Fear of a Bot Planet

"**Fear of a Bot Planet**"
"Fear of a Bot Planet"
Futurama episode
	File:Futurama 105 - Fear of a Bot Planet.jpg Fry and Leela are caught without their robot disguises.
Episode no.	Season one;
Directed by	Peter Avanzino; Carlos Baeza
Written by	Heather Lombard; Evan Gore
Original air date	April 20, 1999
Episode features
Opening cartoon	Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny in "A Corny Concerto"
Episode chronology
	Futurama season one
	List of episodes

"Fear of a Bot Planet" is the fifth episode in season one of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on April 20, 1999. The episode was written by Heather Lombard and Evan Gore and directed by Peter Avanzino and Carlos Baeza. The episode focuses on a delivery the Planet Express Crew must make to a robot planet named Chapek 9. The robot inhabitants hate all humans and Bender decides to join them because he is tired of robots being treated like second class citizens. The episode is a light-hearted satire on racism, an idea reinforced by the title, a reference to Public Enemy's 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet.^[1]

Plot

Cold Opening

While flying in the Planet Express Ship, Fry and Leela comment on how a single world could be considered insignificant in the vast expanses of space. A small planet smashes in the windshield of the ship, and Leela removes it with the window wipers.

Episode Summary

While attending a New New York Yankees blernsball game at Madison Cube Garden, Leela explains to Fry that blernsball is a "jazzed up" version of baseball. Bender is offended that humans won't let robots compete. Hermes calls and tells the crew to report back to the office for a delivery mission. The delivery is to Chapek 9, a planet inhabited by human-hating robot separatists who kill humans on sight, so Bender is assigned the duty of delivering the package. Bender claims that it is a robot holiday, Robonnukah, and refuses to work. Hermes, however, insists that Bender must go.

Upon arriving at the planet, a resentful Bender is lowered to the surface. Meanwhile Fry and Leela decide to throw a Robonnukah party for Bender to show their appreciation. They receive a rushed message from Bender: the robot separatists found out he worked for humans, and he has been captured. In order to avoid being killed on sight, Fry and Leela disguise themselves as robots and infiltrate the robot society.

After hiding out in a robot movie theater, Fry and Leela blend in with the crowd at the opening ceremonies of the daily human hunt. There they discover Bender is alive and playing the robots' prejudice for his own benefit, claiming he has killed a million billion humans on Earth.

Fry and Leela reunite with Bender in an abandoned robot porn shop, but he refuses to be rescued. Before Fry and Leela can leave, the other robots arrive, and the two are placed on trial for being human. They are immediately found guilty of the charge and are sentenced to a life of tedious robot-type labor. A trap door opens and they fall into a hidden room where they meet the five Robot Elders. The Robot Elders reveal that the trial was for entertainment and command Bender to kill Fry and Leela, but Bender refuses. The Robot Elders reveal that humans are just a scapegoat to distract the population from their actual problems: lug nut shortages and an incompetent government of corrupt Robot Elders.

The Robot Elders decide the three know too much and must be killed. Fry threatens to breathe fire on the robot elders, throwing them into a state of confusion. None of the elders can remember if humans can do that or if is was something they made up. The crew flees, pursued by a horde of robots. As the crew escapes on the winch, the robots stack on top of each other, keeping pace with the winch. Bender remembers that he never actually delivered the package, and puts it into the hands of the robot on top. The unbalanced tower topples to the ground. The package bursts open, showering the robots in much-needed lug nuts. The robots then renounce their human-hating ways. The crew, headed back to Earth, celebrate Robonnukah with Bender, who confesses the holiday is fictitious.

Continuity

During the trial Leela repeatedly insists that she should not be on trial, pointing out that she only has one eye and therefore cannot be a human. The robots ignore her and refer to her as a human throughout the episode, foreshadowing her Season 4 Episode 2 discovery that she actually is human.

Cultural References

The judge at Fry and Leela's trial resembles a 16 bit icon of a computer at the first versions of Macintosh.
Right after the robot-mayor says "May the hunt begin!" a robot using a horn which sounds like the opening scheme of a Mac OS X.
Chapek 9 is named after Karel Čapek, a Czech writer who coined the term "robot".^[1]
The story is inspired by a short story by Stanislaw Lem in which a human crash-lands on a planet full of robots and disguises himself as one, only to find out eventually that all the robots are indeed humans in disguise.
Hermes shows up in the form of a hologram, much like Princess Leia in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
A movie called "Buffbot the Human Slayer" is advertised on a Chapek 9 theatre marquee, referencing "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".
Just after Leela sneezes, a robot points and lets out a shriek. This is a reference to the 1978 version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"
When the robot guards are hunting for Fry and Leela, they speak lines taken from the video game "Berzerk", including the famous "Intruder alert! Intruder alert!" sound clip.

References

^ ^a ^b Booker, M. Keith. Drawn to Television: Prime-Time Animation from The Flintstones to Family Guy. pp. 115–124.

External links

Fear of a Bot Planet at the Internet Movie Database
Fear of a Bot Planet at TV.com
Fear of a Bot Planet at The Infosphere.

[Drawn_To_TV-1] Booker, M. Keith. Drawn to Television: Prime-Time Animation from The Flintstones to Family Guy. pp. 115–124.

[1]

v t e Futurama episodes
Seasons 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Season 1	"Space Pilot 3000" "The Series Has Landed" "I, Roommate" "Love's Labours Lost in Space" "Fear of a Bot Planet" "A Fishful of Dollars" "My Three Suns" "A Big Piece of Garbage" "Hell Is Other Robots" "A Flight to Remember" "Mars University" "When Aliens Attack" "Fry and the Slurm Factory"
Season 2	"I Second That Emotion" "Brannigan, Begin Again" "A Head in the Polls" "Xmas Story" "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" "The Lesser of Two Evils" "Raging Bender" "A Bicyclops Built for Two" "A Clone of My Own" "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back" "The Deep South" "Bender Gets Made" "Mother's Day" "The Problem with Popplers" "Anthology of Interest I" "War Is the H-Word" "The Honking" "The Cryonic Woman"
Season 3	"Amazon Women in the Mood" "Parasites Lost" "A Tale of Two Santas" "The Luck of the Fryrish" "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz" "Bendless Love" "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" "That's Lobstertainment!" "The Cyber House Rules" "Where the Buggalo Roam" "Insane in the Mainframe" "The Route of All Evil" "Bendin' in the Wind" "Time Keeps On Slippin'" "I Dated a Robot" "A Leela of Her Own" "A Pharaoh to Remember" "Anthology of Interest II" "Roswell That Ends Well" "Godfellas" "Future Stock" "The 30% Iron Chef"
Season 4	"Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch" "Leela's Homeworld" "Love and Rocket" "Less Than Hero" "A Taste of Freedom" "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV" "Jurassic Bark" "Crimes of the Hot" "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles" "The Why of Fry" "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" "The Sting" "Bend Her" "Obsoletely Fabulous" "The Farnsworth Parabox" "Three Hundred Big Boys" "Spanish Fry" "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings"
Season 5	"Bender's Big Score" (Part 1–4) "The Beast with a Billion Backs" (Part 1–4) "Bender's Game" (Part 1–4) "Into the Wild Green Yonder" (Part 1–4)
Season 6	"Rebirth" "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela" "Attack of the Killer App" "Proposition Infinity" "The Duh-Vinci Code" "Lethal Inspection" "The Late Philip J. Fry" "That Darn Katz!" "A Clockwork Origin" "The Prisoner of Benda" "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences" "The Mutants Are Revolting" "The Futurama Holiday Spectacular" "The Silence of the Clamps" "Möbius Dick" "Law and Oracle" "Benderama" "The Tip of the Zoidberg" "Ghost in the Machines" "Neutopia" "Yo Leela Leela" "Fry Am the Egg Man" "All the Presidents' Heads" "Cold Warriors" "Overclockwise" "Reincarnation"
Season 7	"The Bots and the Bees" "A Farewell to Arms" "Decision 3012" "The Thief of Baghead" "Zapp Dingbat" "The Butterjunk Effect" "The Six Million Dollar Mon" "Fun on a Bun" "Free Will Hunting" "Near-Death Wish" "31st Century Fox" "Viva Mars Vegas" "Naturama" "Forty Percent Leadbelly" "2-D Blacktop" "T.: The Terrestrial" "Fry and Leela's Big Fling" "The Inhuman Torch" "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" "Calculon 2.0" "Assie Come Home" "Leela and the Genestalk" "Game of Tones" "Murder on the Planet Express" "Stench and Stenchibility" "Meanwhile"