Anthology of Interest I

"Anthology of Interest I"
Futurama episode
File:Futurama 220 - Anthology of Interest I.jpg
Episode no.	Season two
Directed by	Chris Louden Rich Moore
Written by	Terror at 500 Feet: Eric Rogers Dial L for Leela: Ken Keeler The Un-Freeze of a Lifetime: David X. Cohen
Original air dates	May 21, 2000
Episode features
Opening cartoon	"Bosko Shipwrecked"

"Anthology of Interest I" is episode sixteen in season two of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on May 21, 2000. This episode, as well as the later "Anthology of Interest II", serves to showcase three out-of-canon "imaginary" stories, in a manner similar to the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes of Matt Groening's other animated series The Simpsons.

Plot

Prologue

Professor Farnsworth invites the employees of Planet Express to see his new invention: the Fing-longer. As he tries it out, it activates the What-If machine, a device that allows the user to view a simulation of a hypothetical scenario after the user asks it a 'what-if' question. The Professor then invites the crew to try out the What-If machine.

Terror at 500 Feet

Bender asks the What-If machine what would happen if he were 500 feet tall. The simulation begins with the giant Bender being built by hundreds of regular-sized bending units. He reaches Earth and crashes onto Central Park and meets with a recently unfrozen Fry and becomes good friends with him. Giant Bender destroys nearly all of Central Park and the military is sent to deal with him.

The military's is unable to damage Bender but when they shoot Fry he is electrocuted. Bender wreaks havoc upon New New York especially because he is friends with Fry, there havoc seem even worse when playing games. To combat Bender, the Professor uses his enlarging-ray on Zoidberg, only to see him wreak havoc as well, interrupted by Bender who isn't pleased with Zoidberg destroying 'his' city. The two fight and Bender finally appears to win by pushing Zoidberg into a stadium of boiling water.

While Bender laughs in triumph, he is distracted by Fry. An enraged Zoidberg rises out of the water and snaps off Bender's feet. This causes his impalement on the Empire State Building. A tearful Fry admonishes the citizens of New New York City about the tragedy of Bender, whose final words lament about his inability to fulfill his dream: his dream of killing all humans. Bender dies, and the scenario ends.

Dial L for Leela

The Professor asks Leela to try out the What-If machine. She asks what would happen if she were a little more impulsive.

Leela shows off her new boots bought on impulse, the only difference being a green stripe down the side. The Professor summons Leela to tell her that she will be his sole heir as she is so unimpulsive -- only to be kicked by Leela into a pit containing his man-eating anteaters. As Hermes discovers her role in the death in a video will, she is forced to silence him by stuffing his body down a drain in pieces. She impulsively kills Bender, with a microwave in order to keep him from blackmailing her about the deaths and then turns him into a go-cart. She decides if she is about to kill someone, she'll chew a piece of gum to distract herself. Amy insults Leela when she rides the go-cart and because Leela had no gum, Leela killed her and stuffed the corpse in the grandfather clock.

Zoidberg summons the rest of the crew in order to solve the murders. While Zoidberg reveals clues, Cubert, Scruffy and Nibbler attempt to implicate Leela, only to be slain by her whenever she turns off the lights. Zoidberg discovers Amy's body in the clock with her hand clutching a lock of purple hair. He then finds a letter from the deceased Bender but is interrupted by Fry who leaves due to boredom, Leela kills (and eats) Zoidberg. When Fry finally figures out the next day that she was responsible, Leela is forced to do something really impulsive: sleep with him to keep him quiet and then do something unspecified to him in the dark.

The Un-Freeze of a Lifetime

After being told that Bender's scenario would not be done again, Fry asks what would happen if he had not been frozen.

Fry narrowly misses falling into the cryogenic tube, and a rift in the space-time continuum appears, which shows the Planet Express crew in the future. The next day, after talking to Mr. Panucci, he came to the attention of Stephen Hawking who arranges for Fry to be abducted. He is introduced to the "Vice Presidential Action Rangers", whose task is to protect the space-time continuum.

Fry explains what happened the previous night at the cryogenic facility and the Vice Presidential Action Rangers determine that Fry was supposed to die and try to kill him. Another rift appears during the attempted murder and Nichelle Nichols suggests that Fry be frozen and Gary Gygax gives Fry his +1 mace for protection against drunken robots in the future. Just before Fry is frozen, he smashes the cryogenic tube, causing the universe to collapse into a space-time rift. This results in Fry and the Vice Presidential Action Rangers appearing at some other indeterminate dimension which is not part of the universe. The scenario ends with them playing Dungeons and Dragons for the next quadrillion years.

Conclusion

After the end of Fry's scenario, the Professor curses the What-If machine for simulating scenarios even he found preposterous and dumps it into the trash can. He then judges the Fing-Longer to be a rousing success and is congratulated by the crew. It is then shown that everything before was just a simulation by the What-If machine when the professor asked what would have happened if he had invented the Fing-Longer, leaving him to lament about the possibilities if he had invented it.

Continuity

In the Futurama Comics, the Professor eventually would invent the Fing-Longer; it appears in the second issue of the Simpsons/Futurama Crossover Chaos! comic mini-series, and in later episodes in the show. An alternative explanation would be that the fing-longer already existed and he was wondering what would happen if he had invented it himself. Bender's speech before asking his "What If?" question in Act I, is an obvious introduction to his "What If?" question in "Anthology of Interest II".

In The Un-Freeze of a Lifetime, Bender and Leela are seen with the rest of the Planet Express crew in the space-time rift. However, if Fry had not been frozen, it is unlikely that Bender and Leela would both have come to work at Planet Express (since Fry was the reason Bender didn't commit suicide and the reason Leela left her job at the cryogenics facility earlier in the series).

The fact that if Fry had not been frozen would result in a rift in the space-time continuum is propably linked to the events happening in "Roswell That Ends Well". If Fry had not been frozen, he would not have travelled back in time in 1947 and so he could not have impregnated his grandmother (Mildred, from which his father descends), thus cancelling his own existence and creating a paradox.

It's a possibility that if Fry had not travelled back in time, he would not have accidentally killed Enus who could then become Fry's grandfather. But that would too constitute a grandfather paradox since it's safe to assume that since the DNA of Enus and Fry are different, the "Fry" that would descend from Enus and Mildred would be completelly different to the "Fry" of Futurama's universe, propably without the unique genetic abnormality which causes him to lack the Delta Brainwave which is a result of being his "own grandpa".

The freezing of Fry right after midnight on December 31st, 1999 (as shown on Space Pilot 3000) seems to be a pivotal point in futurama's universe for the preservation of causality (that would also explain why Bender and Leela are seen together even though they would propably never meet if Fry was not frozen - since causality has "stopped working" in the universe everything is possible and the link between cause and effect is no longer valid). It's actually so important that as a result the universe collapses when every chance of this event happening is lost.

Production

Gary Gygax's appearance alongside Al Gore is something of an inside joke since Gore's wife, Tipper Gore, hates Dungeons & Dragons and has been publicly critical of it. When rebroadcast during the 2000 Presidential Election fiasco, the tagline at the start of the episode said, "Starring a guy who is kind-of, sort-of our next president, maybe!"

Broadcast and reception

This episode guest starred Nichelle Nichols and Al Gore, both of whom would make later appearances in "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" and "Crimes of the Hot" respectively. Al Gore received some criticism for his appearance because parts of the show "conflicted starkly with the anti-violence, anti-smoking and family-values themes of Gore's campaign". Gore's spokesperson responded by stating that most viewers would recognize that the show was meant to be entertaining and that it would be taken in the right spirit.

This episode is one of four featured in the Monster Robot Maniac Fun Collection as one of Matt Groening's four favorite episodes of the series. In 2006 IGN.com ranked this episode as number thirteen in their list of the top 25 episode of Futurama

Cultural references

• The Giant Bender scenario is similar to the plot of the movie The Iron Giant. The creator of the movie, Brad Bird worked with several of the Futurama writers as an executive consultant on The Simpsons.
• The music played during giant Bender's flight is Iron Man by Black Sabbath.
• Terror at 500 Feet is a parody of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet an episode of The Twilight Zone.
• Dial L for Leela is a parody of Dial M for Murder.
• Giant Bender's fight with the Giant Zoidberg pays homage to various Japanese monster movies such as Godzilla. The scene where Zoidberg rises out of boiling water may also be a tribute to the famous King Kong vs. Godzilla scene.
• Upon giant Bender's death, Fry says, "Good night, sweet prince," as Horatio said after the death of Hamlet in Shakespeare's Hamlet. The line is later used upon human Bender's death in "Anthology of Interest II".
• The book shown in the other dimension is the original Monster Manual from Dungeons & Dragons.
• What If...? was the title of several anthology comic book series published by Marvel Comics which featured hypothetical alterations to the established history of the Marvel Universe, based on a specific point of divergence, such as "What if Spider-Man had joined the Fantastic Four?"
• This episode's opening line "Painstakingly Drawn Before A Live Audience" is similar to a joke used in The Simpsons episode "The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show", (Homer asks if the show is going out live, and the voice of Itchy & Scratchy says "Very few cartoons are filmed live, it puts a terrible strain on the animator's wrists") which was written by David X. Cohen, a developer for Futurama.
• The line "I'm a big robot, and I need a big cereal" refers to the Honeycomb cereal commercials aired during the eighties (with "robot" replacing "kid" in this version).
• The overall layout (three stories and a wraparound story) of this and "Anthology of Interest II" resemble the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes of The Simpsons.
• The stadium Bender uses is Shea Stadium, which also says "Home of the 1969 and 1986 World Champion Mets. This would have meant that the Mets haven't won the World Series in the next 1000 years

See also

• "Anthology of Interest II"

External links

• Anthology of Interest I at IMDb