him, ordering him to do menial jobs around the office, cutting his salary for various reasons, and eliminating his creature comforts such as the salt-water dispenser (Zoidberg's reaction: "This is a witch hunt!"). Zoidberg’s unpopularity in the office - which on one occasion even caused his overacting to be held personally responsible for causing Humanity to be deprived of an Omicronian recipe for Immortality - may be due to his being overshadowed by Fry, Leela, and Bender: when they are fired from Planet Express in the episode The Cryonic Woman, he becomes the most well-liked office worker. He claims that Fry is the only member of the Planet Express crew that has never struck him. Zoidberg is the only character to be judged "nice" by MomCorp's Robot Santa (who gives him a pogo stick); Robot Santa labels everyone else "naughty" and then tries to kill them. Farnsworth considers him strange, not because he is an alien, but because he wears sandals.
Zoidberg has been known to squirt ink in someone's face as a defense mechanism, much like a squid. The ink always comes from off screen, so we never know exactly how it's ejected. In one episode, however, he writes a letter to his uncle using his own ink (to make it more personal). To fill the inkwell, he places it beneath his shirt, in his armpit. When frightened, he screams "Whoop whoop whoop!" (as a reference to the Three Stooges as stated in the DVD subtitles for English hearing impaired) He also has a gland that emits a foul odor when he is bored.
[edit] Loneliness
Zoidberg longs for attention and friendship and rejoices when these desires are fulfilled even slightly (He remarked in one episode, when asked to open a can of soup, "Hooray, I'm useful! I'm having a wonderful time!"). In the episode Where the Buggalo Roam, Zoidberg starts to act as if the Wongs are is his family, and thinks he is loved by them (ie: Amy's line: "They're not your parents, I'm not your sister and that's not your golf-cart). He is eventually hit with a moose head. He is always disappointed when people pay no attention to him. On the many occasions where something unfortunate happens to the Planet Express crew, its workers more often than not blame it on Zoidberg or punish him for it (on one occasion, when Leela is blinded and cannot take off the Planet Express ship properly, she crashes through the roof of the ship venue. Hermes, shocked at this, demands that the payment to have it mended will come out of Zoidberg's paycheck, causing Zoidberg to burst into tears.) Apart from his colleagues at work, he has very few friends and can't make new ones because he smells like garbage and has no personality (the only friends he is shown to have are possibly a Nautilus basketball player, who he played basketball in the gym with, two hungry hobos, a lobster he saw in a restaurant tank and later took out on a date, and his "pet" Slinky, which Bender straightened). The staff of Planet Express makes jokes at his expense and criticize him even when he is in the room. Zoidberg, however, never realizes that he is being ridiculed and even interprets insults as compliments (though in one episode, when Bender and Leela were discussing why Zoidberg is lonely, with Bender saying he was "desperately poor and miserably lonely" and Leela firing back "because he's hideous", Zoidberg hung his head in shame). Hermes seems to actively hate Zoidberg, such as saying that he was a parasite, believing that he's responsible for an upsurge in electricity use, and advocating that they eat him when the Planet Express ship is sunken at the bottom of the ocean. Of all the Planet Express crew, Fry is the only one to treat him decently. He considers Fry to be his best friend in the world, proclaiming in Bender's Big Score that he was the only member of the crew who never struck him. Additionally, Fry also tried to teach Zoidberg how to date, and once said that he thought Zoidberg was "cool". He also considers Bender a really good friend, even though Bender treats him very badly.
[edit] Jewish references
There are other ethnic references in Dr. Zoidberg's character. These allusions combine to suggest the culture of Ashkenazi Jews. His surname sounds as if it could be of German extraction, because berg is German for mountain and is a common suffix for German surnames, including those of German Jews. Zoidberg is a crustacean, and crustaceans are not kosher according to Judaism, which adds an extra layer of humor to Dr. Zoidberg’s character. On one occasion he is refused entry to a "Bot" Mitzvah reception (“No shellfish!” He is then shown commiserating briefly with a pig who was also denied entry).
The other Decapodians seen on the show, such as Zoidberg’s Uncle Harold (voiced by the Simpsons' Hank Azaria) and the staff at the Decapodian embassy in Washington D.C. speak with very heavy Yiddish accents. The staff at the Decapodian embassy also use Yiddish words like "schlep," and the secretary is an example of a caring Jewish mother. His great uncle was a great Hollywood actor who changed his name to Harold Zoid, a reference to actors changing their names to make them sound less Jewish. In the episode "The Deep South" Fry tells Zoidberg they couldn't be seen together as Fry is "trying to join the country club" (although this could just be due to Zoidberg's extreme poverty and other severe deficiencies).
In "Fry and the Slurm Factory", Zoidberg is shown in the gift-shop of the Slurm soft drink factory wearing a t-shirt featuring the word "שׂלוּרם", which could be pronounced as "Slurm" in Hebrew. This parodies the Hebrew Coca-Cola t-shirts sold as souvenirs in the Jewish state of Israel. A more standard transliteration of "Slurm" into Hebrew would be "סלרם". The DVD commentary to the episode makes clear that the creators were unaware of this, as they lament the unavoidable similarity of their spelling to that of the Hebrew word for peace, "שׁלוֹם" (Shalom).
In the first Futurama full-length movie, Bender's Big Score, Dr. Zoidberg refers to his "tuchus", and congratulates Lars and Leela using the phrase Mazel Tov when they announce their sudden engagement. He can occasionally be heard muttering other Yiddish sayings throughout the run of the series, such as toasting Fry's newfound wealth with the phrase "L'chaim" in the episode "A Fishful of Dollars."
[edit] The Decapodians
Doctor Zoidberg’s race, the Decapodians, are aliens from the beachlike mud planet Decapod 10. This name is a reference to the scientific nomenclature of lobsters and crayfish as decapods, that is, creatures with ten legs. The actual physiology of Decapodians combines that of several different sea creatures. Dr. Zoidberg’s anatomy is similar to that of crustaceans, as he has chelae (pinchers) and a hard exoskeleton, hard enough to prevent it being punctured by a samurai sword in a seppuku attempt. The shell is also removeable, and Zoidberg often removes it when it gets too cramped. Unfortunately his fleshy, boneless inner body is considered by many to be quite disgusting. He also has many attributes of cephalopod mollusks, such as the tentacle-like protrusions covering his mouth (reminiscent of those of cuttlefish) and his ink gland, through which he occasionally expels ink when threatened (as do all Coleoidea); he uses this to "get my own ink for writing". He also coughs up blue pearls after ingesting “too much dirt”. He has also been shown to propel water from several unseen holes on his head. Throughout the series, Zoidberg usually refers to himself, and is referred to by others, as a lobster. In an early episode, Zoidberg falls in love with an actual lobster in a nightclub aquarium. In the episode "When Aliens Attack", he finds himself trapped in a lobster cage, but is rescued by Bender. He refers to himself self-deprecatingly as a squid ("Three Hundred Big Boys") commenting, "Oh, what a foolish squid I've been." In the episode "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" he declares that he is "friskier than a squid on Tuesday."
The Decapodian race is originally from the planet Decapod 10 (a member planet of the Democratic Order of Planets), but many Decapodians also live on Earth. The Decapodians seem to have been one of the first alien races to make contact with humans, and Decapodians arrived on Earth soon afterward (proceeding to accidentally wipe out the anchovy population by overfishing). The Decapodians themselves have many comical traits, including the traditional "apology dance" used to ask forgiveness, and the recent (but good) tradition of "Clawplach", in which Decapodians fight to the death over matters of honor and whether or not abbreviations are acceptable in Scrabble (Zoidberg maintains that they are not). The Decapodians' national anthem is the music played during fight scenes in the original series of Star Trek.
The Decapodians appear to have a mating season (which is similar to pon farr in Vulcans), and as soon as the parents have passed on their genes, they die. However, in "Where the Buggalo Roam", Dr. Zoidberg announces that he has taken the liberty of fertilizing the caviar that was being served at the barbecue; despite passing on his DNA into the caviar, he does not die. Decapodians also have courtship display and arena battle practices which are closely analogous to the lek of some Earth species. The male reproductive organ appears to be called the "wazoo"; Fry, making a pitch for Zoidberg to the Decapodian named Edna, states that Zoidberg has "male jelly coming out the wazoo", she replies "well that is where it comes out". There is one allusion to asexual reproduction or regeneration: at Fry's housewarming party, Hermes eats some small pincers and comments that they are "mighty tasty", to which Zoidberg replies "Thank you, I made them myself".
Biologically, fin rot is a serious disease that can afflict Decapodians. Decapodians have incredible strength, mostly in their claws, Zoidberg was able to cut through Fry's arm without difficulty. In a parallel universe explored by the Planet Express crew ("The Farnsworth Parabox"), Dr. Zoidberg's outer shell is blue; according to the DVD commentary this is because one in every two million lobsters is blue. Decapod 10 maintains an embassy, resembling a giant sandcastle, in Washington D.C. under Ambassador Moivin. In "A Taste Of Freedom" the Decapodian military invades and conquers Earth, but after their occupation warships are dismissed, Zoidberg himself destroys the Mobile Oppression Palace (a motorized sand castle on top of a crab-like robot) and liberates Earth. The Decapodians also walk in a fashion which causes them to walk with their "toes" pointed out. In Bender's Big Score, Zoidberg mentions and demonstrates that the only internal organ that seems to be particularly unique to his people is a gland that gives off foul odors when he is bored, which may currently be considered a useless trait. Decapodians also have "mouth flaps" which in more than one episode move independently with the same amount of control as a normal appendage.
[edit] In popular culture
In Action Comics #863, there is an alien Dr. Zoidberg look-alike, complete with sandals, that appears within several of its pages. Zoidberg appears in the Looney Tunes short, Attack of the Drones with a single line in a parody of the Jedi Council.
[edit] External links
- Dr. John A. Zoidberg at the Infosphere.
- Dr. Zoidberg's page in the Futurama Encyclopedia
- Crustacean Notes - a Dr. Zoidberg website
[edit] References
- ^ a b c Baker, Chris (2007-12-18). Videogames & Futurama, Part 2: How Zoidberg Got His Name From a Game. Wired. Retrieved on 2008-03-28.
- ^ Cohen, David X. (2003). Futurama season 1 DVD commentary for the episode "The Series Has Landed" [DVD]. 20th Century Fox.
- ^ Joel, Keller. Billy West: The TV Squad Interview. Retrieved on 2008-01-14.
|
||||||||||||||||||||
