Futurama Pilot Episode - A Comedic Viewpoint of a Realist Future

Erwin Dennis Umali | 2010-23119

The future had always been stereotyped as a utopia. Only in the recent decades have mainstream media began painting the future in a more pessimistic light.

Futurama paved a road to that light, and veered off course into whimsical space, making for a fresh, effective setting for adult-themed humor. Based on the pilot episode, Matt Groening took The Simpsons universe and threw it in a time machine.

The protagonist, Fry, was a ‘no life delivery boy’ who considered himself a loser in life. A series of events puts him in a cryo-chamber, which suspends his bodily functions for a thousand years, effectively time-travelling to the future. He wakes up to a completely different world, and, to him, this was a chance of a new life, an escape from his failures and shackles of the past.

However, this future only looked awesome the first few moments; soon after, he was being forced into a lifetime job he did not want to have, and ran into unsettling situations, including a near-death encounter in a ‘suicide booth’. Underneath the bustling future metropolis, he laid eyes on the remains of a lost, crumbling city. By the end of the episode, he reunites with his only relative, and eluded his lifetime job as a delivery boy… by becoming a space delivery boy.

The show tackled science and technology with an unusual twist. From my point of view, nothing in society improved, even after a thousand years; in fact, the future might have become more oppressive, nearing the point of dystopia. Despite the cryogenics, pneumatic transportation, alien and robotic life forms, and all the space-age technology, society still suffers from much the same problems we have in the present, just morphed into a different form. Ugly things still crawl beneath your feet, society still suffers from depression, oppression, anxiety, alienation, discrimination.

But, in the end, what’s amazing with Futurama is how it wraps this all up into an enjoyable adult comedy show. The pilot episode utilizes irony, schadenfreude, and even classic slapstick comedy to deliver its humor, all the while making you question the future the show depicts, and what it means in the present.