Holly's Pretentious Futurama Essay

Matt Groening’s ‘Futurama’ is a prime example of how the creative use of post-modern science fiction intertextuality can produce comic irony.

As the technology became more high-speed, communication becomes more sophisticated, creating the need for a new social and cultural connection. The traditional connections of information with knowledge and meaning loosened collapsing traditional values. This caused the emergence of a new ideology and practice of power called post-modernism. The transformation of the world into a technological project makes science fiction the only form of literature capable of mirroring reality.


Groening uses the science fiction trope of time travel to create a world in the future based on the intertextual sci-fi conventions and reinvented social satire; when Fry, a pizza delivery boy in 1999, gets cryogenically frozen and woken up in 2999 he is in a whole new world. This creates a post-modern play on the 21st century zeitgeist and on another level parody’s science fiction texts and the devices recognised as genre traits to create humour.

There are many ways Futurama uses the Sci-fi genre to create an intertextual comic irony. Science fiction is often the creation of a new diegesis, or an extension of contemporary ideals. Futurama is a sci-fi text although it parodies sci-fi with an intertextual bricolage. This can be directly linked to certain texts, or to subtly play with the tropes and iconography characterised by the sci-fi genre itself.

As genres get more established over time certain conventions are passed on. Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ was one of the first sci-fi feature films and showed the futuristic sets that have now become standardised. Later films and sci-fi texts based their knowledge of this genre on the previous work. Burton states that genre ‘has certain distinctive features. These features have come to be well understood and recognised through being repeated over a period of time’. After ‘Metropolis’ the development of the set conventions continued. The 70s-80s sci-fi films took different angles on set location with ‘The Plant of the Apes’ five film series set in a post-nuclear holocaust environment and Andrei Trarovsky’s ‘Solaris’ showed a water-dominant planet. Later ‘Blade Runner’ advanced on the bleak post-apocalyptic future, as did ‘RoboCop’ with futuristic wastelands. Futurama is constructed out of the knowledge of previous sci-fi texts and manipulates the conventions to create humour.


Currently the increasing hybridism of texts is becoming so established that there are now conventions in intertextual media’s. This trend originated in ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Logons Run’, some of the first texts to use intertextuality to simulate the real world. Intertextuality helps the viewer to identify with the characters and world they live in by reflecting on how the human mind sees information. This is especially important in Futurama because the comedy is derived from audience recognition.

The futuristic set in Futurama is very similar to that of the one in ‘Metropolis’ but also has the bleakness of ‘Blade Runner’. The world in Futurama is split up into two with New New-York as the above ground futuristic version of present day New York built on top of Old New York, which is a destroyed city, populated by the mutants. This split is seen in ‘The Time Machine’ with the Eloi above ground and the chthonic Morlocks below.

The sliding doors have become characteristic of the sci-fi set. The use of it in ‘Star Trek’, the most popular long running sci-fi text, has caused wide known recognition. In ‘Space Pilot 3000’ Fry gets caught in a sliding door. This create comic irony as the sliding door was used as a luxury item so that people didn’t have to open them themselves and to get caught in one defeats the purpose.

In the first episode ‘Space Pilot 3000’ the opening line ‘space, it seems to go on forever, then you get to the end and there’s a monkey throwing a barrel at you’ is a direct reference to ‘Star Trek’. This is one of the most famous sci-fi lines and to begin a series with this show how the text means to go on. When Fry gets frozen in the cryogenic chamber you see outside through a window. This visual imagery is a parody of Pal’s ‘Time Machine’. Outside the window two new cities are built up and destroyed, just like in ‘Time Machine’ when he travels in time and watches civilizations pass. With episode titles of ‘How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back’, ‘The Cyber House Rules’, ‘The Cryonic Woman’ and ‘Godfellas’ it is clear that the direct parodies of other texts are a very strong element of Futurama.


I have just identified the aesthetic use of the sci-fi genre in Futurama as the intertextual characteristics and iconography. The ritual recognition is the way a culture speaks to itself, the relation between audience and industry. Science fiction is a representation of cultural distopianism found in society. This is also addressed in the ideological understanding, being one of the themes used in science fiction.

Theorists like Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Donna Haraway turn to sci-fi topoi not only as a major symptom of the post-modern condition, but as a body of privileged allegories. Science fiction ‘offers us a world clearly and radically discontinuous from the one we know, yet returns to confront that known world in some cognitive way’ – Scholes. This ‘confrontation of the known world’ creates the position to challenge the ordinary. The naturalisation of the sci-fi elements in Futurama we recognise as different estranges us from the familiar and everyday. This creates irony but also highlights the ordinary and makes us question society.

This theme of sci-fi is based on the social anxiety about technology and civilisation development. In ‘Metropolis’ the tyrannical time control of capitalism is symbolised by the manual movement of the clock. This theme of questioning authority also makes it a post-modern text. Gergen referred to post-modernism as a ‘suspension of authority’. Like ‘The Simpsons’, Groenings most recognised creation, the post-modern social satirical element is a very strong part of the humour. This is exemplified by the police officers. In both Futurama and ‘The Simpsons’ police officers are represented as stupid and lazy. When they are trying to arrest Fry and Leela in ‘Space Pilot 3000’ one of the police officers describes the use of violence as ‘lets get 24th century on his ass’. This puts the judicial system into question creating a post-modern irony. This is also an intertextual reference to ‘Duke Nukem 3D’ when he says ‘Lets get medieval on his ass.’


Gergen expanded on this - ‘As authority is increasingly called into question the borders between genres are also challenged…This questions the boundaries between fact and fiction, news and entertainment, advertisements and information, education and entertainment for example.’ Futurama is essentially a blend of genres in itself being a science fiction, comedy and cartoon hybrid. In Futurama the blurring of boundaries creates a constant theme throughout.

In ‘The Series has Landed’ Fry and Leela go on a trip to the moon’s theme park where Fry wants to visit the real moon. They go on an education ride because Fry says he wants to go to the ‘real moon’ and this is the closest thing Leela can think of. The history of the moon is documented by people with ‘fungineering degrees’ and illustrates the first moon landing with ‘whalers on the moon.’ This shows how drastically different fact has become from fiction and creates humour by exaggerating the commercialisation of the present day. This creates a contradistinction, highlighting human morality by showing the comic side of immorality.

The ideals raised by science fiction texts are also themes used to create comic irony. Science fiction explores the questions post-modernists raise by querying human existence. Gergen adds that calling authority into question also creates a ‘suspicion in the centre of human existence (soul, passion, creativity, rational thought and efficient control of ones actions) which slowly looses all confidence in the coherent, identifiable substance behind the mast’.

In ‘A.I.’ the manufacture of a robot that is so real it ends up leaving the audience to question what makes humanity. In this ‘Mecca’, adapted from the previous robot sci-fi trope, is a recreation of a socialist utopia making them a threat to mankind.

Being an empty signifier the robot trope is highly polysemic. In sci-fi, the robot is predominantly portrayed as the perfect manufactured being, without any human emotions. Emotions are either seen as a weakness that humans have, distracting them from productivity and harmony, or as a wonderful thing that robots don’t have making the robot inferior. The emotionless robot has been used as the entropic element of many different texts. One of the first was the ‘Tin Man’ in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ who goes in search of a heart. The idea of being ‘alive’ is then questioned by the characters in the book; Dorothy: ‘This copper man is not alive,’ The Scarecrow: ‘Are you alive? It must be a great misfortune not to be alive.’ In ‘Star Trek’ ‘The Borg’ are highly efficient robots that only function as a collective group. This is juxtaposed with the human need to be an individual. In Douglas Adams ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ ‘Marvin the paranoid android’ creates ironic humour as he is constantly complaining instead of doing his job. This has been subverted from the previous robot signifiers, as he doesn’t perform the task as he is programmed to because of his interfering emotion.

In Futurama the robotic race sees human existence is seen as a weakness. In a TV soap that appears in Futurama called ‘All My Circuits’ the main characters are all played by robots and the human in it is seen as week because he has a human heart. The naturalisation of this concept in the screenplay creates irony, as it is so different to the present day ideals. One of the main characters, Bender the robot, constantly belittles the humans in the programme. In ‘Space Pilot 3000’ Bender’s quotes include ‘Whaddaya mean we, mammal?’ and calling Fry ‘meatbag.’ Bender is a highly masculine, moral-less robot that has to drink alcohol to live and occasionally ‘jacks on’ to the electricity supply, the robot version of drugs. His masculinity contrasts with his name, being a slang word for a homosexual, which creates irony. He is one of the characters that have been used to challenge our own perceptions of life. His faults are our faults. He is the best representation of the distopia that science fiction models.

Fredric Jamerson argues that ‘post-modernism is best understood as the end result of capitalisms relentless comodification of all phrases of everyday existence’. In Futurama there are small details in the screenplay that subtly exaggerate the consumer language of the 21st century to create irony. In the opening scene of ‘The Series has Landed’ Fry is eating his breakfast and comments on the products ‘caffinated bacon, baconated grapefruit, Admiral Crunch, Arch Duke Chocula’. Also in the title sequence there are billboards advertising ‘Bachelor Chow’, ‘The Implant Hut’ and ‘Smart Sausages.’ The contempory description and naming of products that the viewer is accustomed has been embellished to produce comic irony. This also devalues the contempory products the viewer identifies with, creating a post-modern satirical comedy.

There is a darker humour in Futurama that emphasizes the immorality of comodification. For example Fry and Bender meet while inadvertently queuing to use a ‘Stop ’N’ Drop Suicide Booth’ and in some parts of town there are vending machines that sell ‘Refreshing Crack’. This is very cleaver as the irony creates humour but also underlies the seriousness of the matter.

The satire of the commercialisation of the 21st century is more directly addressed by the representation of ‘the past’ in Futurama. In the second episode ‘The Series has Landed’ Fry travels to the moon and believes he is going to be a ‘famous hero like Neil Armstrong and those other guys no-one heard of’ and sees their footprints in the moon dust which have a Nike pattern on them. This symbol is widely recognised by the audience and relates the future of Futurama to the past.

One of the main ways in which Futurama works with audience understanding is the links to the 21st century. The central character Fry helps the audience view the world of Futurama through his eyes. This is used to show the difference between the futures understanding of the past and what Fry witnessed. On the educational moon ride the first moon trip is shown as a video clip of Jackie Gleason’s ‘The Honeymooners’ shouting ‘One of these days Alice…Boom! Zoom! Straight to the moon!’ Fry corrects this by saying ‘that’s not an astronaut; it’s a TV comedian! And he was just using space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife.’

As in The Simpsons there is a multitude of celebrity appearances but in Futurama this has been possible by the preservation of the celebrities heads in jars. This is another way of linking Futurama’s world with the 21st century. The concept reaches a peak at the end of the first series with Fry attending a concert by the Beastie Boys. ‘Back in the 20th century, I had all five of your albums,’ says Fry. ‘That was a thousand years ago,’ replies Adam Horovitz. “Now we’ve got seven.” There is also the sci-fi link with Leonard Nimoy’s head (Spock from Star Trek) saying ‘It’s a life of quiet dignity,” as he eats food off the surface of his jar fluid like a goldfish. This mockery of celebrities creates a postmodern satire of current celebrity iconic ideologies. Current ideologies are very important when understanding texts.


Futurama is dependent on our understanding of the 21st century and it’s current iconography. ‘Any text requires what is sometimes called ‘cultural capital’ on the part of its audience to make sense of it’ - Allen, following Charlotte Brunsdon. So to understand how Futurama creates post-modern irony you have you look at the social context and audience relation.

Futurama is aimed to have a very broad audience. Groening creates this by having many levels of understanding so to appeal to the different audiences. There is the science fiction intertextual level, which is aimed at the highly knowledgeable sci-fi fan base and also those who recognise the sci-fi conventions and devices. Also the face value comedy and the character identity, which tends to mirror ‘The Simpsons’ screen devices. Fry and Homer, Leela and Lisa, Bender and Bart, the character parallels are easily drawn. There are also Groenings traits, like the background signs that are evident in both; in the background of ‘Space Pilot 3000’ you can see ‘JFK Jr. Airport’, and in one of ‘The Simpsons’ episodes where Lisa becomes the president there is a future scene where there is a sign next to a tree which reads ‘A holograph in memory of a tree’.

There are inevitable similarities with ‘The Simpsons’ and aficionados of the dysfunctional family will definitely notice some duplication in the minor characters but overall Futurama is different. In contrast to ‘The Simpsons’ it does try to be a little more adult in its target audience, which actually can lead it to be a little more bitter and politically incorrect than ‘The Simpsons’. This is also related to the disopian science fiction view.

Futurama gave Groening the chance to reinvent the use of intertextual social satire because it is set in the future, and also work with and adapt the science fiction genre to create a hybid in its own rights. The breakdown of the boundaries between sci-fi and non-sci-fi has led to the hybrid, called the ‘Slipstream’ by Bruce Sterling and ‘Specula Science Fiction’ by Veronica Hollinger. Futurama is a parody of science fiction, includes pastiche’s of certain texts and also homage’s the science fiction genre itself with the comic contradistinction. This new cartoon -sci-fi - comedy hybrid is in a league of its own.

Fin

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Big Idiot, little brain?

In between designing Futurama fan sites, and programming an open source poker server, (Urgh) some chap called Tom has taken to dissing the mad squills Holly has displayed above using the medium of his intensly dull blog. Just 'cos you don't understand, 'tard!

Check it here∞.

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Haiku Lou says:

It says 'pretentious'
It's bound to have some long words -
Tom's comments are cack!