Futurama's Creators Tried To Challenge Viewers With Hidden Clues In The Pilot
"Futurama" is first and foremost a comedy, but by setting events a thousand years in the future, it invited itself to have the kind of worldbuilding you'd see in more straight-laced science fiction. The writers aren't just out to make their audience laugh, but to invest them in a futuristic world.
The "Futurama" writers are learned science-fiction nerds themselves. Series co-creator David X. Cohen has degrees in physics and computer science, while David A. Goodman, who wrote the "Futurama" episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before," (which featured most of the original "Star Trek" cast) went on to write for "Star Trek: Enterprise." Since the writers are nerds, they know how obsessive nerds think and engage with media by overanalyzing it.
The creators of "Futurama" admit they've even relied on fans to preserve the series' continuity, checking the "Futurama" wiki rather than rewatching episodes themselves. An audio commentary track for the series premiere, "Space Pilot 3000" — featuring Cohen, co-creator Matt Groening, Bender voice actor John DiMaggio, and episode co-directors Gregg Vanzo & Rich Moore — touches on the topic of fans' intensity. "To do a show where you're setting up a story that takes place a thousand years in the future, and what we tried to do, we tried to lay in a lot of little secrets in this episode that we would pay off later," Groening recounted. Indeed, an observant viewer will notice those hints — and many did. The creators learned about "Futurama" fans' dedication early on when online fans quickly beat a "challenge" the pilot laid out for them.
The alien language of Futurama
One clue in "Space Pilot 3000" is in the episode's opening sequence. When Fry falls into the cryogenic tube that he then sleeps in for 1000 years, there's a one-second shot of an alien shadow. This doesn't pay off for another 64 episodes; in "The Why of Fry," Fry (and the audience) learn that the dog-sized, super-intelligent, immortal alien Nibbler (who poses as Leela's pet) pulled the leg out from Fry's chair to send him tumbling into the tube, and into the future, because Fry has an important destiny. (But I digress).
About 10 minutes into the episode, there's also a "Rosetta Stone," as described on the commentary track. When Fry and Bender sit at a bar, the wall behind them has a poster saying "Drink Slurm." Slurm is a soft drink in the world of "Futurama," one that Fry develops a taste for. It becomes a recurring background detail and the cornerstone of the series' 13th episode, "Fry and the Slurm Factory" (which /Film called one of the best "Futurama" episodes).
However, the "drink" part of the poster is written in a fictional language alien language, using a simple cipher where letters of the English alphabet are substituted with alien characters. Another all-English "Drink Slurm" poster was shown earlier in the episode, giving viewers the opportunity to identify five letters in the alien alphabet by comparing the two. "Based on that, they translated all of the alien language within a couple hours of ['Space Pilot 3000'] being on the air," a bemused Cohen recounted. "We thought it would be more challenging than that, but people were pretty on the ball. So, we later introduced a second alien language which is much harder to translate in. People finally got it but [...] it took a few months."
Never underestimate the dedication of science-fiction nerds.
"Futurama" is streaming on Hulu.