How Futurama Pulled Off Raiders Of The Lost Arcade (And Avoided Getting Sued)
Once per season, the makers of "Futurama" like to tinker with their formula by presenting speculative anthology-style episodes wherein they can tell stories that are even wilder than usual. The second edition of this format was entitled "Anthology of Interest II" and aired on January 6, 2002. The wraparound device for "Interest II" was that the Professor (Billy West) invented a TV-like device called the What-If Machine which could present short videos of whatever speculative question one thought to ask it.
Fry (West), being something of a shiftless layabout, announces that he's only ever been proficient at old-school video games, and asks the What-If Machine what life would be like were it to adhere to the rules of said video games. He and the rest of the "Futurama" characters find themselves in a world where diplomatic talks between Earth and the planet Nindenduu 64 have broken down, causing Donkey Kong to throw a barrel at the severed head of Richard Nixon (West).
The episode is replete with old-school video game references. The leader of Nintenduu 64 is Lrrr (Maurice LaMarche), a character seen in previous episodes, and Lrrr employs the Space Invaders from "Space Invaders," Q*bert from "Q*bert," and an alien from "Berzerk" who speaks the phrase, "All your base are belong to us," a notoriously mistranslated phrase from the 1989 Japanese video game "Zero Wing." The Earth's top military colonel is Pac-Man, and Earth's Italian ambassador is Mario.
On a 2014 episode of the Wired Magazine podcast "Geek's Guide to the Galaxy," "Futurama" co-creator David X. Cohen talked a little bit about how he and his team managed to animate so many licensed video game characters and iconography without lawsuits. It seems there was a gentle interplay between Fox and the animators on what makes characters legally distinct from their originals.
Nindenduu 64
Clearly, one of the mandates was to never use any actual video game titles in the episode. The Space Invaders are introduced when Leela (Katey Sagal) announces "Invaders! Possibly from space!" Donkey Kong is introduced when Fry says "I know that monkey! His name is Donkey!" The phrase "Donkey Kong" is never said. One might also note that Donkey Kong is wearing a loincloth, something he doesn't wear in the original "Donkey Kong" video game.
David X. Cohen noted that "Raiders of the Lost Arcade" was mostly geared toward arcade denizens his age (Cohen was born in 1966). Arcade culture is embedded deep in the consciousness of Gen-Xers the world over, and it's hard to communicate the glories of video game culture before the industry moved into homes. Cohen knew that his references would be understood by audiences of a certain age:
"[An anthology] I wrote was called 'Raiders of the Lost Arcade.' The 'what if' scenario was Fry asking, 'What if life were more like a video game?' And here I got to use all these things from video games of the 1980s, which was my era for video games, back in the day when you would actually spend your quarters in the arcade, and I spent many quarters in the arcade at that time. So we had a Space Invaders-style invasion of Earth where the spaceships were coming down by moving to the right, then dropping down a notch, moving back to the left, dropping down a notch."
Lrrr's instruction to his fleet was merely, "Move left! Drop down! Reverse direction!" — the pattern of the Space Invaders. He also noted that he and his team had to recreate a lot of old arcade noises, as there aren't exactly master recordings of 1980-era arcade games anywhere.
Let's-a not get sued!
When asked what sort of legality surrounds 40-year-old video games, David X. Cohen noted that, yes indeed, there are still copyright holders to games like "Berzerk" that could handily sue his pants off, should their intellectual property be infringed upon. "Berzerk," incidentally, was developed for arcades by Stern, now Stern Pinball. Presumably, the rights still rest with them. Cohen noted that there had to be legal distinctions between "Raiders of the Lost Arcade" and the original arcade heroes, all overseen by the bigwigs at Fox. He said:
"The answer to that is we make designs that are closely based on the thing we want to parody, we then send it off to Fox for legal review and they say, 'Oh, you've gotta change it a little more,' and it goes back and forth and back and forth and we end up with something, hopefully, that gives you the clear idea of what we're talking about, but which you could make the argument is distinct. So it's always a back-and-forth process and lots of lawyers look at everything."
The most inside-track video game reference Cohen made, however, likely didn't require any legal clearances. After Fry fails to fend off the Space Invaders, he is permitted to enter his three-character initials on the game's leaderboard. He, with the utmost maturity, enters the initials A.S.S. before giggling like an 8-year-old. Any arcade denizen worth their salt and equipped with a similar maturity level would input "ASS" as their initials as well. In that moment, Cohen reached out of the screen and shook our jejune hands.