Fear of a Bot Planet

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Futurama episode
"Fear of a Bot Planet"

Fry and Leela are caught without their robot disguises.
Episode no. 5
Prod. code 1ACV05
Airdate April 20, 1999
Writer(s) Heather Lombard
Evan Gore
Director Peter Avanzino
Carlos Baeza
Opening subtitle Featuring Gratuitous Alien Nudity
Opening cartoon Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny in "A Corny Concerto"
Season 1
March 1999 – June 1999
  1. Space Pilot 3000
  2. The Series Has Landed
  3. I, Roommate
  4. Love's Labours Lost in Space
  5. Fear of a Bot Planet
  6. A Fishful of Dollars
  7. My Three Suns
  8. A Big Piece of Garbage
  9. Hell Is Other Robots
  10. A Flight to Remember
  11. Mars University
  12. When Aliens Attack
  13. Fry and the Slurm Factory
List of all Futurama episodes...

"'Fear of a Bot Planet" is the fifth episode in season one of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on April 20, 1999. The episode was written by Heather Lombard and Evan Gore and directed by Peter Avanzino and Carlos Baeza. The episode focuses on a delivery the Planet Express Crew must make to a robot planet named Chapek 9. The robot inhabitants hate all humans and Bender decides to join them because he is tired of robots being treated like second class citizens. The episode is a light-hearted satire on racism, an idea reinforced by the title, a reference to Public Enemy's 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet.[1]

Contents

[edit] Plot

While attending a New New York Yankees blernsball game at Madison Cube Garden, Fry is told by Leela that Blernsball is a "jazzed up" version of baseball. Bender is offended that humans won't let robots compete in the blernsball league. Hermes calls the crew to report back to the office for a delivery mission. The delivery is to Chapek 9, a planet inhabited by human-hating robot separatists who kill humans on sight, so Bender is assigned the duty of performing the actual delivery. Bender claims that it is a robot-religious holiday, Robonnukah, and doesn't have to work. Despite his made-up holiday, Bender must go on.

Upon arriving at the planet, a resentful Bender is lowered to the surface using the ship's winch. Fry and Leela decide to throw a Robonnukah party for Bender to show their appreciation. They receive a rushed message from Bender, who has been captured by the robot separatists when they found out he worked for humans. In order to avoid being killed on sight, 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, claiming he has killed a million billion humans on Earth.

Fry and Leela reunite with Bender during the hunt in an abandoned robot porn shop, 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 robot-type labor, they are dropped through a trap door, where they meet the five Robot Elders. The Robot Elders reveal that the trial was for entertainment, and 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 population from the actual problems, lug nut shortages and the incompetent corrupt government of Robot Elders, and that many of the supposed powers humans have that robots fear are in fact made up. The Robot Elders decide to kill the three, citing that they know too much. Fry threatens to breathe fire on the robot elders, throwing them into a state of confusion on whether humans can do that or if that was something that the robots made up. The crew escapes, and is pursued by a horde of robots. As the crew escapes on the winch, the robots stack on top of each other to capture the crew. Bender remembers that he never actually delivered the package, and puts it into the hands of the robot on top. The unbalanced tower and the package falls to the ground, and the robots are showered in much-needed lug nuts, and renounce their human-hating ways. The crew, now en route back to Earth, celebrate Robonnukah with Bender.

[edit] Chapek 9

Chapek 9 is a world of "radical robot separatists" where "humans are killed on sight". It is named after Karel Čapek, a Czech writer who coined the term "robot" in Rossum's Universal Robots.[1] The planet was colonized centuries ago by a group of radical robot separatists who despised working for humans and wanted to kill them all. These radical robots eventually created the five Robot Elders. The Robot Elders run the planet, though only from underground where they can not be seen. It is the Robot Elders who continue to feed the robots living on the planet lies about super-powers humans possess in order to maintain a certain level of fear and animosity. Above ground, the robot colony is run by a robot mayor. Every day a human hunt takes place at 5PM, yet for 146,000 days in a row no humans have ever been caught. The planet is blue-gray with an almost equal mix of land and water. Closer inspection reveals that it has an atmosphere breathable by humans and a very eroded surface. Many features show large-scale erosion of sedimentary rock by wind and water.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Booker, M. Keith. Drawn to Television: Prime-Time Animation from The Flintstones to Family Guy, pp. 115–124. 

[edit] External links

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