Futurama: Space Pilot 3000 Reaction Paper

                25 year-old Phillip Fry, a delivery boy from 1999 was having the WORST day of his life, let alone the worst New Year’s Eve of his life. He died in the video game he was playing, got insulted by a kid, had to work at a job he hates, got his girlfriend and his bike stolen, was informed that his belongings were thrown out into the street while it was raining, and was victimized by pranksters by sending him to a phony address. To borrow a saying from Suzanne Collins’ ‘Hunger Games’, I’d say that the odds were definitely not in his favor. When the New Year arrived, Fry was hardly excited for it. But little did he know that his odds were changing.

                Time-travel! What a mysteriously wonderful idea anyone would want to be able to experience. Some would say that Fry time-travelled to the future, but technically, he didn’t. He just accidentally froze himself in the cryogenics pod in the room, stopping his body from changing or aging until 1000 years later, the machine would release him. A lot has happened in a thousand years since he got frozen. Civilization got wiped out by aliens in one of the earlier years. Then it got rebuilt and was ‘better’ than before. Then got wiped out by aliens again. And got rebuilt again. But the most peculiar thing in this span of events is that the building where Fry was located never got vaporized. I’m pretty sure I won’t be getting an answer to that question anytime soon. Sigh, I should really stop questioning fictional stories… or is it one?

                Well, yes it is. It is in fact science – fiction. And science fiction, or SciFi, is defined to be “a genre of fiction dealing with imaginative content such as futuristic settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life” (Wikipedia), which pretty much sums up the entirety of Futurama. Sure, you have the typical robots and aliens and futuristic technology, but the show’s version of the future is actually very peculiar. You have a robot (Bender) that acts as a typical drunkard, or in other words, a robot with a personality of its own, and an alien (Leela) that is pretty much human except for her one bulbous eye. Also, the system of society in this future is very systematic, what with each person digitally being assigned a job instead of letting him/her choose a job. I still don’t know what the other aspects of Futurama there are, since I have only watched the pilot episode, but I predict that they are just the usual stuff, like exaggerations of the current society with innovations that are not yet real except in our imaginations, but with an extra ingredient of comedy. Not much of an expectation but that's just my opinion.