Amy Wong

This page concerns the fictional character. For the producer, see Amy Wong (producer).

Amy Wong is a fictional character, one of the main characters from the FOX television animated series Futurama. She is studying engineering at Mars University, and to help her with her studies she works as an intern at Planet Express (supposedly kept around because she shares Professor Farnsworth's blood type). She is voiced by Lauren Tom.

Character development

When creating Amy's character Matt Groening and David X. Cohen decided that she would be something of a klutz. Groening was interested in exploring the idea of using slapstick comedy and physical humor with a female character since most of this humor was done by male characters in his previous work The Simpsons.

Amy's personality was originally much different; Lauren Tom stated that she was supposed to be "a car mechanic, really tough lesbian sort of character." However, her characteristics were changed, to contrast Leela's.

In the season four episode "Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch", in which Amy's boyfriend Kif becomes pregnant, there was some disagreement among the writers as to whether Amy should be the real mother of his children. It was eventually decided that making Amy the mother and having her initially reject the children would make her too unlikeable.

Biography

Amy comes from a very rich Chinese family; her parents own the entire western hemisphere of Mars and her sorority was Kappa Kappa Wong (ΚΚ王). Amy's stereotypically Asian meddling mother and father frequently pressure her to get married and give them grandchildren, which she is not eager to do. They are often shown to be rather unkind to their daughter, including an incident where Amy's father repeatedly made fun of her for being fat as a child ("Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles").

On the show, Amy is known for being somewhat shallow, kind, and ditzy. When Doctor Zoidberg has lost his mind due to hormones, she is fooled multiple times into untying him, despite the dangers. As she said herself "Fool me 7 times shame on you, fool me 8 or more times shame on me." She uses Martian slang, which is simply American slang with altered consonants, such as "Guh" (duh) or "Shman" (man). Amy tends to wear rather provocative outfits. Her standard outfit is a midriff baring pink sweatshirt and matching sweatpants, anything that reveals her belly button. She confesses to Fry that she dresses that way to rebel against her parents; in the movie Into the Wild Green Yonder, she tells her father that she wears the sweatsuit because she knew he always wanted a son. There is also a half-rivalry with Leela about their looks and love lives, with Amy always ready with a putdown. When angered, Amy occasionally starts cursing in Cantonese ("Amazon Women in the Mood"), such as "Daa sei lei", which literally translates to "Beat you to death". She has also been known to sing in Cantonese, though the exact lyrics have yet to be translated.

It is implied that Amy was rather promiscuous back at Mars University due to her cuteness and sassy personality, and that she does not object to this characterization. In "When Aliens Attack", when she asks Prof. Farnsworth how she looks, and he says, "Like a cheap French harlot", Amy merely responds with "French?". According to her, because of her supreme cuteness, Amy had cuteness reduction surgery on her cheek and nose when she was a teenager.

Amy has dated many men. She dated Fry for a time in "Put Your Head on My Shoulder", but the relationship was brief. However, during their relationship, he was involved in an accident which caused her to have his head grafted onto her shoulder to save his life. She still carries a disfiguring scar from the incident. She has been dating Kif Kroker since 3001. Although she is not ready for total commitment, Amy is sure that one day she will be. In "Kif Gets Knocked Up A Notch", she became the "Smizmar" of Kif's children; that is, she inspired the feelings of love that caused Kif to be receptive to procreation. Although Leela is the biological mother because she grabbed Kif's ungloved hand to keep him from being sucked out of his spaceship, not knowing that, in his receptive state, this would impregnate him (some of the children even have only one eye like Leela), the Smizmar is considered to be the true mother in Kif's culture.

Amy has several tattoos which don't appear to recur between episodes. One "obscene tattoo" (which appears blurred because its design requires a resolution unmatched by modern TVs) was shown to be on her upper left arm in "A Fishful of Dollars", and in "Three Hundred Big Boys", she buys a talking tattoo of a devil, which resembles the trademark of hot rod artist Coop, on her right arm. In the same episode, three other tattoos are implied to be on her butt, one of which is a horse of some kind; the other two had the voices of a man and a woman respectively. None of these are ever seen or mentioned in any episode other than the ones they're first shown in, despite numerous occasions in which their locations are visible, apparently lacking said tattoos.

Amy is also skilled in piloting the Planet Express spaceship, which she learned to do by playing a claw vending machine until she completely drained it of all the prizes. This was an effort to get the keys to the ship, which had fallen into the machine due to her absent-mindedness. It is also shown in Bender's Big Score that Amy can understand (and probably speak) "yeti," proven when she understands the ice apes on Neptune before they begin "assaulting the interlopers". Into the Wild Green Yonder reveals that she was a champion miniature golf player as a child; the episode "Bendless Love" shows her as a javelin thrower on the track and field team at Mars University.

Love life

Philip J. Fry

Amy used Fry as her fake boyfriend in order to avoid being set up with an unattractive potential husband by her parents during a trip on the luxury starliner Titanic. Unfortunately, Leela was also using Fry as her fake fiance to ward off the attentions of Zapp Brannigan. Thankfully, catastrophic damage to the ship avoided a potentially embarrassing situation and Amy won the battle of the bogus boyfriends. Amy and Fry also have another relationship (though this one is genuine) in "Put Your Head on My Shoulder" where Fry and Amy are trapped together in a desert on Mercury and realize they have a lot in common. When they are being towed to the nearest gas station to refuel, they make out in the car. They continue the relationship back home (with sexual relations implied), but Fry intends to end it the day before Valentine's Day. An accident ends with Fry's head being temporarily attached to Amy's body, causing much tension.

Armando

Despite supposedly being on a girls' night out to cheer up a critically depressed Leela, Amy still ended up dancing all night at O'Zorgnax's Pub with Latin smoothie Armando. She abandoned Leela in order to go with Armando to the back seat of his car for "coffee".

Gary

Amy's next boyfriend Gary, a banking industry regulator with a hairy chest who was her date on Valentine's Day. He wasn't very happy to see that Amy's ex-boyfriend (Fry) was still attached to her shoulder (although he does show Fry more than a little sympathy). Although things seemed to be going well, Gary fell for the "tell me about yourself" trick. Leela does this to save Fry's head from being carried to a sticky situation at Gary's place. Instead Gary went on to explain how interesting banking industry regulation is and that it is based on five different regulatory traditions (six, if you want to get technical).

Kif Kroker

Amy's current boyfriend Lieutenant Kroker was in command of the Titanic (a luxury spaceship named after/parodying the doomed 1912 cruise ship) in its final minutes before being sucked into a black hole. Amy's parents thought his sudden promotion outweighed the doomed nature of his ship and immediately grabbed him and presented him as a possible grandchild-provider to Amy. Amy seemed quite impressed with Kif, and the relationship lasted the rest of the series.

Initially, their relationship after escaping the Titanic went nowhere, mainly because Kif was too nervous to call her and ask for a date (settling instead for just phoning her ten times a day and stuttering so much Amy thought they were obscene calls). Eventually Zapp Brannigan persuaded him to go along on a double half-date with Amy and Leela. Zapp's book of chat-up lines nearly ended the date before it started, but eventually Kif's heartfelt singing and admission of love won her heart.

However, when Amy told her parents about Kif Kroker, they apparently had no memory of him, and when they met him they dismissed him as wimpy and 'un-manly,' contradicting the fact that they strongly encouraged Amy to date him on the 'sinking' Titanic (though Kif's demotion after the disaster to his usual status, serving under Brannigan's command, may have lowered Kif's appeal in their eyes).

In The Beast with a Billion Backs, Kif asks Amy to be his "Fon-Fon Rue" and they get married back at Kif's planet, Amphibios 9, with Zapp as the best man who is to hose the couple (Kif on the head, and Amy on the breasts). After Kif's accidental death during the film, however, Amy sleeps with Zapp in her grief (Zapp says that this way she can be closer to Kif). When Kif is revived, Kif cites that "Fon-Fon Ru" literally translates to "someone who doesn't sleep with his superior officer", which she did, and he punches Zapp in the gut for rubbing it in. At the end of Into the Wild Green Yonder, Kif abandons Zapp entirely and gets back together with Amy, joining the Planet Express crew as they travel through a wormhole to parts unknown.