Futurama Almost Gave Fry A Second, Fancier Robot Friend
In the "Futurama" episode "A Fishful of Dollars" (April 27, 1999), Fry (Billy West) remembers that he had 93 cents in his savings account when he was cryogenically frozen in 1999. After a thousand years of .25% interest, however, that amount had grown into a fortune of 4.3 billion dollars. Thankfully, inflation hasn't kept pace, and Fry is suddenly one of the wealthiest people on the planet. As anyone with abrupt access to a massive fortune might, Fry immediately begins to squander his riches on frivolous things. He buys the Mona Lisa merely so he may use it as a clay pigeon for skeet shooting. He tries to recreate a slobby, 20th-century apartment just as he remembered it. Most notably, he buys an ancient can of anchovies at auction, a valuable commodity indeed, given that anchovies went extinct many years before. The anchovies, still sealed, are guaranteed to be edible.
Unbeknownst to Fry, however, the anchovies are also valuable to Mom (Tress MacNeille), the vicious billionaire industrialist. It seems that anchovy oil can be used as robot oil in Mom's factories, and Mom fears that Fry aims to undercut her manufacturing business. Mom spends the episode trying to buy out or hoodwink Fry and steal his anchovies.
Fry, meanwhile, keeps on spending. He becomes so rich, he immediately disconnects with his friends. "I finally know what I need to be happy," Fry says, "and it's not friends. It's things." Of course Fry's robot best friend Bender (John DiMaggio) sadly points out that "I'm a thing."
It seems that in early drafts of "A Fishful of Dollars," Fry almost took an additional step in rejecting Bender by buying a fancy new robot friend named Deluxor. This was revealed on the DVD commentary track foe "Fishful."
Tired: Bender; Wired: Deluxor
Patric Verrone, the writer of "A Fishful of Dollars," recalled his early draft and the robot Fry would briefly cavort with, saying:
"[I]n an early draft, Fry was supposed to get another robot friend. He was rich enough to get an all-wood robot named Deluxor made of hand-carved wood."
"Futurama" co-creator and executive producer David X. Cohen claimed to miss the never-born Deluxor, to which Verrone promised that Deluxor would return in a future episode. That commentary track was recorded sometime around the release of the DVD set in 2003, and, as of this writing, Deluxor has yet to appear. But, because "Futurama" incessantly persists through multiple cancelations, there's every possibility that a hand-carved wood robot could still appear.
Verrone's idea was sort of employed in Dan Vebber's script for "Obsoletely Fabulous" (July 27, 2003). In that episode, Bender finds that he faces obsolescence in the face of a new, much more capable robot named 1-X (Phil LaMarr). He runs away and ends up on a remote tropical island with other outdated robots. While there, he learns to reject technology (a strange stance for a high-tech robot) and gets a downgrade. Bender returns home with a body made of wood. His head is a log with eyes. It's not quite the same as a fancy, hand-carved robot, but Bender was briefly oaken.
But then, in "The Duh-Vinci Code" (July 15, 2010), written by Maiya Williams, "Futurama" introduced Animatronio (David Herman), a fancy, all-wooden robot once constructed by Leonardo da Vinci. Animatronio had wooden legs, a curlicued head, gem eyes, and a piano-like torso. It took 11 years, but it seems that the spirit of Deluxor lived on after all.