Space Pilot 3000

"Space Pilot 3000"
Futurama episode
Promotional poster for the episode
Episode no.	Season 1 Episode 1
Directed by	Rich Moore & Gregg Vanzo
Written by	Matt Groening David X. Cohen
Production code	1ACV01
Original air date	March 28, 1999 (1999-03-28)
Guest appearances
Dick Clark as himself Leonard Nimoy as himself
Episode features
Opening caption	In Color
Opening cartoon	"Little Buck Cheeser" by MGM (1937)

"Space Pilot 3000" is the pilot episode of the American animated television series Futurama. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on March 28, 1999. The episode focuses on the cryogenic freezing of the series protagonist, Philip J. Fry, and the events when he awakens 1,000 years in the future and is the first episode to be set in the 30th century. Series regulars are introduced and the futuristic setting, inspired by a variety of classic science fiction series from The Jetsons to Star Trek, is revealed. It also sets the stage for many of the events to follow in the series, foreshadowing plot points from the third and fourth seasons.

The episode was written by series creators and developers David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, and directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo. Dick Clark and Leonard Nimoy guest starred as themselves. The episode generally received good reviews with many reviewers noting that while the episode started slow, the series merited further viewing after The Simpsons and followed by Family Guy.

Plot

In a flashback to 1979, a young Donna Sheridan graduates from Oxford's New College with her friends Rosie and Tanya ("When I Kissed the Teacher"), and dreams of the Greek island Kalokairi. Her mother Ruby is a famous singer, but they have a strained relationship as Ruby is always away on tour so she does not attend Donna’s graduation. Fed up with her mother's constant absence and determined to spend her life making memories, Donna travels to Kalokairi to find her destiny.

In the present, Sophie is in Kalokairi preparing the grand reopening of the Hotel Bella Donna in honour of her recently deceased mother. Harry and Bill can't attend due to overseas obligations and Sophie also feels estranged from Sky, who has been offered a job in NYC ("One of Us").

In Paris, Donna meets the sweet, awkward Harry Bright, who instantly falls in love with her ("Waterloo"). They spend the night together, but Donna leaves early for Greece. Missing her boat to Kalokairi, Bill Anderson gives her a lift in his sailboat, where they dance and flirt ("Why Did It Have to Be Me?"). On the way, they help a stranded fisherman named Alexio to go back to shore in time to save the love of his life from marrying someone else. Unbeknownst to Donna, Harry has followed her to Greece, however he arrives too late and she sails off with Bill.

In the present, Rosie and Tanya arrive and Sophie shows them the renovated hotel ("I Have a Dream"). This mirrors the past, when Donna explores the abandoned farmhouse that would eventually become the hotel. A heavy storm then breaks out and Donna discovers a trapped horse, and soothes it with the assistance of Sam Carmichael. In the present, a heavy storm destroys both the decorations and cuts off ferries to Kalokairi, to Sophie's dismay.

Sam, who lives in a cabin on the island, reassures Sophie that she can never disappoint her mother, as he once did. Before Sophie was born, Donna and Sam were enjoying a whirlwind romance ("The Name of the Game") which ended badly when she discovered he was engaged to another. Heartbroken, Donna breaks up with Sam and tearfully watches him leave the island ("Knowing Me, Knowing You"), while the present Sam reassures Sophie how important she was to her.

Following Sam's departure, Donna is visited by Tanya and Rosie, who cheer her up by performing as Donna and the Dynamos ("Mamma Mia"). Bill returns to the island, and she joins him on his boat, much to the chagrin of Rosie, who fell for Bill. While they are gone, Sam returns, having ended his engagement for Donna, but is saddened to hear she is with another.

Donna discovers she is pregnant but has no idea which one of her three recent lovers is the father. Bill's great-aunt Sofia overhears Donna's wish to stay on the island and reveals she owns the abandoned farmhouse where she has been staying. Donna happily accepts her offer to stay there, where she later gives birth to Sophie.

In the present, Sophie tells Rosie and Tanya about her problems with Sky, and Rosie explains how she and Bill broke up ("Angel Eyes"). Meanwhile, Bill, Harry, and Sky leave their ventures abroad to support Sophie but are told there are no boats to Kalokairi.

However, Alexio recognises Bill so he offers the trio safe boat passage to the island as gratitude for Bill saving his relationship. Bill convinces everyone to join them for the Kalokairi party. When the guests arrive ("Dancing Queen"), Bill and Rosie soon reunite over their mutual grief over Donna's death, and Sophie tells Sky she is pregnant and never feeling closer to her mother.

The celebration is suddenly disrupted when Ruby arrives, despite not being invited by Sophie. Ruby explains that Sky tracked her down, and she wants to build a relationship with her granddaughter. Sophie then performs with the Dynamos in honour of Donna ("I've Been Waiting for You"). Ruby is proud, and expresses slight but sincere grief over her daughter's death. Afterwards, the hotel manager, Señor Fernando Cienfuegos, reveals that he is Ruby's long-lost lover from 1959, so they are joyously reunited ("Fernando").

Nine months later, Sophie gives birth to her baby boy Donny. At the christening, Donna's ghost proudly watches, and they have a final moment before Donna fully passes on ("My Love, My Life"). The end credits show all the characters, including Donna and the younger cast, at a party at Hotel Bella Donna ("Super Trouper").

Continuity

While the plot of the episode stands on its own, it also sets up much of the continuing plot of the series by including Easter eggs for events that do not occur until much later: as Fry falls into the freezer, the scene shows a strange shadow cast on the wall behind him. It is revealed in "The Why of Fry" that the shadow belongs to Nibbler, who intentionally pushes Fry into the freezer as part of a complex plan to save Earth from the Brainspawn in the future. Executive producer David X. Cohen claims that from the very beginning the creators had plans to show a larger conspiracy behind Fry's journey to the future. In the movie Futurama: Bender's Big Score, it is revealed that the spacecraft seen destroying the city while Fry is frozen are piloted by Bender and those chasing him after he steals the Nobel Peace Prize.

At the end of the episode, Professor Farnsworth offers Fry, Leela and Bender the Planet Express delivery crew positions. The professor produces the previous crew's career chips from an envelope labeled "Contents of Space Wasp's Stomach". In a later episode, "The Sting", the crew encounters the ship of the previous crew in a space beehive. When discussing this discontinuity in the episode commentary, writer of "The Sting" Patric Verrone states "we made liars out of the pilot".

This episode shows a fictional technology that allows preserved heads to be kept alive in jars, as in the earlier The Simpsons episode, "Bart Gets Famous". In Futurama, this technology makes it possible for the characters to interact with celebrities from the then-distant past, and is used by the writers to comment on the 20th and 21st centuries in a satirical manner.

Production

In the DVD commentary, Matt Groening notes that beginning any television series is difficult, but he found particular difficulty starting one that took place in the future because of the amount of setup required. As a trade-off, they included a lot of Easter eggs in the episode that would pay off in later episodes. He and Cohen point these out throughout the episode. The scene where Fry emerges from a cryonic tube and has his first view of New New York was the first 3D scene worked on by the animation team. It was considered to be a defining point for whether the technique would work or not.

Originally, the first person entering the pneumatic tube transport system declared "J.F.K., Jr. Airport" as his destination. After John F. Kennedy, Jr.'s death in the crash of his private airplane, the line has since been redubbed on all subsequent broadcasts and the DVD release to "Radio City Mutant Hall" (a reference to Radio City Music Hall). The original version was heard only during the pilot broadcast and the first rerun a few months later, although the original line is still used on repeat broadcasts in the UK on Satellite channel Sky One. (The Region 2 DVD has the redubbed line). According to Groening, the inspiration for the suicide booth was the 1937 Donald Duck cartoon, Modern Inventions, in which Donald is faced with—and nearly killed several times by—various push-button gadgets in a Museum of the Future.

Cultural references

In their original pitch to Fox, Groening and Cohen stated that they wanted the futuristic setting for the show to be neither "dark and drippy" like Blade Runner, nor "bland and boring" like The Jetsons. They felt that they could not make the future either a utopia or a dystopia because either option would eventually become boring. The creators gave careful consideration to the setting, and the influence of classic science fiction is evident in this episode as a series of references to—and parodies of—easily recognizable films, books and television programs. In the earliest glimpse of the future while Fry is frozen in the cryonic chamber, time is seen passing outside the window until reaching the year 3000. This scene was inspired by a similar scene in the film The Time Machine based on H.G. Wells' novel. When Fry awakens in the year 2999, he is greeted with Terry's catchphrase "Welcome to the world of tomorrow". The scene is a joke at the expense of Futurama's namesake, the Futurama ride at the 1939 World's Fair whose tag line was "The World of Tomorrow". Dick Clark made a cameo as a head in a jar, hosting Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve 3000.

In addition to the setting, part of the original concept for the show was that there would be a lot of advanced technology similar to that seen in Star Trek, but it would be constantly malfunctioning. The automatic doors at Applied Cryogenics resemble those in Star Trek: The Original Series; however, they malfunction when Fry remarks on this similarity. In another twist, the two policemen who try to arrest Fry at the head museum use weapons which are visually similar to lightsabers used in the Star Wars film series; however, they are functionally more similar to nightsticks. The interaction between the characters was not overlooked. The relationship formed between Fry and Bender in this episode has been compared to the relationship between Will Robinson and the robot in Lost in Space.

Although both Futurama and The Simpsons were created by Matt Groening, overt references to the latter are mostly avoided in Futurama. One of the few exceptions to this rule is the appearance of Blinky, a three-eyed orange fish seen on The Simpsons, as Fry is going through the tube. A running gag of the series is Bender's fondness for Olde Fortran malt liquor, named after Olde English 800 malt liquor and the programming language Fortran. The drink was first introduced in this episode and became so closely associated with the character that he was featured with a bottle in both the Rocket USA wind-up toy and the action figure released by Moore Action Collectibles.

Broadcast and reception

In its initial airing, the episode had "unprecedented strong numbers" with a Nielsen rating of 11.2/17 in homes and 9.6/23 in adults 18–49. The Futurama premiere was watched by more people than either its lead-in show (The Simpsons) or the show following it (The X-Files), and it was the number one show among men aged 18–49 and teenagers for the week.

In a review by Patrick Lee in Science Fiction Weekly based on a viewing of this episode alone, Futurama was deemed not as funny as The Simpsons, particularly as "the satire is leavened with treacly sentimental bits about free will and loneliness". The episode was rated as an "A- pick" and found to "warrant further viewing" despite these concerns. Rob Owen of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted that although the episode contained the same skewed humor as The Simpsons, it was not as smart and funny, and he attributed this to the large amount of exposition and character introduction required of a television series pilot, noting that the show was "off to a good start". Andrew Billen of the New Statesman found the premise of the episode to be unoriginal, but remained somewhat enthusiastic about the future of the series. While he praised the humorous details of the episode, such as the background scenes while Fry was frozen, he also criticized the show's dependence on in-jokes such as Groening's head being present in the head museum. In 2013, IGN ranked it as the 17th best Futurama episode, writing that it "deserves some recognition for successfully introducing us to a massive universe in just a scant 22 minutes, while also making it funny".

External links

• "Space Pilot 3000" at IMDb
• "Space Pilot 3000" at the Infosphere, the Futurama Wiki.