Futurama

Answer: The initial number is 0101100101 = 357. When reflected in a mirror, however, it reads 1010011010 = 666 (the number of the Beast). It is a parody of The Shining, where the words Red Rum are seen as the word murder in the mirror.

Sierra1

Answer: You are thinking about episode 20 of series 2 - "Anthology of Interest I". She technically never kills anyone, but in the episode she ask a "What if machine" (one of the Professor's inventions) what would happen if she was more impulsive. The machine then shows the more impulsive Leela killing off the Professor to get the money from his will and thereafter killing Hermes, Bender, Scruffy, Cubert, Nibler, Amy and Zoidberg to cover it up. Finally she does something really impulsive with Fry.

Andreas[DK]

Answer: Yes Leela knew from early on that Fry had feelings for her. They were pretending to be a couple in 'A Flight to Remember' from season 1 and Fry tried to get on dates with Leela ever since. She just didn't show signs of the feelings maybe being mutual before some of the later episodes.

Andreas[DK]

Show generally

Question: Which episode is it where the characters visit either a museum or an archaeological dig of the 20th century, and come across a voiceover/narrator/scientist making wild and wrong assumptions about the use of common objects? I've got a quote in my mind that's something like "here's where people would maybe do [something] perhaps."

Jon Sandys

Chosen answer: In s02e06, "The Lesser of Two Evils", they go to "Past-o-Rama" amusement park. There's a hologram of an Old New York traffic and the voice over guy says something like "it was a forum for a free exchange of opinions", followed by New Yorkers yelling.

Bishop73

Thanks! I think what I was remembering was that combined with the Bigfoot video where the narrator says "In the dense forests of the Pacific Northwest dwells the strange and beautiful creature known as Bigfoot, perhaps."

Jon Sandys

I, Roommate - S1-E3

Question: Is the tune that Bender is whistling when he comes to work actually real and if so, what is it? He is also whistling this tune in some of the other episodes.

Answer: According to the DVD commentaries, John DiMaggio (the voice of Bender) was instructed to just make something up for Bender's whistling, to avoid any potential copyright issues.

Gary O'Reilly

Season 3 generally

Question: One of the Easter Egg entries says an egg is on every DVD and can be accessed by entering '35' when the alien writing appears on the screen. I have tried this, but it doesn't work. Can someone please go into a little more detail for me or explain why it might not work? The other easter eggs can be accessed fine.

Answer: I did some research around the net and it seems this only works with region 2 DVDs.

Mortug

Show generally

Question: One thing I never understood about Futurama was all the famous heads-in-jars, especially people like George Washington, or other people who would be long dead and decomposed in OUR time, let alone 1000 years from now. How did they get them? Cloning (which we know they have, thanks to Cubert)? If so, then why not just keep cloning and avoid the jars altogether?

Xofer

Chosen answer: Matt Groening has actually mentioned that this is indeed a mistake and a historical inaccuracy, but says it's still funny and allows historical references and gags to be made.

David Mercier

Chosen answer: It seems to be a custom version of "Yo Ho A Pirate's Life For Me", maybe increased tempo.

Answer: It's just funny that he would hate them so much, for no apparent reason, that he wants someone to actually inform the grunka-lunkas of his hatred for them.

Phixius

Answer: Well the Professor is the owner, so he does as he pleases, most of his time is spent inventing though. Hermes is the accountant and bureaucrat. Amy is an intern and an engineering student, although this seems to be all but forgotten in the later seasons. (The Professor does mention though that he likes having her around because they share the same blood type). Scruffy is the janitor and Cubert is a kid and presumably goes to school.

Andreas[DK]

Bend Her - S5-E13

Question: At the end of this episode, when they are performing the "soap opera" for Calculon's benefit, Leela is dressed in a black dress and blonde wig with sunglasses. This ensemble looks really familiar to me, for some reason, and I wondered if it was perhaps a parody or homage to a well known soap character/actor/plot. Can anyone clue me in? And, on that note, is Fry's character of 'Congo Jack' a parody of something or just a stereotypical soap character?

Answer: Ally McBeal.

Show generally

Question: Does Leela have super strength? I've never seen it explicitly stated, but the are quite a few instances in which she is shown to be much stronger than the other characters, or where she'll do something that requires great strength.

Answer: No I wouldn't say she has super strength (besides the one episode where she actually does have super strength) but she is fit and adept in some form of martial arts. Besides the rest of the Planet Express crew are pretty pathetic, physically speaking.

Andreas[DK]

Show generally

Question: Sometime during the third season, the animators changed their alien substitute code for a more difficult one. I can't remember what it was called (Modulator 6? Something like that.) but I remember that each symbol could represent any letter depending on the letters/symbols that came before it. I still want to translate the secret messages myself, but could someone please explain to me (in layman terms) how this new code works?

Answer: Each symbol in the second alien alphabet (AA2) corresponds to a number from 1-26, so you'll end up with a series of numbers. The first number corresponds directly with an A-Z letter on another lookup table, but each subsequent letter is the corresponding number from the original numeric series subtracted from the number preceding it. The lookup tables and a tutorial on decoding AA2 is available at http://tfp.killbots.com/?p=aa_02.

Sierra1

Mars University - S2-E2

Question: When they pass in front of the library, there are only two books "Fiction" and "Non-fiction". I remember seeing something similar in a science-fiction film when I was a kid. A man says something like "All the knowledge of the Martians is contained in this disc". Is it a reference to this film, and if so, what is its name?

Dr Wilson

Chosen answer: I don't know that it is a reference, but it sounds like you are thinking of The Martian Chronicles.

Grumpy Scot

That's Lobstertainment! - S3-E8

Question: I have heard that Calculon winning the Golden Globe in this episode is a spoof of how a woman (Pia Zadora I believe) won the Golden Globe for Best Female Newcomer for a film that was terrible enough that she shouldn't have even dreamed of getting it, and it turned out she won it because her husband had bribed many people to get her to win. Is this true?

Answer: While it has never been proved, it is believed that her husband, Israeli millionaire Meshulam Riklis, did have something to do with her winning a GG for her role in "Butterfly", especially since she also won Razzies for Worst New Star and Worst Actress for the same role.

Answer: As the commentaries say, she's actually saying something that's relevant to what's going on.

DenizenZERO

Chosen answer: The hiatus and the cancellation were for the same reason, a dispute over ownership between Matt Groening and Fox. Fox actually own the majority of the interest in the Simpsons, but their stake in Futurama is much more limited. This gives Groening more bargaining power with the show, and unfortunately Fox were unhappy with this so put the show on hiatus and then cancelled it.

David Mercier

More mistakes in Futurama
More quotes from Futurama

Trivia: The part of Zapp Brannigan was originally going to go to Phil Hartman, the voice of Troy McClure and Lionel Hutz in The Simpsons, but was changed when he was murdered by his wife in 1998.

More trivia for Futurama

Join the mailing list

Separate from membership, this is to get updates about mistakes in recent releases. Addresses are not passed on to any third party, and are used solely for direct communication from this site. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Check out the mistake & trivia books, on Kindle and in paperback.