The Futurama Iceberg Explained

[Music] so futurama is coming back again for like the fourth time so what better way to take a look at the series and some of the absolute weirdness than by looking at the series through an iceberg so let's do just that let's look at some theories easter eggs and weird continuity issues within the series of futurama and since i've done quite a few iceberg videos on the channel by this point i figure i can probably keep the description of what exactly an iceberg video is pretty brief i'm going to go through each point from top to bottom and discuss each of them the top of the iceberg are more well-known theories or facts and as you go further down into the dark unknown things get a bit weirder and sometimes more abstract and as always there's gonna be spoilers ahead i mean the show's been cancelled for years now so it might be hard to spoil a show like that and hey while we're here comment down below what you'd like to hear me talk about next and make sure you subscribe if you haven't already futurama theorem so this is quite possibly the most well-known futurama fun fact in the season 6 episode prisoner of benda the entirety of the cast ends up switching bodies around via a device that the professor has created the problem with this being that you can't just switch back with the person you switched with to get back into your own body you know because plot so towards the end of the episode we have a bunch of our main characters a few extras in the mop bucket and not their original bodies but that leaves us in a bit of a weird situation how in the world can we get all of these characters back into their bodies with the rules that we've already set forward go back and rewrite part of it absolutely not out of the question instead one futurama writer took matters into his own hands ken keeler a futurama writer with a phd in applied mathematics created an entire mathematical theorem in order to solve the problem they had written themselves into the theorem to keep things as simple as i really can proves that regardless of how many mind switches between two bodies have been made they can still all be restored to their original bodies using only two extra people provided these two people have not had any mind switches prior assuming the two people cannot switch minds back with each other after their original switch funnily enough the 13 switches that we see could actually have been done a little more efficiently with only nine switches instead i i don't want to list everything out it gets very confusing this is actually the first theorem to be created for entertainment in a tv show which is absolute insanity and also i love it bender's birth inconsistencies so continuity in futurama is well something to say the least and by saying it's something i mean it's sometimes something there are bits of continuity littered throughout the series but the show at other times completely disregards any sense of continuity at all and that's fine i mean no one's watching futurama or a show like it for the overarching story but this point bender's birth is a pretty prominent inconsistency in the show so in one episode we see bender being built as a full-grown robot but then much later in the series in season six to be precise we get an entire backstory for a very young bender and strangely it ties in with hermes of all people hermes as it turns out was an inspector at the factory where bender was built when he realized that bender had a problem with the software that didn't allow him to back himself up hermes instead of labeling bender as defective and having him destroyed instead let him pass through and gave him a chance at life so these conflicting backstories seem to be at odds with one another i mean i guess there's a way they could both be true but it might be a bit of a stretch nibbler and the pilot this is another one of those things that i think has become much more well known as the series has gotten bigger and the internet has become more of a thing so to talk about this we need to back up to the long forgotten year of 1999. philip j fry is working as a pizza delivery boy his girlfriend has just broken up with him and he's off to usher in a brand new millennium delivering pizza on new year's eve he cracks open a beer leans back on his chair and falls into a cryopod freezing himself for a thousand years surely you know this story if you've seen the show but later on in the series we find out that nibbler the alien who's been disguising himself as leela's pet actually pushed fry's chair causing him to fall into the cryopod and ensuring that he would be forced into the future i mean that's a cool idea but it seems like something of a retcon right like obviously if you go back and watch the show's pilot and pause it at the right time you wouldn't see nibbler except that's exactly what happens if you go back and watch the pilot you can actually see nibbler's shadow standing over the pushed over chair this is one of those weird continuity things that i was talking about earlier where sometimes the show really does work towards a strict continuity and other times it doesn't care 2 in bender's dream this is something that's actually kind of similar to the last point in the iceberg except instead of setting something up and revealing it much later it's one scene to the next in season 2 episode 3 bender is having a bad dream after pawning off his body bender wakes up very upset and tells fry that there were zeros and ones everywhere he may have even seen a 2. the joke being that in traditional binary there are no twos only ones and zeros but again if you do go back and pause bender's dream at the right time there is actually a two in there so coincidentally there's really only two ways i can think of to justify this the first is that this is kind of a foreshadowing for the imagination that bender somehow manages to develop in one of the futurama movies this could theoretically be the groundwork for that with bender being able to think slightly differently than the traditional robots who rely on binary in order to think process and do basically anything the other reason could be that bender doesn't actually function on binary he's actually running off of a three value logic basically instead of an a or b a one or a zero it's more of an a b or c a zero one or two i'm nowhere near smart enough or well read enough to get into too many details on this but i think it's probably the more likely of the two options i can see bender and lila's apartment numbers speaking of binary this is a great transition point bender and lila both live in apartments that are jokes in references to them or their character bender for example lives in apartment zero zero one zero zero one zero zero which is actually the binary representation of the dollar sign simple you know cause bender likes money as for leela she lives in apartment one eye yeah it's pretty on the nose with that one because she she has one eye hypno toad sound hypnotoad is very obviously the worst best show that has ever existed but where does this hypnotizing sound actually come from i mean obviously in the show the sound is coming from the hypno toad but what about the actual sound that the show futurama is using well it turns out that the sound is actually that of a wind turbine being played backwards as for why the sound and image itself is so hypnotizing well that's kind of up for debate i mean surely it doesn't really have that kind of sway over the average viewer [Music] right zoidberg was actually a veterinarian on his home planet so if you were ever in a situation where you were in the future and were in dire need of medical attention the absolute last person you would want to see would be dr zoidberg i mean the m in his md is even in quotations on his door but what if zoidberg was more of a veterinarian of sorts with a focus on alien life maybe veterinarian isn't the best word for it maybe more of a xenobiologist that sounds like a cool word we'll go with that so we do have some evidence behind this in the show for instance zoidberg is caught up into a mash unit he's functioning as a doctor within the earthican army so he obviously does have at least some kind of formal training and from what we see from his time in the army and his knowledge of yetis and yetiism throughout season 6 episode 23 his knowledge is strangely comprehensive especially when we see the knowledge in comparison to how little he actually seems to know about human biology but how could zoidberg have become a doctor because he does actually seem to be a doctor of some sort yeah he does say that he has a doctorate in art but you know futurama continuity isn't always great or consistent well it may be in the future that with such advances in medical technology that actual organic doctors aren't super common anymore why trust a human or giant lobster man to do something if a robot can do it more precisely so it seems that zoidberg is just gravely out of his depths when it comes to helping the crew of planet express when he's really just there to help his friend professor farnsworth who could succumb to his yetism at any point lila's parents and i second that emotion lilo's heritage is something that was a bit of a mystery early in the show's run it was heavily hinted that she was an alien and one of the last surviving members of some far-off species and by hinted i mean that's kind of just what lila says there's an entire episode that's built around the premise of lila supposedly coming into contact with another of her species they do a whole married with children parody it's really funny but as we all know later in the series we found out that lila is actually the daughter of two mutants and she was just passed off as an alien in order to give her a chance to live as an above-ground human the mutants of course being heavily discriminated against and forced to live in the sewers but we do actually see leela's parents before they're officially introduced you see futurama has a set of background characters they like to use over and over again the most famous of these being the number nine man a man with the number nine on his shirt who eventually becomes an important character in the film into the wild green yonder before he was even given a speaking role you can see this man and many other characters like him in the backgrounds of various episodes similarly leela's parents can be seen in the background of season 2 episode 1 i second that emotion in this episode while in the sewers they see a bunch of mutants and towards the top of the group we see the characters who a couple seasons down the line will be revealed to be leela's parents but what's kind of weird about this is that the designs are just a little bit different her father's mouth is horizontal and her mother's arms are humanoid and not tentacles this is obviously just because they ended up tweaking the designs a bit but it could be in universe that they mutated more as they aged fry's worms did permanently change him in season 3 episode 2 fry is infected with space worms from a sandwich at a space gas station not really is the future the worms which seem vaguely parasitic actually end up improving just about everything about fry they make him more muscular they fix his brain and make it more intelligent and allow him to play the holophone at a master level but at the end of the episode fry ends up going into himself and threatening the worms to leave the whole episode's really about self-acceptance but this theory puts forward that the worms did actually have a long lasting effect on fry it just wasn't as straightforward as everything else the worms had done what the worms did leaf fry with was a vision of what he could ultimately become someone who lilo really does love the worms left him with a desire to better himself we even see down the line that fry has been trying to learn the holophone something that's a direct reference to how he was when the worms were inside him the worms did permanently change fry it just wasn't something physical zapp brannigan has ptsd zap branigan is a true earthquake and hero but despite everything we've heard about how great he is or was anytime we see him in the series he's an absolute idiot not afraid to trade the lives of his soldiers for victory and unable to admit that he might ever be wrong but this theory suggests that zapp was a brilliant soldier at one point but that now he's dealing with ptsd or post-traumatic stress disorder one of zapp's greatest accomplishments was his defeat of the killbots he ended up defeating them by taking advantage of their only weakness you see each killbot has a set limit to the number they can actually kill so what zap did was send in wave after wave after wave of soldiers to face the killbots die and eventually have them shut down the mental toll that would take on a person would be borderline incomprehensible it's this fact that would ultimately lead to zap kind of snapping his higher ups know this and that's why for the most part despite being a highly decorated general zap is usually given some menial post aside from that one war he was in charge of that is futurama simpsons and disenchantment all share a universe so everyone should know that futurama the simpsons and disenchantment are all shows created by the same man but the connections these shows share seem to go far beyond just that it seems that they're all actually within the same universe futurama and the simpsons is definitely the easiest to prove because i mean there's just a whole crossover episode where bender becomes friends with homer it's uh not great but as for futurama and disenchantment you need to dig at least a little deeper in the season one finale of disenchantment lucy is using a crystal ball and if you were to look closely you'd catch a glimpse of what's very obviously supposed to be an image of fry bender and the professor so while it may seem like disenchantment is said in the past i think the show is actually set even further in the future than futurama at least that's kind of going off of what we see in the show with that whole steampunk kingdom so what's probably happening is that their appearance is from the time the professor fry and bender travel to the future several times with a time machine we see in that episode that society kind of implodes in on itself and resets a bunch of times disenchantment could take place during one of those times and the simpsons is probably just in current year bender became a criminal because of the pilot shock the bender we're introduced to at the beginning of the series seems like almost a completely different character than the one we've gotten to know throughout the show's run this theory puts forward that bender kind of changed when he experienced his shock in the hall of criminals in the first episode that that's actually what allows him to become the lovable criminal scamp that we know so well from this point onward bender is able to break his internal code and commit whatever crimes he wants to aside from kill the professor so when we see other models of bender like flexo they're pretty similar they like to smoke and drink and everything but they typically aren't criminals so it seems like this one specific instance is the entire reason that bender is who he is jurassic park was originally about fry's mom so jurassic bark is one of those episodes that is really hard to watch because it hits you like a semi-truck the scene at the end of the episode where you see fry's dog seymour waiting for fry to return but that of course never happening is one of if not the most emotional points in the series but originally it was going to be even darker the original story would have had fry coming across his fossilized mother instead of his dog this was revealed in the dvd commentary they also kicked around the idea of it being fry's father as well but they ultimately decided that either of those options would be way too depressing which yeah they did give both fries father and mother their own story lines with closure and got punches in the series down the line though r futurama sleepers r futurama sleepers is a subreddit that discusses the best futurama episodes to fall asleep to to be honest there is something weirdly magical about falling asleep to futurama it's something i did for years and there are definitely episodes that i prefer to fall asleep to impossible to die naturally in futurama huh this is kind of the opposite of the everyone was dead point in almost every iceberg so we've already briefly touched upon the crazy medical advancements that probably exist in the futurama universe but this theory thinks that it's basically impossible to die either by accident or of natural causes i mean for the bulk of the series the professor is the oldest human we see but then we find out that even both of his parents are still alive and seemingly healthy and we've seen the bulk of the cast survive being literally just skeletons and heads i mean we even have heads in jars of celebrities and historical figures doomed to live forever as heads in jars so what options remain for those who want to be freed from the shackles of life well that's where the show's suicide booths come into play and it's probably why they're so seemingly popular that's the only way to die unless you're a sweet 80s guy who forgot about your bonitas and that's where we'll end this video for now if you like this video comment down below if you'd like to see more content like in the future follow me on twitter at 10k build to stay up to date on everything i'm working on support us on our patreon if you like this content and want to see more like it and of course make sure you subscribe for all your entertainment related content [Music]

Channel: 10K Productions

Views: 417,542

Keywords: Futurama, bender, fry, leela, professor, theory, iceberg, 10k, 10k productions

Id: S2yZ8LyZ2ko

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022