Futurama - "You gotta do what you gotta do.”

Jonathan Idolor

2013 - 14792

Being the amusing sci-fi cartoon it is, Futurama was entertaining and at times mindlessly amusing. Despite all the fun, if you look at a lot of the themes it brings up, it gets you thinking.

 The funny thing about the future here is that while Fry was cryogenically frozen in time, which is a very controversial topic in science, you can see the man-made structures being destroyed and rebuilt. I found it interesting how some structures, trends, seem to repeat. When the alien ships destroyed them it’s like we went back in time to old buildings then suddenly to futuristic ones. Here we see a one-way time travel, where the new world was built on top of the old one, always moving forward.

“You gotta do what you gotta do.” I always thought of this phrase as an encouraging statement; something to push you to your goal, desire, or maybe even destiny. I even use it as an excuse to play games or relax and enjoy while society looks down on me since I haven’t written my reaction paper yet. To see it used so differently, so ironically, makes me think about how we are being classified. From a certain age we are assigned a life which we, more or less, have no say in. We are made to serve society, made to serve people who are made to serve other people. The mocking irony where we become like robots, like Bender, needing to make things like the suicide machine to help us kill ourselves because we probably don’t know how to do anything outside our assigned jobs. Who is really living in this kind of world? Not being able to do what we want, the freedom of choice and the wonder of possibilities.

I watched a TED talk in Youtube recently, Sir Ken Robinson talks about the current educational system, and I believe society included, is trying to prepare us for the future with the standards of today or maybe even the past. We are being taught a narrow spectrum of skills which can be used in getting jobs and supporting industrialism. The thing is nobody knows how the future will look like or maybe what jobs will be available in 5, or even 1000 years, the same number of years Fry went into the future. Now he also enlightens me about talents. He says that although a person has a particular talent, it may not be what he/she loves to do. He talks about a friend that used to be a concert pianist. She played the piano magnificently, but when asked if it made her happy she said no. The same guy asked why she did it and she said because she was good at it, and he said “being good at something isn’t a good enough reason to do it. To spend your life doing it.” Fry didn’t want to be a delivery boy, he wanted to be an INTERGALACTIC…delivery boy!