The Deep South (Futurama)

This article is about the Futurama episode. For the U.S. geographic region, see Deep South.

"The Deep South"
Futurama episode
File:Futurama 216 - The Deep South.jpg Fry and Umbriel.
Episode no.	Season two
Directed by	Bret Haaland
Written by	J. Stewart Burns
Original air dates	April 16, 2000
Episode features
Opening cartoon	"Scrap Happy Daffy"

"The Deep South" is episode twelve in season two of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on April 16, 2000.

Plot

A bureaucratic mix-up results in Hermes receiving a mandatory fishing license instead of a pet license for Nibbler. The crew takes the Planet Express Ship to the center of the Atlantic Ocean, and starts fishing. After failing to catch anything, a bored Bender fashions a large fish hook made from Amy's beach umbrella, with Hermes' Manwich on it, and attaches it to the ship's unbreakable diamond filament tether.

Sunset comes, and the crew is ready to head back to New New York. Bender begins to haul in his line, but he has caught a colossal-mouth bass. The bass dives, dragging the ship to the bottom of the ocean before the hook slips loose. The Planet Express Ship survives its trek to the bottom, but its engines will not work underwater.

Professor Farnsworth conveniently has an anti-pressure suppository which Fry uses to go foraging for food with Bender and Dr. Zoidberg. Separated from them, Fry glimpses a mermaid; but when he returns to the ship, no one believes him. That night, the mermaid Umbriel lures Fry out of the ship, and they leave to explore the wonders of the ocean bottom. Meanwhile, Zoidberg finds a new home, a large conch shell.

The next morning, the crew finishes modifying the ship to return to the surface, but finds Fry missing. They set off following Zoidberg's sense of smell, and find the legendary lost city of Atlanta. There they find a civilization of merpeople with southern accents. A documentary (narrated by Donovan) explains that Atlanta moved offshore in an effort to boost tourism and become a bigger Delta hub. The city overdeveloped and its excess weight caused it to sink to the bottom. Everyone that stayed with the city evolved into merpeople, with the assistance of leaking caffeine from Atlanta's Coca-Cola plant.

Ready to leave, the crew heads back to the ship. Fry announces he is going to stay in Atlanta to be with Umbriel, shocking the crew. Once they reach the ship, Zoidberg says he also is staying (as usual, no one cares) but discovers his house has burnt down, after Bender left his cigar inside (Hermes notes the impossibility of this situation). Fry settles in to enjoy his life with Umbriel, but when he discovers that the Atlantans' evolution (the "mermaid problem") has made them unable to have sexual intercourse with humans, he runs to try to catch his friends. The ship leaves without him, but Bender's hook is still attached to the tether. Fry grabs hold and is dragged behind the ship. The colossal-mouth bass returns, and is hooked when it swallows Fry whole. The bass stays caught, and Fry returns to the surface with the rest of the crew. Bender's bass sets a world record, until Fry falls out of him and the weight is lowered; at which point Bender begins choking him. Dr. Zoidberg, having lost his under-sea home, reveals he now lives inside the bass.

Cultural references

• The concept of this episode is a play on the idea of the Lost City of Atlantis; the title parodies the Deep South region of the United States.
• Zoidberg twice runs away from danger gibbering like Curly Howard of the Three Stooges.
• When the camera zooms in on Fry and Bender's bunks before Fry first talks to Umbriel, we see several things propped up against the wall. In the lower right corner is a Rebel Alliance fighter helmet from Star Wars, the same helmet he wore during "When Aliens Attack", a banner from Mars University and also the sword Bender stole in the earlier episode "A Bicyclops Built for Two".
• Umbriel's name is a reference to Ariel, the main character in Disney's animated motion picture The Little Mermaid. Ariel and Umbriel are both moons orbiting Uranus, named for two of the sylphs in Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock.
• Umbriel's father, "The Colonel", parodies the animated version of Colonel Sanders seen in contemporary KFC commercials.
• There is a reference to the 1972 film Deliverance when Bender nervously hums the opening notes to "Dueling Banjos" upon arriving in Atlanta.
• The song Atlantis by episode guest star Donovan is played early in the episode during the montage sequence of Fry and Umbriel's date; and the later narration of the history of Atlanta is a parody of this song.
• In the story of Atlanta a Ted Turner statue is shown being mounted above a SeaNN sign, a parody of CNN. The weight of the statue is the last straw, and causes Atlanta to sink into the ocean.
• The "Gods of our legends" in Donovan's song include Ted Turner, Hank Aaron, Jeff Foxworthy, "the" magician, and "the guy who invented Coca-Cola"; it is also stated that Jane Fonda was there.
• The concept of mermaids not having the same reproductive functions as humans is a reference to the mermaid problem. When Fry wishes that Umbriel could've been a mermaid with "the fish part on top and the lady part on the bottom", this is a jab at an episode of Night Gallery called "Lindermann's Catch", about a fisherman who wants to give a mermaid he's fallen in love with legs, but his wish backfires when her human half (her head) also becomes the fish part. It also parallels the Red Dwarf episode "Better Than Life", where the Cat claims that conventional mermaids are built "the stupid way around", and reveals his mermaid girlfriend Miranda who has a torso resembling a giant fish and a pair of human legs (and presumably the reproductive organs associated with them). It also parallels a surrealist painting entitled Collective Invention by Rene Magritte which depicts a mermaid with a fish torso and a woman's legs which has washed up on shore. There is also an episode in a Russian cartoon "Charles Darwin — Origin of Species" where a magician makes a women first transfer into a fish and then backwards and then saws the woman apart, "connects" her again and then a normal mermaid and one with the fish torso and human legs, behind and reproductive organs come out.
• Umbriel and Fry watch a whale and a giant squid wrestle, a reference to the Squid and Sperm Whale panoramic at the American Museum of Natural History and also exactly resembling the Apollo 18 album cover by the band They Might Be Giants. In an interesting side note, The Drinky Crow Show pilot was about nobody believing he saw a mermaid; Billy West (Fry among others) voicing Drinky Crow and They Might Be Giants doing the theme tune to the show.
• There is a Krispy Kreme outlet in the lost city, a reference to Krispy Kreme's popularity in the South. However, unlike Coca-Cola, CNN, and other Atlanta-centric jokes seen in this episode, Krispy Kreme is not based in Atlanta. It is based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
• While underwater, Bender is seen reading The Atlantic Monthly.
• Bender's announcement that "in the event of an emergency, my ass can be used as a flotation device" is a reference to the movie Star Trek: Insurrection, in which Data says "in the event of a water landing, I have been designed to serve as a flotation device" upon resurfacing in a lake.
• After Fry announces his intentions to stay underwater with Umbriel, Zoidberg invites him to come and visit his little house outside of town but "The Colonel" shakes his head and Fry says that he can't because he is trying to join the country club. This is a reference to the anti-Semitism that once ran rampant across the world, but strong in the Deep South until the early 1960s. This is one of many references to Zoidberg's Jewish-inspired origins, which is itself a joke because he is a shellfish, a non-kosher food that Jews are forbidden to eat under dietary laws (Kashrut).
• "The Colonel" suggests Umbriel date a dugong (a sea creature believed to have given rise to the legend of mermaids) from Macon, another city in Georgia.
• Part of Fry's attempt to reach the ship after take-off parallels that of Captain Benteen in the Twilight Zone episode "On Thursday We Leave for Home."

File:Lost city of Atlanta (Futurama).jpg

The lost city of Atlanta.

Continuity

• Bender's sigh of "Oooohhhhh yeeeaaahhhhh" when he is zapped by an electric eel refers to his electricity addiction in "Hell is Other Robots"