Futurama

"Here's to another year in this dead-end life with the worst broken heart ever"

Futurama is an animated sci-fi satire created by Matt Groening that originally aired on Fox beginning in 1999. It originally was mediocrely reviewed by critics, who said the show was essentially The Simpsons but in space, so Fox dumped the show in 2003, and the next year handed over rerun rights to Adult Swim. Much like Family Guy, the show gained popularity through said reruns, and critical reception grew greatly, where it is now acclaimed as one of the best adult animation has to offer. Things looked like they were going to get ugly in 2007, where Adult Swim's rights to the show expired, but despite that, Fox decided to produce four direct-to-video movies from 2008 to 2009, and handed over syndication rights to Comedy Central, who aired all of the original episodes and the movies (as 16 individual episodes), and eventually decided to produce 4 half-seasons.

Futurama was one of Chris's favorite shows from the Adult Swim lineup, so he occasionally peppered his comic with material from it. While Futurama can be enjoyed on multiple levels, Chris probably only watched it for the random-access humor and so he'd mass debate to the fanservicey characters.

Stuff Chris stole from this show

• A common gag in Futurama is the appearance of 20th- and 21st-century celebrities and other historical figures as cloned disembodied heads sustained in jars of murky fluid. This allows the writers to use guest stars who would otherwise be long-dead in the 31st Century, when the show is set. In Sonichu #4, Chris battles the evil W-M-Manajerk, who is basically the head of a nondescript man in one of these jars. His jar is mounted atop a powerful robot body, which looks suspiciously similar to one used by Richard Nixon's head in "A Head in the Polls".

WM Manajerk ready to kick ass.

• Sonichu #7 involves time-travel, and so Magi-Chan Sonichu creates a "time-sphere" which looks very much like the one employed in the direct-to-DVD film "Bender's Big Score". In fact, Chris and Sonichu spend their trip backward through time discussing the movie as though it were a scientific treatise on real-life temporal mechanics. The pair also discuss the episode "Roswell That Ends Well," and agree that the two fictional cartoons prove that one cannot alter the past to influence the future. Chris also references the binary code used in the movie to activate the time sphere, although this doesn't appear to be dialogue, or even connected to the plot of the issue.
• As if that weren't bad enough, Chris throws in Bender himself, one of the main characters of Futurama, plunging through the time stream as Chris and the others pass by going the other way.
• Chris badly mimicked Bender in Mumble 7.
• Chris made a gabbled threat against a troll named after Zapp Brannigan in Rollin' and Trollin': Captains log star date Velour Fog? Zapp Brannigan? What’s the deal with that? I’d punch you in the face like Leela does.
• According to the CWCipedia article on Bubbles, as a Rosey she befriended the merpeople living in the lost city of Atlantis. This could be a plagiarism of the Futurama episode The Deep South, in which the main characters go to Atlanta, now an undersea city populated by merpeople.
• Chris compared himself to December 31, 1999-Fry on 31 December 2013. However, Fry had a job and was a moderately-functional member of society, and his ex-girlfriend was real.
• Chris has stolen the line "smoke um peace pipe" from the episode "Where the Buggalo Roam" in his Wigwam video.

External links

• Wikipedia article on Futurama