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Top TV Memes: The Best Meme Formats From 'Futurama'
Futurama is an adult science fiction cartoon by Matt Groening. It tells the story of Fry, a pizza delivery boy who falls into a cryogenic freezer and wakes up 1,000 years in the future. While poorly adjusting to life in the distant future, Fry befriends one-eyed alien Leela and Bender, a robot with kleptomania. The three of them find jobs at an intergalactic package delivery service, where they can’t manage to do anything right.
Futurama is responsible for dozens of notable meme formats, from Zoidberg quotes to an angry alien news anchor explaining physics. Airing from 1999 to 2013, this show was predictably responsible for some old impact-font era memes as well. In 2021, Futurama still gives us a limitless supply of modern meme content, so here are two of the best episodes to find some.
Most Popular Memes: Season 2, Episode 11: "The Lesser of Two Evils"
In this episode, Bender discovers his long-lost identical brother Flexo after Fry hits him with a car. As the episode goes on, Fry finds himself questioning which of the robots is which, leading to the creation of a primordial meme everyone has seen. Thus, "Futurama Fry" (or "Not Sure If") was born, peaking in popularity back in 2012. Eventually, we all grew tired of the exact same image with only slightly differing captions being reused millions of times, but there are still plenty of Futurama Fry memes out there.
That being said, there are a lot of other valuable moments in this episode that go unrecognized in the meme world. The alcoholic Bender, designated in this episode as the worst of the siblings, resembles everyone’s weird uncle, and seeing twice what we normally see of him means there’s even more memeable content than usual. Bender also makes another jab at the famous Suicide Booth meme, reliving it once more as he gleefully strolls away to take his own life in what turns out to be a mere phone booth instead.
Most Meme Potential: Season 1, Episode 1: "Space Pilot 3000"
This pilot episode is what brought us the suicide booth, but it gives context that would be otherwise impossible to discern from a three-panel reaction meme. While the panels of this image give the impression that Fry is happily trying to kill himself after reading the newspaper, the episode itself has a very different context. Believing it to be a phone booth, he mistakenly enters into a suicide pact with Bender, who has spent much of his life bending materials used in building the same contraptions. When they survive the machine’s attempt at a painful, torturous death, Bender declares it a ripoff and the two leave. With the nihilistic sense of humor most of the internet shares, this meme format isn’t going anywhere.
There’s a lot of undiscovered meme potential in this particular episode. We can all relate to Fry’s hatred of existence as he struggles to deliver pizza to a fake address of a man named "I. C. Weiner" while his girlfriend drives off with another man. This episode’s job-assignment plot also takes some subtle jabs at communism, the internet’s favorite political regime, and if you’ve never seen the preserved head of Leonard Nimoy dancing for fish food, you’re in luck. As an introduction to the world of Futurama, we see bits of many memeable aspects of society, as well as decapitated reminders of our own.
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