Talking Simpsons - Bonus Episode - Talking Futurama "Roswell That Ends Well" With Nina Matsumoto

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

The Talking Simpsons Network is taking a week off, so to fill the content gap, we've decided to post an episode of our Patreon-exclusive Talking Futurama podcast miniseries! If you like this episode and want to hear the rest (with more to come every month), head over to Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and sign up at the $5 level. Once you do, you'll have immediate access to all of our limited miniseries, covering animated shows like Futurama, Mission Hill, The Critic, and Batman: The Animated Series. So visit Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and sign up today!

Once again, television has given me a reason to live. Good news everyone, it's Talking Futurama where existing is basically all we do. I'm your host, the deluxe gas princess Bob Mackie, and this is the Talking Simpsons Patreon's chronological exploration of Futurama, who's here with me today as always. Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, and you ever feel like you're only going with girls because you're supposed to? And who's our special guest today in person? Hey, I'm taking a break from making a pot roast. It's Nina Matsumoto.

That's right. And this month's episode is Roswell That Ends Well. Hey, which crazy thing happening are you guys screaming about? This episode originally aired on December 9th, 2001. And as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history welcome to the world of tomorrow good news bobby skipping christmas is number one on the new york times bestsellers list mortal kombat advance is released to terrible reviews on the gba and meanwhile jack and daxter is doing much better on the playstation 2

so skipping christmas was this part of the war on christmas the initial shots fired uh it was about taking christmas off and going uh and and relaxing somewhere instead of like making a big to-do for it but uh then their whole town won't let them skip christmas and so they forced them to celebrate christmas and yes it did turn into the film Christmas with the Cranks, starring Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis. Not to be confused with Deck the Halls, the Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito film.

I've heard on the podcast, How Did This Get Made? That's where Matthew Broderick's soul died. Yes, yes. That is where he said, like, this is the bottom, which again, he's sort of killed a guy once. Bob, can we skip Christmas one year?

No. Oh. No, we get two Thanksgivings now. It's true. Double Thanksgivings, two Christmas. That's what we get for being a binational couple. It's true. It's Bob's American chauvinism.

Yeah. Hey, I like the one that's closer to Christmas, but, you know, I can deal with the October Thanksgiving. It's still good. I think the timing of your guys' Thanksgiving is really weird. It really kicks off the indulgence of it all, of the holiday season. Just like, okay, overeat now, and then you slide right into Christmas. The overindulgent holiday where you eat a ton and see your family. It's like back-to-back for you guys.

I skip seeing my family, and I have for the past 12 years. But still, like October just makes more sense to me. Weigh in in the comments. Which Thanksgiving do you prefer? Well, see, we get a bunch of pumpkin decorations in October and that's good for Thanksgiving

and Halloween. Very efficient. See, I saw it more as like your Thanksgiving, your Halloween pumpkin turns into your Thanksgiving pumpkin pie like a month later. That's true. You can buy a pumpkin for Thanksgiving and then we carve it for Halloween. like your thanksgiving your halloween pumpkin turns into your thanksgiving pumpkin pie uh like a month later that's true you can buy a pumpkin for thanksgiving and then we carve it for halloween

it makes sense efficient canadians we're about all about waste in america that's why it's in november but yeah mortal kombat for the game boy advanced didn't play it i'm sure all of these mortal kombat portable ports are terrible i i was shocked to hear there is a gba version of moral combat that sounds awful there's a gameba version of mortal kombat that sounds awful there's a game boy mortal kombat oh my god yeah and a game gear one too which i did own which was i mean it's game gear it wasn't that good but yeah mortal kombat advance was like exceptionally bad for its time like it got like one one out of ten and just like it it's a famously a terrible um a terrible porthouse got handed it for just very

cheap so yes it's uh mortal kombat fans uh have many things to argue about as being the worst mortal kombat game but i think usually that one wins and uh jack and daxter that makes you long for the days when naughty dog made things other than sad murder dad games well they keep remaking the same ones over and over because those are like the citizen kane of gaming if you will they're that important bob yeah you should appreciate that i think naughty dog should bring back the original mascot have you seen it i've only seen yes the young woman no that's that's the cheat code mascot you saw if you played rings of power it's just like a a poorly drawn dog that's like raiding uh the fridge for beer he's drinking like

dad's beer or whatever and they say uh naughty dog that's why he's naughty because he's stealing your beer i think i've said this before but i love every game studio that started in the 90s and now is making like prestige games but all of their names are like insane monkey entertainment or like never stop which is a boner joke like they all have these like very like edgy uh funky names like naughty dog yeah even id was very like was that same kind of thing yeah i jack and daxter i didn't i only played it a teeny bit i remember its big claim to fame was like no loading after the first load that it was just uh they had built the world to be just seamless like you would just go you'd just run to another zone and you wouldn't load anything.

But I was always more of a clank man out of all of the Sony games. I like those more than like finding precursor orbs. I like having all the fun weapons of Ratchet and Clank. And every one of those games is the same, but you can play one every five years and you'll have fun. I just wanted to go back to MK quickly. Oh, sure.

Who do you like to play as? You know, I think Sub-Zero. He was usually my main. I think Scorpion because I'm bad and the get over here thing is just a very cheesy thing to do to people. I'm a Scorpion girl. So we got two Scorpions, one Sub-Zero. We're in love.

She shuddered at my touch when I did that. Get away from me. That's the anti-scorpion get away from me uh but yes nina is here nina matsumoto we all know her we all love her and she has obviously been a guest on many podcasts before and she does our wonderful art on the patreon and she was last with us for uh bending in the wind a horrible horrible episode yeah But you were... I couldn't decide which Simpsons episode to be on. I was crippled by choice with season three

because there's so many good episodes. And with season 13, I was like, I don't know how much insight I can bring to these episodes. But then I thought, well, last time I was on Talking Feature-ama, it was for an episode I hated. Now I'm on an episode I really love. And it's probably, I'll say this now, this is probably the best Futurama episode ever made. Yeah, I think so.

I think there's ones that I think are just a little funnier. But like this is the Who Shot Mr. Burns of Futurama, I'd say. It's like the big event. It should have been their movie. We've said it many times before I want to get into that when we start talking about it because I can see like how this could have been expanded into a movie and the other movies I mean we'll get to them they're disappointing because they're not actually movies they're four tv episodes that can all exist independently but are also interdependent on each other and it's not a great way to tell a story I

never thought about like what my favorite episode of Futur drama is this might be in my top five it is really good i don't know if it's my favorite though like is it kind of weird that you consider your favorite future drama episode uh the one that you consider to be your favorite future drama episode is about the past i i'm just the sucker for time travel stories oh yeah that makes sense i agree with henry it might not be the funniest one but in terms of like storytelling and like scope and just like fun narrative tricks i think it is like the most creative it's super solid yeah i do think time keeps on slipping gives me more of like a heart like it makes me warm and fuzzy and laugh like this doesn't have the grab your heart and pull the tears out of your eyes kind of feel of say jurassic bark or whatever

which i i think we said before maybe we'll change our minds when we actually do it but i i like like luck of the fry ish is a sad episode more than jurassic bark but fry-ish fry-ish i think that's i think that's better than uh jurassic bark personally i'm a jurassic park uh disliker, let's say. Jurassic Park. I said bark. You said park. Okay, well, I love Jurassic Park.

I love it, too. Nina's here to correct both of us. That's right. So some preliminary information for everybody up front here. This is an Emmy-winning episode, by the way. So this won the

Outstanding Animated Program Emmy at the 2002 Emmys. So this is the one of two episodes that won an Emmy for Futurama. So the other one is in the Comedy Central era, the episode The Late Philip J. Fry, which is very good. That one rules. That is the best Comedy Central episode. Oh, absolutely.

And it's another high concept one about time travel. That's the other one that won. So let me tell you what else was in this category in the year 2002. So it's one we just covered covered and it's not very good. The Simpsons, She of Little Faith, that lost to this. Other things that lost are, as told by Ginger, the episode is called Lunatic Lake. King of the Hill, this is a great episode. Bobby Goes Nuts.

That's my purse. Yeah. I don't know you. It's that episode. Such a classic. But I don't think it's a good episode to submit for an Emmy win. Because it's all about kicking people in the balls. And there are other more emotional episodes that probably could have won over this one.

You know, I would have been okay with that one winning over this episode of Futurama. It's really funny. Super good. It's not as epic in scope and storytelling. It's true, yeah. And the other one that nominated was South Park. And that was the Osama Bin Laden has farty pants episode. I'm actually shocked that one lost, but I guess South Park wasn't respected enough yet.

But that is one of their biggest episodes. That episode was, I remember waiting for that episode because we were all thinking, what's South Park do after 9-11? This is their post 9-11 episode, and I was watching it very closely. And it's a really interesting episode about how everyone in Afghanistan kind of hates America, and for good reason. But also then, Carmen has a Looney Tunes-style battle against Osama bin Laden the entire time. And I think it invented the uh

durka durka jihad speak that they would later use in team america right yes episode okay that's uh well and it's an interesting thing they do in that ep because they actually did hire what sound to be native speakers to play the not cartoonish afghani citizens that are in the episode. But then when Osama bin Laden talks, that is just Trey Parker doing Durka, Durka, Jihad voice. He's a master of accents, just like Hank Azaria. Has South Park won a NEMI? Oh, yeah. They've won several at this point, yeah.

They're now respected. They're now an institution. And that episode has a joke, I hope they don't have a TOWLEY ban. Oh, right. By a good old TOWLEY. That was probably the best joke in that episode uh more preliminary stuff so on the dvd there are two commentaries one is a regular one recorded before the emmy win and jay stewart burns calls it oh he does okay yeah at the

start he calls it it's such a great mind f because he says the emmy winning episode and i was like yeah he's right they They won the Emmy. But then Cohen goes, obviously, we're recording this before the Emmys happen. And so we're probably wrong in that prediction. I was like, wow, how rare is it on a commentary? Somebody actually correctly predicts the future on that. And the other one was recorded after the Emmys and after the win. And it's more focused on animation.

It's not voice actors screwing around. Even Matt Groening says up front, it's like it's not a bunch of goof offs making a bunch of like lewd jokes it's like a serious conversation about the animation but still lots of fun lots of fun jokes Claudia Katz is on it you rarely hear from her Rich Moore is on it I think it's David Cohen and also Matt Groening

too and Scott Vanzo Scott Vanzo yes talking about all the 3D effects that went on in this episode the polygonal animation and everything oh i actually didn't know about this secret commentary by the way thanks for sensory for me uh yes yeah my poor my poor freaking ears can't handle the profanity her sody pop is too cold i'm a dirty i i talked to especially south park gets me in a dirty talking mood especially but yeah that that that secret commentary that's the the fourth one on it uh you got uh the fourth audio track it's really interesting it makes me wish they

did more because they're talking to mainly the rough draft korea people who don't sound remote i think they were doing them when they were like in town for for some business function and so like hearing rich more talk about when directing this episode, working out of Korea and in the Seoul, Korea office and getting in faxes back then for layouts and all that, that was really cool. That was before Zoom and before Skype and all that stuff. We need to hear from the animators more in these commentaries. I agree.

And this is a great-looking episode. Yeah. None of the Korean... It would be really great to hear a Korean artist once talk about working on The Simpsons. And I mentioned this before in previous podcasts, I believe, looking episode yeah none of the korean it would be really great to hear a korean artist once talk about working on the simpsons and i mentioned this before in previous podcasts i believe but so this is the december debut of broadcast season four we're kind of done talking about broadcast versus airing because at this point they're all mixed up so broadcast season three ended in may

of 2001 with i dated a robot which means basically nearly seven months passed between new episodes. So I remember going to the mall, coming back home, eating dinner, and realizing there's a new Futurama on? What happened? And it was like an amazing treat because it had been seven months. And I assume I was following news groups and stuff. And I knew that there were episodes Fox was sitting on on i just didn't know when they would air and this was a seventh month break a seven month break yeah it's so long i i blame 9-11 and and also the popularity oh and of course the late baseball season which of course also delayed simpsons and

the halloween special that that darn yankees and their their world series it's the damn yankees we're allowed to say that here we're quoting a title quoting a title uh so we can talk about how this episode begins and of course we have our opening cartoon uh sorry the joke is fun for the whole family except grandma and grandpa that's very true not a non-sequitur yeah i oh you know another thing i liked hearing on the commentary was when they talked about how they got help from Nina's old boss for some of the designs around Roswell. Bill Morrison, a Roswell expert of some note. I think he had a lot of research materials from his comic Roswell. Yeah, yeah.

The one non-Simpsons Bongo comic about the little alien man. Yeah, which, I mean, takes place in Ros roswell new mexico and it's all about it so yeah i mean and on top of that morrison did a ton of visual development for the first year of futurama and all of that so uh it only makes sense that they died i like the hearing rich morgo like yeah bill morrison came over from bongo and helped us with with roswell designs oh that totally makes sense um this is totally up his alley. He loves that old timey stuff. Yeah. Well, I mean, how do you guys feel about, you know, the old UFO stuff like these UFO conspiracies this is born out of? Well, I was never an alien, a teen or an alien kid or an alien guy. But now the government admitted, yeah, UFOs are real.

We don't know if intelligent life is real, but we don't know what these things are in the sky. And then like nobody cared. Yeah. So the mystery's out, and, you know, innocence is dead, but nobody cares anymore. But, Nina, sorry. Oh, I grew up consuming a lot of that stuff because my dad is, like, super into UFOs.

That's true. Bob, do you remember the first time you met him? Yes. He says a very important question for you, and you're like, yes, what is it? And he said, do you believe in UFOs you and you're like yes what is it and he said do you believe in ufos and you said yes which is the correct answer i do i don't know if they were confirmed to be real at that point but i i mean i wanted to make him happy but i i also like

think yeah they're sure well like i definitely believe in intelligent life somewhere out there it's arrogant to think otherwise uh did ufos actually come to you uh earth and did they abduct people i don't know about that so like that's some i'm skeptical about but my dad super believes in alien abduction and all that stuff he actually went to like a ufo convention once in nevada oh that's cool yeah did he join mufon what is that that's a ufo like uh appreciator society oh no he didn't do that but he he did say he saw ufos there and he said he doesn't care if nobody believes him because he knows what he saw

uh mufon is the mutual ufo network mutual okay man i hear they're a bunch of freaks though i wouldn't i don't think he's um i don't think he's uh joined any kind of society you know i miss i've said it before but i miss those quaint old conspiracy theories of just you know aliens came to earth and then the government lied to us and uh they it's got to be real there must be aliens instead of you know there's there's a lot worse conspiracy theories now that aren't so innocent and fun about space aliens but yeah i mean i i certainly believe there's out of uh aliens in space that the with space being so infinite how can we be the only people that with an intelligent life yeah my dad is like super into this one lady who does like um like hypnotherapy for people who claim they were abducted to aliens he she puts them under

like a trance and then they can recall things that were done to them like things aliens did them when they were abducted and uh she published books about this um like interviews and stuff and then he like my dad is also um a translator so he translated those books to japanese oh that's really like published in japan oh that's awesome wow man see i but i do and and i do think the x-files helped me believe it more too i will say because that they it's very persuasive the the the entire roswell thing like it's key to the the story of of x-files that roswell was real and that was the beginning of uh the plan to destroy the planet earth uh at 2012 which then didn't happen and they kind of just deal with that later did you believe in all the the alien

not alien alien autopsy video well reicher said it was all true no he said like he doesn't know but if it was look out it's pretty crazy huh no that one i didn't believe so much the alien autopsy videos but then well and i i mean i just loved all of the sci-fi stuff of the 90s that was buying into i mean the biggies were x files men in black and independence day all of them were about roswell like they all had like this starts at roswell and it goes from there like yeah so i always love that cool stuff in it yeah and though i've never been to roswell i had i also had a friend who uh his father was really into this this was a co-worker at an old video game

website and his his father was so into it like he he would just like he camped out as close as you could get to area 51 him and his friends camped outside of there multiple times you need in search of the truth but they never got they never found the the truth was out there yeah i think when it came to the the alien autopsy video i wanted to believe but i couldn't no it was really fake looking yeah just like fox malder you want you want to believe but let's talk about the cartoon clip uh my my note on this is uh it's from the 1930 bosco cartoon congo jazz enough said yeah i saw the title i was like i'm not gonna investigate this any further you can watch it on youtube yeah you know i clicked around in it it's uh you know for a CongoJazz, enough said. I saw the title. I was like, I'm not going to investigate this any further.

You can watch it on YouTube. Yeah, you know, I clicked around in it. It's, you know, for a thing starring Bosco called CongoJazz, it's not as bad as it could be. That's what I noted, actually. It's like, oh, it's mostly animals. Hello, folks. Well, that's also the wiki on it said, I didn't confirm this, that it was the first Bosco where he uses his falsetto voice

and not his original voice. Yes, look up the Talk Inc. kid when you're not at work or in public. Yes. What is his original voice? Well, we can't do it here. Okay. But think of the character Buckwheat and you're mostly there. So this episode opens.

By the way, I have quite a few clips, but not as many as I thought I would get because there's a lot of action in this episode opens by the way i have uh i have quite a few clips but not as many as i thought i would get because there's a lot of action in this episode so yeah this episode begins again if we're thinking of like if this could be a movie this is the end of act one where it's like stuff happened before this and now this is the pivotal movement that pushes them into this new setting and yes they the entire crew of the planet express they're off into space to watch the uh the star go supernova and this is uh like a viewing of this so they're off into space to watch the uh the star go supernova and this is uh like a viewing of this so they're all together i i really love that it starts with this opening shot of the new new york skyline so you think it's going to be a regular episode on

the planet and then it just zooms into a star and it's like nope this isn't in new new york we're we're in outer space just straight to it and and yeah the rich more direct i did want to mention too that he's you know the supervising director of the series who doesn't always direct an episode but it shows how much he liked this script yeah oh yeah i gotta direct this one that's true yeah he is the director again and suzy dieter mentions that she had her eyes on this one and that rich more pulled rank on her and took the episode out of her hand it's like everyone knew it was going to be a good episode it's not like one of those like like say simpsons episodes were like

oh this like bond at the table reading didn't think it would be any good we need to be a classic uh like in the on the commentary mac grinning said they held off on time travel for a long time because like if we do we want to do it right but i feel like i don't know what the history of uh seasons three and four getting picked up were because we knew that when the show got picked up initially, it was for two seasons, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there was never any variety story about, you know, season three is picked up and season four is picked up. I feel like end of production season three, they're like, we might not get a season four. Let's just do our time travel story.

And that's why they're doing it now at the end of this production season. And they also mentioned they almost did it for Anthology of Interest that year, because they're like, oh, we can only do time travel if it's in a wacky scene. And then they're like, oh, we can't just keep this to one act. This is way too big for that. And Fry, he's there.

He's never seen a supernova blow up before, but if it's anything like a Chevy Nova, it'll light up the night sky. So Fry, previous Chevy Nova owner, and Bender remarks that anyone who misses this will regret it for the rest of their lives that's when fry leaves to make popcorn bender sends him on it as a prank oh yeah he asked fry to make popcorn sorry about that yeah which i love that popcorn technology is not improved in 30 or 3000 in a thousand years no uh in futurama it's

iffy pop but of course in real life it's Jiffy Pop. I never use these. I think my mom was just thinking they would burn the house down. So they're like, that's what microwaves are for. Why would you involve a stove in the making of popcorn? You know, I never tried making Jiffy Pop before either. Like I grew up with air popped popcorn with an air popping machine. Oh, I had those. Yeah, like I swore by that for years, but I moved recently.

And for about a week or two i did not have a microwave because i just moved and uh the microwave belonged to the previous um landlord before but i wanted popcorn to watch a movie so i opened a bag of microwave popcorn and i i made it on a pot on my stove oh wow and it's the best homemade popcorn i ever had it was it was really good It really makes a difference. And I never did it again because I bought a microwave. Yeah. Still.

I bought an air popper at the beginning of quarantine and it served me well for like 20 bucks. I think I pushed you into that. Better than microwave popcorn, I think. It is, yeah. But still, if you can make popcorn stovetop, I highly recommend it. I only briefly had one of those air poppers in when i was like 20 or something and i really i just loved watching the thing spin around and spit it out that was my

favorite part with the air popper they just keep breaking though that's why i stopped like i went through like two or three of them in the past decade it's still going strong two years later tell me what brand you have uh after the show i actually forget you know what else is still going strong more than two years in that uh my air fryer still still working good can you make popcorn in it no no you can't well then right popcorn i guess an air fryer can't do everything so the the uh this iffy pop uh instead of putting on the stove fry puts it in the microwave because it says do not put in microwave he tears that warning label off and laughs like devilishly to himself as if removing the label will remove the actual danger so uh i as a kid did learn a metal in the microwave lesson uh early i was like seven nothing happened except for some cool

lightning but basically i must have seen some it wouldn't have been simpsons but i must seen something that showed you could put an action figure in the microwave and you know watch it melt or whatever and so this one was probably the worst one that I could have done it with because it was it was a Robocop that also was made to have

like cap poppers on the back so it had a big metal knob on the back and I put it in there like okay robocop let's see what happened i just saw a little bit of lightning i was like huh and i told my mom like hey why the microwave makes lightning and she's like you put metal in there so so that's when i learned my i just i just assumed that uh the house would explode yeah well so i never touched it how we use electricity can be smarter, cleaner, and greener.

At Electric Ireland, we can help guide you there. You see, our new Net Zero Hub has all you need to know about smart meter plans, EV tariffs, solar panels, and much more. Making your usage clearer, your trips greener, your home cozier, and your world brighter. Find our net zero hub at electricireland.ie. The only thing I've ever destroyed in a microwave accidentally was a mug where if you poured hot water in it, it would play happy birthday. And you know what? I'd say good riddance. It sounds cute.

It's annoying. I really hate the Happy Birthday song. Oh, that's true. Yes. It's my least favorite song in the world. So this microwave accident is the catalyst for what happens next because the supernova is exploding and red light is enveloping the ship and the iffy pop in the microwave is making blue light envelop the ship and those two meet. And that's when we get time travel.

What a cool shot. I also love Fry's like, hey, what smells like blue? Yes. Fry's got a few good lines. And also, which crazy thing are you guys yelling about? So, you know, this episode is a lot like several Star Treks as well. We just watched one last night. The Deep Space Nine episode, Little Green Men.

Yeah. That's what we were thinking of. Okay. I was thinking of, well, definitely in the Star the star even in original star trek they always wanted it to be an accident so they're like no you gotta there's got to be you know fly around the sun and it's got to be this thing to actually go back in time they don't just have like ready-made time machines but i was also thinking i i was thinking a little green man but that's a good one i was thinking of the season five finale of Next Generation,

Time's Arrow. I was thinking of that a lot. Yeah, I was bringing that up. That's where they find Data's head. Yes, yeah. That was discovered like 500 years before they made first contact or something like that. In Little Green Men, it's very tied to this.

Yeah. It's Quark and his brother and the brother's son. They end up in Roswell. Oh, okay. It's very, very good. Also, Charles Napier is in it. He's playing an army general. Oh, that's awesome.

Duke Phillips himself is in the episode. Yeah, they accidentally travel back in time. And yeah, they think the Roswell people think they're Martians. And they're trying to figure out why they're there. Are we trying to invade our planet? And they're like, no, we just wanted to go to Starfleet Academy. So this is Time Zero's Time Zero Plus Little Green Men.

Sort of, yeah. A running of those two episodes. So when this microwave accident happens, the ship glows with energy, disappears from the sky. We see it plunging through this tunnel of pulsing blue energy. And we get like, it was a 2001 Space Odyssey shot of the professor with

you can see his eyes it's reflected in his glasses and then you know the digital clock on the ship starts ticking backwards and then we're just speeding through a bunch of uh clocks as we go through this tunnel and i don't know if that's a reference to something because i was like is this a time tunnel thing but there aren't actually floating clocks in the time tunnel yeah you know i just recently did a time travel story, Sparks 3. Oh, that's right. Yes. Future Perfect.

It's about time travel. Yeah. It came out in April. So I got to come up with what a time travel portal looks like. And I just kind of went with what I think is most recognizable form, which is like this. It's just a bunch of like a wavy void with a bunch of clocks. In my case, though, was inspired uh by the time traveling visuals and doraemon because that's the comic i grew up with and that's um there's a lot

of time traveling that because you know it's about a robot cat from the future and when they go through the the time tunnel it is exactly like this uh with like the clocks everywhere that's cool wow i didn't know it was a doraemon. So that might be a very early depiction of what time travel looks like. Yeah, maybe like the H.G. Wells time machine movie adaptation from like the 50s or 60s. Who knows? This all started somewhere

because like in the game Day of the Tentacle, when you go through time, it is a swirling blue vortex as well. So they're all referencing something. Yeah, definitely. And in Treehouse 5, Homer also goes through a time vortex just like this we also surrounded by clocks yeah but i i love that these clocks they up the joke from

treehouse five of that these clocks have physical shape and can be taken on like a bunch of water yeah you could be uh knee-deep in clocks i i also speaking of professor's eyes i love the shot of lila adjusting his eyes he says focus and then when she does it he like smiles like thanks like that's he's very thankful for it he's also very blind yes so they leave this vortex uh emerge from a swirling red vortex in space everyone's recovering from the damage and uh a bell dings and fries like oh my popcorn's done and he goes to check it and just like an ear of corn sticking out a little popping tray so i love he says oh it's less pop than ever that's a great line and good line from lila i don't know what's happened but we take it on a lot of clocks so we pull back to see everyone is knee

deep in clocks and we find out that something strange is going on in our first clip why is there so little traffic around earth and what's this layer of ozone that's never been there before such noises oh no there's no global positioning signal navigation is failing we're gonna crash not if i can help it oh i guess i can't everyone put on your seat belts those things cost more lives than they save. And then he immediately gets shot out the windshield. Bender is just the type of guy who would refuse to wear a seatbelt. That's exactly who he is. I mean, I've heard that as a kid you would hear,

oh, like the two instances in which someone was trapped because of a seatbelt, and that's their reason why. It's more likely you'll be dead without it. Everyone was mad at Ralph Nader in 2002, but he saved, I don't know, probably millions of lives at this point. Yeah, and then those people who didn't die, they grew up to be Republican voters,

part of his plan to get George Bush elected. It's all coming together. It's good that they have seatbelts at all. There's always a joke observation about Star Trek. Why don't they have seatbelts? Whenever the ship gets rocked, they're all just like jostled everywhere. Sh know sometimes in I think it was like the first couple seasons of TNG when they go like battle stations and then they put like almost like a tray in front of their laps

that uh I remember it's like their armrests extended it wasn't a seatbelt but it was almost like it was locking them into into place maybe it just wasn't fun to see that it's more fun to see them get knocked around i mean actors stumbling around yeah exactly as the camera turns yeah i feel like i've seen early uh social media posts of like somebody locking the camera instead of how it was edited with the camera moving all around so you can just see the uh the actors flinging themselves all about which is so much fun every star trek should do that i think the the actors are stumbling around the stage and you know that felix clock my uh my mom grew uh loved those felix clocks i i had a garfield

version of the felix uh tail wagon clock but it's technically not felix though right no it's a generic it's made to cash in on felix's yeah yeah it is it's not licensed Felix, though, right? No. It's just a generic cat. It's made to cash in on Felix's fame. Yeah, yeah. It is. It's not licensed or anything, though. No, no. I call it a Felix clock, too, because that's what my mom calls it. But yeah, it's not the official license. And you know when there was that big fire in 2018 that my mom and stepdad were very lucky their house was not really damaged in it, unlike pretty much every neighbor of theirs. The one thing that got really burned was the Felix clock.

It got melted and warped. I bought her a new one that Christmas. I'm glad that was the only fire in Northern California. There was never another one ever again. I have to be very specific of like the November 2018 one in Paradise, California. That's the specific one I'm talking about. I was actually visiting Nina for the first time during those wildfires. I remember your flight back here was delayed because

of the extreme smoke, wasn't it? That's how we fell in love. That's true, yeah. It gave Bob extra days to ponder whether he should confess his feelings to me or not. So thank you, fire. You know, so we lose a Felix cat clock, but we gain love. And countless lives.

Oh yes, that too, yeah. So, yes, we see Bender's parts scattered across the landscape. Fry asks Bender's head, are you okay? And then Bender tries moving his feet, and then we cut away to his feet far away, his little footcups wiggling in the sand. Yeah, it's adorable. You know, though, what is this, some magic regenerating robot head?

Because his head is pretty banged up when Fry picks it up. By the time they get back in the ship, his head's back banged up when fry picks it up by the time they get back in the ship his head's back to normal maybe he knocks the dents out on the way over who knows i uh also uh that bit about the ozone layer being back uh this was something i read in 2021 this is kind of like those other stories was like oh yeah acid rain what happened to that uh according to a 2021 scientific journal reporting i read and this was multiple places the ozone actually has recovered quite a bit in the past couple decades like it's hardly uh the world's only problem weather and climate change wise but we actually

have kind of curtailed the ozone layer going away yeah don't worry we'll wreck the earth in other ways yes yeah i remember uh in the early stages of the pandemic when like no one could commute anymore and we were all trapped inside there was that nature is healing meme i hate that where uh it actually what like pollution was decreasing because there weren't like a billion cars on the road constantly so and now all the middle managers have said get back in those cars and drive back to the office hey one million dead americans means a lot less pollution for the rest of the world oh boy sorry to get dark there but lila has a plan the plan is zoidberg

pick up the pieces everyone else take five zoidberg is not offended and he makes a game of it yeah and it's so great that his game is not that he's that an entire audience is cheering him on but he's not pretending picking up trash is anything else that just an entire audience is cheering him on but he's not pretending picking up trash is anything else that just that the audience is cheering on him picking up the crowd goes wild and he's using bender's arm as like a trash grabber it's very it's very very cute and this is when a military convoy shows up in the middle of the night as zoidberg is picking this up and he replies what is it's a good word yes i love that yeah it's not what the it's what is and uh the convoy drives into this military base and the government finds an important

discovery general in all my years are covering top secret discoveries with sheets i've never dramatically revealed anything as shocking as this. Dun, dun, dun. The debris from an alien spaceship. Son, I think I can safely say, Woo! As you can see, 1947 is going to be an eventful year for the town of Roswell, New Mexico. I do enjoy how on the nose that line is. Yes so yes i know where we live i know i know where we are it's great he sounds like way too much like john dimaggio i think it's kind of distracting i

kind of wish they got charles napier now yeah it would have been good yeah i did like dave herman scream in that in that scene you know that's the ups and downs with John DiMaggio, that he's such a great voice actor, but they give him too many one-off roles because Billy West and Dave Herman can't take them all, but he is more distracting than them in a minor role like that. To bring this back to Star Trek yet again,

one thing I loved about that episode is everyone kept smoking all the time. I kind of wish he did that in this episode was disgusted yeah yeah there's there's like one shot of guys smoking but it should be everybody smoking all the time yeah yeah I think Cork was like ah they they they they ingest poison and on purpose yeah I could sell them everything uh Cork's the best. I love that guy. I also, yeah, what a great Cohen-style line of general in all my years of covering top secret discoveries with sheets. I've never

dramatically revealed anything as shocking as this. Like, what just a great series of words. I just love that. These characters are great. We move to a team of scientists. They're investigating the crash site. They're examining Bender's parts. There's a cute little joke with one scientist is holding Bender's arm while it's pickpocketing the other scientist.

I don't know where it's going to put that wallet. But Bender, even when separated from his body parts, he can't resist stealing. He'll instantly be caught, but that's a problem for later. Bender can't resist theft. You know, this is like probably the most damaged Bender has ever been in the history of this show. And the last time I was on an episode of Talking Feet Drama, it was where he got scratched up a little bit and he couldn't move his body anymore. Yeah. He's like dismembered and he can still move around.

Yeah. Boy, he's recovered from this. Yeah, you're right. Maybe they fixed him better after the last time. Though also in that episode, they don't even explain how he gets back the motion of his body. He just starts moving again. The power of Beck. I'm just going to keep complaining about that episode.

It was so bad. It's okay. We don't like it that much. But we cut to the inside of the ship. The professor is reading the high precision digital chronograph to discover where they are in time and they are in july 9th 1947 and we see the chronograph has changed into a pinup calendar which in that episode little green men when we've when it's revealed like where they are in time it is a pinup calendar oh man we see the pinup calendar in that star trek episode with uh rita hayworth yeah in this case i think it's betty grable it is this one yeah if you look up 1943 20th century promotional image of betty grable you will see this exact pose the

the proud back pose of her and in the next page is a sexy cowboy i yeah we're getting ahead but i love that joke so much like there's that there is an equal opportunity pin-up calendar back in 1947 with sexy men and women alternating months. I think Rich Moore asks, who is this calendar for? You know, it's either for bisexual single people or a couple that have opposite gender. It's sharing. Now it's your turn. August is your turn. So our next clip here, we learn about time travel.

Wait a second. You mean we travel through time? Duh. Some idiot must have put metal in the microwave. Yeah. And the microwave radiation combined with the gravitons and graviolis from the supernova blasted us through time itself. Have you seen today's news?

High school gym renovations on schedule? What a load! No, over here. Flying saucer captured. That's no flying saucer. That's my ass! My God! This means the flying saucer that crashed in Roswell

was us! And the alien they captured was... was... Hello. Yeah! Yes, and the alien they captured was... Was... Hello. Yeah! So what are you guys doing tonight? I'm up for whatever.

So this is accurate. So the July 8th, 1947 edition of the Roswell Daily Record featured the headline, RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region. The Futurama version is just Flying saucer capture, which is much better. And that's Jesse Marcel, the head intelligence officer who initially investigated and recovered some of the debris from the Roswell site. Let's see the photo is of. And yeah, the story back then was after that headline, the next day they say, oh, oh no it was a weather balloon and then in 1994 the government took that back and then their new story was actually it was a spy device we were testing

out to use on the ussr and we couldn't admit it was a spy device because then it was you know it would get us in trouble but you know in the star trek episode once the the ferengis escaped they were like oh let's just say it was a weather balloon but it was Charles Napier so he believed it yeah no I I'd still definitely believe that the the government would say all of these things if they got a UFO they'd be like well we can't tell America it's a UFO because it really would disrupt everything in in the world and so let's just lie like that it makes me think like joe biden probably knows about every ufo and has met an alien but he immediately forgot about it because

he's 90 years old i i hate to reference joe rogan oh no oh no but one thing he would do often when having on he did this with bernie sanders he said if you get, can you find out if there are aliens in Area 51? And will you promise to tell me? And Bernie Sanders says, okay, I will tell you if I find out. I mean, that's a great bit in Independence Day as well, where the president goes like, what? Area 51's not real. And then a general goes like, no, it is. There is an alien there.

And Bill Pullman's like, why didn't you tell me? Well well they hide all the good stuff in area 52 we've learned that uh that's uh i also the the term graviolis says i just love that like it's ravioli but for gravity it sounds delicious yeah but um act two starts we're in the ship uh professor is telling frying bender that they tore the universe a new space hole and it's clenching up fast and they have to go back through the space hole no let's say exactly 24 hours whoa so great so music staying there he puts a ticking clock on the rest of this story so it's funny how like immediately when he decides it's time to escape we have 24 hours to go it's not carefully calculated at all he's like oh let's say 24 hours. It's the most exciting period of time. I think.

I also, I do love that. They set up Zoidberg for a perfect Lenny and squiggy. Hello. But it must be. Hello. Yeah, but it is,

it is a perfect, like a cut to another scene joke, but yeah, exactly. 24 hours. It has to be that. I, you know what?

When Lila says, you know, I can get this fixed in 10 hours. Like, you've got eights. That's such a great, like, you know, line in a tense war movie or whatever. Obi-Wan Kenobi on that show, they just had a line like that. Like somebody says, we got to fix the door. It'll probably take me like three hours. You've got one. In this case, she's fixed everything but the cup holder yes so they could just go please henry this is a star

trek podcast oh i'm sorry yeah none of these wars you know there's no there has yet to be time travel in star wars i don't unless there was something in an expanded universe thing i'm sure like 40 of the books involve time travel uh i know i read a comic that was specifically said to be not canon when even they published it but it did involve time travel it was the the famous one have you heard about of han solo meaning uh uh indiana jones have you no no no basically the short version is millennium falcon gets stuck in a similar time uh hole a space hole like in this episode falls down to earth in 1938 crashes and then Han Solo dies in it but Chewbacca lives Chewbacca escapes and the and then Dr. Henry Jones the the explorer, finds the crash.

He thinks that Chewbacca is the Sasquatch, and then he finds Han Solo's bones. So this is a comic book. This was in a real comic book approved by Lucasfilm. Before the Disney buyout. Yes. Okay, I assume so. But the plan is Farnsworth and Leela will buy a new microwave they need to time travel. Meanwhile, Fry and Bender will sneak into the army base to get back Bender's body.

And I love that it's all just set up for Fry to basically say, I once had a grandpa named Enos. That's right. It sounds like the beginning of a dirty limerick. That's why I always figured his name was Enos. I mean, it's a perfect name for the man who is his grandpa or isn't.

It's no worse than Gomer. We'll talk more about him later, but let's hear about the dangers of time travel. Hey, and while we're on the base, I'll visit my grandfather, Enos. He was stationed at Roswell. Your grandfather? Stay away from him, you dim-witted monkey.

You mustn't interfere with the past. Don't do anything that affects anything unless it turns out you were supposed to do it. In which case, for the love of God, don't not do it. Got it. If, for example, you were to kill your grandfather, you would cease to exist. But existing is basically all I do. What is your purpose here?

All right, officer, I'll move along. What the general means is, why did you come to Earth? Not a day goes by I don't ask myself the same question. He's starting a one-man show. He really enjoys meeting new people, Zoidberg. Nobody else listens to him in the year 3000, so he's getting all this attention. He loves it.

He's been passed out in public before and dealt with authorities yeah it's like i'll move along uh but yeah that they they address the grandfather paradox directly with literally a grandfather which uh yeah far farnsworth describes the grandfather paradox which i couldn't i i looked into it and it's been part of science fiction since at least like the 20s, in any time somebody wrote about a time travel story. But there's no named inventor for it. It's a good mislead for both the audience and Fry, because Fry thinks, my goal is to now keep my grandfather alive. And the audience thinks, oh, this is where the story is going.

Fry has to protect his grandfather and keep him alive. But really, we know where this is going. And yes, when we get to it, I'll tell you like this is a huge surprise to me as a viewer that was not expecting this disgusting uh turn in the story no no no but you know i i did read about uh theories current theories about the grandfather paradox and there's an interesting 2020 scientific paper called reversible dynamics with closed time like curves and freedom of choice which basically implies kind of what this episode does which is that even if you were to go back in time and kill your grandfather you would then just create a new paradox that makes the same event happen and that the timeline always wants to remain the same and so if you

change something then say you just become your own grandfather or something else causes it to happen it's it's more that the timeline doesn't like to be changed and fights back at you if you try to change it oh wow i want to go back in time and kill my grandfathers right now and see what happens yeah snap that old man's neck it'll be easy as a young man i'll come back in time with guns he's never seen. So we cut to the army base. Fry is in his undies behind a truck. He's spraying on military fatigues with some all-purpose spray. And there's actually one deleted scene that shows how Fry got on the base.

And I have a clip of that. Halt. What's that you're carrying, soldier? This? It's a communist detector. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Just because i hang out in coffee houses doesn't make me a communist so there you go so i mean we don't really need

to know how they got into the base but it is weird that they just were able to sneak on like a man in a robot head it's very relaxed base yeah i i also like uh fry spraying the clothes onto himself not unlike uh am's spray-on bikini. Fry walked all the way there in his underpants and then sprayed it on. It would seem like better to do it in the ship instead of getting there just in your underwear. I guess he walked all the way there in his underwear. I wasn't even thinking of that. That's great.

So, yeah, this is when we get our gomer pile usmc jokes 2002 2001 the last time you could ever do this again because when they get on the base uh fry hears enos and of course that is uh basically the parody of sergeant carter pile yes yes if you've seen the show yeah he had a uh adversarial relationship with his uh commanding officer although uh gomeryle loved Sergeant Carter. Yeah. And didn't understand that Sergeant Carter hated him. Yeah, I learned a whole lot about Gomer Pyle from the Gomer Pyle episode of our pals' gayest episode ever, which was very good. The one where Gomer is pretending to be, he's writing love letters to the Tsar.

Yes, it's basically bart the lover 30 years earlier essentially yeah it's exactly the same i i will say i love enos and gomer pile and uh you know his sweet southern homosexual accent uh is it basically was my friends made fun of me that i had that kind of accent and I battled it most of my life. Even though I kind of, I do, I love that accent. It's so nice and sweet. I wish you kept your accent. I know, but kids can be cruel

and they all make fun of you for having that accent, so you eventually just shove it down, way down. Bring it back out. Gilbert Powell said Shazam, but he also said golly, which is why Enos says, gadzooks. I love his gadzooks. Cut my gums up some pairs.

Yeah, it's actually very easy for me to do that accent. So, yeah, Frye's spying on his grandfather. And we see his very strange commanding officer saying, I want that toilet bowl so clean I can eat off it. Because I intend to. And he demands that 1,200 hours he get that. And then we see the next day he's eating out of that toilet. He is a strange man. He wants his lunch placed in the latrine.

So this guy's a real sicko. Food should not enter the bathroom at any point. We've covered this. You know what? I don't do it no more. It was part of my rebellious 20 i've seen some chafing dishes in your bathroom what's going on in there anyway but i i also like that it then turns into a uh it's a little back to the future moment too yeah yeah him trying to save him from

the jeep is like marty actually saving his dad from getting hit by the car oh that's right yeah except in this case the jeep never would have hit him because we see it slowly approaching and as fry like tackles his grandfather it slowly turns like a long way away from where it would have hit him so the jeep was never on the path to hit him or going fast enough to kill him i'd say for the most part they they pretty much avoided making too many back to the future references like the whole grandmother thing is kind of skirting that line but for the most part i think they figured like there's so many parodies and jokes made of back to the future already yeah like let's try to come come up with something more original yeah yeah this this is

really the only one i was like i guess yeah but you're right the uh the sexual dynamics of the incest stuff is a little is also a bit of that but i i like too that like you can see that they wrote on a board like okay fry kills his grandfather how how do we innocently have fry kill his own grandfather and so they have to go to such extremes that fry through his idiocy is trying so hard to not kill enos that he is going to kill enos eventually including the like a pile of rusty bayonets like he's destined to do the nasty in the pasty as we learned in a future episode that's right but yeah let's meet enos in our next clip are you crazy you almost got yourself run over. I did?

Then I sure am lucky you knocked me onto this pile of rusty bayonets. Psst, Fry. Stop interfering with history. I don't want to have to memorize a lot of new kings when I get back. I had no choice. I was about to not exist. I could feel myself fading away like Greg Kinnear. Well, thanks, soldier.

I'm off to make Sarge's lunch. Handling raw chicken? Best part of the job. Mmm! Finger lickin' good. That's it! This place is too dangerous! We gotta get you outta here! Everything's gonna be alright, Dad! Well, Gadzooks, I better ask Sarge. No time! Run! Run to safety! Ow! No time! Run! Run to safety!

It's a very funny joke. They run into the bombing range, formerly minefield, so they're being exploded from below and above. That's great, yes. And yeah, we didn't mention it in too much detail, but Gomer Pyle, of course, and Jim Neighbors, obviously very, very gay, got married late in life, but he was always pretty much closeted until the 2000s, I think.

I mean, it was when he married his partner. Yeah, yeah. That was when he came out, and that was when marriage was legal. This was, I agree with our pals Drew and Glenn on that podcast a bit, who you both want to be happy for this guy, but also it's like, you know, he's getting too, on some level, you're a little annoyed that a guy who could have done something to help the cause for marriage equality and gay rights did nothing and then gets to take advantage of it late in life after not helping. But, you know, he's an old queen. It was hard for me to hate him too much, you know, and he died pretty soon after i i it was hard for me to hate him too much you know and he

he died pretty soon after so it's hard to not even that man i guess and the one joke they don't do in this episode is uh the the joke and they did this in the simpsons as well the parody where he's got this like i'm just a big goofball but he's got this like baritone like beautiful singing voice yes yeah uh but they don't do that here and then he would go on to like record albums and stuff jim neighbors of course i don't even think we said jim neighbors did we say jim neighbors yeah yeah i uh enos too i i like that he's about how obvious gomer pile is as also being gay but it was in the 60s that if somebody said they weren't gay then it was just like well yeah he's just a sweet man why are you why are you trying to attack this man by calling him a sodomite he's he just he has a sweet accent

and he's nice and same with like you know liberace he was just waiting to find the right girl and a summer came around and when i was a kid uh i would watch you know instead of nine hours of tv a day i watched like 13 and one every morning like there was just a block of old tv shows so I've probably seen all of Gomer Pyle like two or three times in my life yeah I didn't see it as much I did like his episodes on Andy Griffith though I actually I love Jim Nabors but I actually as far as a guy on Andy Griffith's show I actually preferred Goober to Gomer oh come on now George Goober Lindsay George Goober he's a. But he's got that Jughead hat. Is that all it takes for you?

Just the Jughead hat? But also that, man, what a slight on Greg Kinnear there, huh, guys? Yes. Yeah, I'm a big Greg Kinnear fan. Yeah, yeah, I am too. And we just saw him in a rotten movie. We watched You've Got Mail. You know, I can see why people like it, but it's pretty twisted.

When they wrote this in the year 2000, I'm guessing late 2000, he was on the downswing. I guess so. Fry would have only seen As Good As It Gets, You've Got Mail, and Mystery Men. I guess his career was already kind of taking a downturn. Mystery Men was a cry for help, I think.

I like Mystery Men. I have a soft spot for it yeah yeah he's like he's like superman he's very good he's so good and i i like him in uh if you got mail he has a fine job as they call it the baxter in the movie the baxter michael show walter michael show calls it that yeah that movie violates its own premise i don't think it's as clever as it wants to be i have problems with the baxter i love the baxter re-evaluate the baxter in the year 2022 well no see the see the well this spoils the baxter here but the secret of the baxter is that paul rudd is the baxter in the baxter but we're seeing the baxter from the cut the viewpoint of the guy who's the baxter in the other movie that stars jason throw in it so he's so we're seeing the baxter from that movie but the baxter of the Baxter is Paul Rudd,

who loses Michelle Williams to Michael Showalter. It's been 17 years. I just want Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black to be funny again, and I think we've lost one of them. You know, Showalter, he's now in, well, he didn't get nominated, but his movie got nominated for an Oscar

and won an Oscar. Really? Okay. He did the Eyes of Tammy Faye, or not Eyes of, the Tammy Faye movie with Andrew Garfield in it. Spider-Man? I mean, he is a Spider-Man. You know, Greg Kinnear played a gay man in As Good As It Gets back when it was risky

to do so. That's right. Yeah. He was told by his agent, like, you know, you're putting your career at risk by doing this. He's like, I don't care. It's a good role. I'm sure it did hurt his career.

I think it did. Yeah. I think so. He's too good at it uh great kaneer underrated i never saw his talk soup run i got e too late but i actually i watched his uh post conan show like the 1 30 to 2 a.m talk show late night i don't i forget what it was called i think it was called later with great kaneer okay yeah i knew it was like a really generic name like that it should have been called like too late it was it was the same slot that was taken over by total request lives carson daly uh later in time but yeah i great kaneer i like a lot yeah he uh he was really great and as good as it gets uh even though i think his character is almost written i feel like somebody told james l brooks do not write this character to be a gay man who then

falls in love with helen hunt like who man who then falls in love with Helen Hunt like who's fixed by falling in love with a woman because it edges up to that in the movie. Have her fall in love with a 65 year old man. It's natural. It's normal. She makes him want to be a better man.

That's the goal of every woman. She drives Greg Kinnear to be a great artist again though. At least her nude body pulled that off. Oh, I saw many stills of her nude body back on the internet. Were you browsing Mr. Skin, too? No. You were on Mrs. Skin. As I recall, Helen Hunt shows the top of her buttocks in that, I believe.

No, you see his side boob. You see an unclosed side boob. PG-13 side boob in there. By the way, it's June 16th today. Greg Kinnear's birthday is tomorrow. Happy birthday, Greg. He's turning 59 tomorrow. Oh, wow.

Live it up, Greggy. You know, if we're also talking Greg Kinnear and sexy movies, the year after this joke at his expense, he stars in one of his riskiest roles to date, Autofocus. That's right. That's a great and really dark movie, too. Does it autofocus on his schlong? Is what happens no but i mean it's about he plays uh what was that actor is he bob crane yeah he's bob crane and who was a sex freak uh who got and he's

befriends oh it's such a great movie willem dafoe plays his sex freak buddy who uh shows him how to do like film sex tapes like he was uh it turns out bob crane was on the cutting edge of filming sex tapes in like 1964 that's right he was the star of hogan's heroes yes yeah and i don't i don't want to spoil the end of the movie but it's not a happy one i mean wikipedia bob crane find out don't spoil the movie by wick of reading bob crane's wikipedia page so we cut to to Zoidberg being examined to see what food, if any, the creature eats. And there's just a bunch of food

out on the table in front of him. He thinks it's a buffet. So he thinks it's like a restaurant. It's like, oh, if only I had any money, my wallet with me. And they tell him it's free. And then you hear him screaming. And we see food hitting the window. We see his face smashed against the glass

licking the food off is that an independence day reference okay that's that's how uh brent speiner dies in independence day he's uh he's killed in the room and then the monster that ate him squeaks on the window then why is he alive in the sequel i haven't seen the sequel he is bad i know they unkill him in the sequel but I guess they say you don't exactly see a body. You just assume he's dead because he's not in the movie anymore after that in the first one. And then he's in the sequel like, actually, I'm fine. Oh, so it's like a Dr. Ian Malcolm situation. Yeah, similar to that.

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's popular with fans. But double references to Brent Spiner in this episode. I like it. Man, the image of his face pushing the grease around with his tendrils, like what a great gross shot. Yeah. I mean, he only eats garbage.

This is the first real food he's had in a while. This also saves on animation. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You just see it fling against the wall. Yeah. I love it.

So we're at Sears Roebuck now, which is offering a free girdle with the purchase of Tractor. Just showing you the amount of items Sears sold at one point. Just the vast array of items you could buy there. You could buy a saxophone. You could buy a house from Sears and have it delivered. Yes. And build it yourself.

This is not a joke. You could actually do that. And those houses really still hold up. So I love this joke where the professor is wearing a zoot suit and lila is wearing like a poodle skirt because if you're thinking of like how we view the past would any of us know like how did fashion change between like 10 20 and 10 70 no no like i actually hate having to draw anything historical because if you're even a few decades off your work may end up looking like this to those who know history better and yeah i'm sure i've drawn i i've been off by like 100 years in some period stuff that i've drawn yeah i haven't i haven't been enough watching something

that said in the 80s and i go like wait a minute that song was and then was it and i looked that up yeah i even get like 80s and 90s stuff mixed up sometimes now well you know i think the stranger thing show works pretty hard to not to do that. I think they actually are pretty good at keeping track of that stuff. But yeah, you know, our pal Scott Gairdner had a great online sketch about this kind of thing, too, where it's basically like it's a history video from like 500 years in the future about the Beatles and how they get everything wrong about the Beatles. Like when the Beatles conquered America. It's a great sketch. Just look it up. But yeah, also that they bring back acts versus ask.

Like they think how somebody talked in 1999 is how they talk in 1947. I don't know if it's consistent here, but let's hear them buy a microwave in our next clip. Fries from around this time. I'll talk like him. Yo, Holmes, we're looking for a microwave oven. Microwave? Never heard of that brand, sweetheart.

What you want is the deluxe gas princess. This beauty has four broilers, a casserole indicator, a fold-out ironing board, and down here, a foot-soaking tub. Since as a woman, you'll be standing in front of it all day. Oh, I'm sorry. Now I'll axe you again. Where can we find a microwave? Sir, your wife's hysterical, so I'll address this to you.

This oven is lightning fast. It takes only five hours to cook a roast. Oh, that's good news. You know, you really don't cook enough roast, Leela. Women. Actually, I think when Leela says, let me axe you again, I think she's reverting to the modern way of speaking because as we learned a year ago,

axe replaced ask in the English language. Yeah, and same with their outdated senses of modesty as well. These are some good sexist jokes about how sexist things were in the 40s. That's a good guy. Since as a woman, you'll be standing in front of it

all day. They weren't nice enough to give women a tub to soak their feet in, though. His appliances. Oh, I have some microwave history, though. Oh, boy. So the first commercially available microwave did come out in 1947, but it was nearly six feet tall. So we can

either assume it came out after July, or a small town like Roswell wouldn't be selling an industrial gadget intended for restaurants or something like that so and it was also built by raytheon oh it's a walk-in microwave you could have walked in there i think it's for executions it's not it's not for cooking anything well yeah i looked into that uh just about microwaves like they they originally just used for like communication which is why they get a dish for it in here i it was you know a then at the time recent thing like oh these microwaves like they they originally just used for like communication which is why they get a dish for it in here i it was you know a then at the time recent thing like oh these microwaves also can heat things up as well it's funny when they became more uh viable to just purchase people

assume like oh we won't have to cook anything any other way before they the microwave is not viewed as a thing used to reheat things it was like well this is the oven of the future so you would see all these like microwave cooking books and like oh the microwave the gadget of the future but then we learn like things are measurably worse when you just make them in the microwave it's just sort of a last resort for actual cooking or reheating something that was cooked once that's why when i moved i was like oh i don't have a microwave but maybe i could see if i can like live without one and bob you're like no you need to get a microwave immediately i live with that one when i moved to california in 2010 i live with a nutball and i was like oh where's your microwave and he told me i don't believe in microwaves and i was like well i believe in them and i need them to keep food and what about my coffee so

there you have it you know i'm glad um i caved and bought one because you know what it's the fastest way to cook a potato. Exactly. Oh, yeah. It just takes a few minutes. It's nice a lot of the time, though. If I have the time for doing it another way, and I don't just mean in the air fryer, but I do kind of prefer it. Like, say, if I have some leftover pizza, there's something about reheating it in the

oven that I prefer. Like, it's crispier instead of a big spongy squishy thing out of the microwave uh our household will be an oven instructions household well the microwave will be uh will be allowed to be used for certain things i'm a sicko you know you know this so i like lukewarm pizza i don't know about this so i like yeah i like taking uh leftover pizza out of the fridge and putting in the microwave for like, I don't know, 15 seconds tops. So it's not like hot. It's not warm.

It's lukewarm. It's like room temperature. That's how I like it. Wow. Because if you heat up too much in the microwave, it gets all soppy. Oh, yeah. Well, I don't like that. I don't like that.

I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like that.

I mean, yeah, you could use an actual oven to make it crispy and nice, but that takes too long. That's why you got to plan your meals well in advance. No, I refuse. By the way, Bob, when was long microwave invented? The long microwave? Do you know about these? Have you heard about this? No, no.

No, I haven't either. No, no, it's just a term for when you see a listing for an apartment. Oh, okay. And they use whatever camera setting to make the place look bigger than it actually is. It stretches everything out. And so when you look at the kitchen, it makes the microwave super long. They use the Puff Daddy video lens on the camera. Yeah, basically.

See, that's funny. In the place I live in, you see it's in the wall. I didn't have to buy a new microwave when I moved here. I got a new one. I wish I had one of those. The microwave takes up too much space on the counter, honestly. I wish mine was stuck under the top cabinet. the top gotta carve a hole into the wall and see what happens you know i've heard in meanwhile i've heard about in la that you need to double

check that a listing says it comes with a fridge because you if it doesn't say it comes with a fridge that means you got to buy your own fridge like what the hell i know it's insane apparently this is the thing like i've read as a warning, like if you're thinking of moving to LA, know that you got to confirm that place has a fridge or else you're buying yourself a fridge. Well, we all know a fridge is a luxury

and poor people shouldn't have them. You're either getting a fridge or a cold, wet sack to put your food in. No cold or hot food. Yeah, no. I hear that 99.7% of quote unquote poor households have a fridge man not so poor are they yeah they need to show me the lack of their fridge to see if they get

any kind of entitlements keep your perishables on the windowsill every place you come with a and a microwave i agree at the very least yes but but But anyway. We're in Roswell, walking down the street with Fry and Enos. We see some stores with fun names like Fedora's for Boys and the Hard Croon Cafe and Gil's Televisual Radios. People are watching a huge TV with a very small screen. I did some TV research as well. Oh. So commercially available televisions existed as early as 1929, but they were really taking

off in the late 40s. And 1949 was an early peak year for television so they could buy a tv around this time but a few years later would be like when everyone was getting tvs in their households and of course 50s was like the tv decade and you know 60s color tv and so on and then all those people grew up tv so yeah i yeah we turned out tv that that hard croon cafe sign it reminded me too i almost went to the hard rock cafe when i went to vegas and also the planet hollywood but i found out the planet hollywood that in vegas it doesn't even have the giant naked uh sylvester stallone

anymore what's the point yeah what stopped you from going to the hard rock cafe uh you know what we decided we'd rather eat at this chicken place that was closer. It was like, it's hot. Let's not walk all the way there. We had had enough fun that day at Madame Tussauds, just standing next to wax figures. I saw you pretending to use a piano. That's right. Yeah, I was next to Liberace.

Sadly, there was no Jim Neighbors there. The kids don't know who Jim Neighbors is anymore. You know what? That was an underattended wax museum it was not as hot as it used to be i think they thought it was going to be a big cool place but i it was it really is something to stand next to those wax figures for just a moment you actually do it like if you see them out of your periphery you're like oh a person oh wait no it actually is a wax like they they are that convincing in every museum one of them is a murderer and you have to make sure you know

which one is the murderer or you up to your knees in the cast of mash now they they did keep it very cool in there that's good unfortunately so uh fry is happy that he got enos off the dangerous army base enos wants to know if fry has any uh anything to eat in his lunchbox which is bender's head so he pulls out some chips, and Bender goes, hey, that's my brain! And Enos painfully chews and swallows these sharp pieces of metal and claims, they cut my mouth up, something bad.

I love that. Them crackers. I love that. Yeah, I guess jokes like that and the licking raw chicken off of his fingers thing shows that Enos was likely to die soon enough anyway and that fry he probably would have been dead within a year anyway fry isn't really helping it or killing him too fast no he's very danger prone but he does want to stop off for a malt

and they head to a malt shop with a non-funny name i think it's just like joe's malts or something though the sign is funny yes one teen to them. We all know those teens love sharing malts. And this is where Fry meets his grandma. See that waitress there? Yowza! I know what I want for dessert. That's my fiancé, Mildred. Grandma Mildred? No dessert, just coffee. Okie doke. And for you, Snuggums?

I'll have a pie with a fried egg on top. She sure is pretty. You ought to marry her and father some children right away. Yeah, folks say that. But did you ever get the feeling you're only going with girls because you're supposed to? What?

Don't ever, ever say or think that again. Please, just concentrate on staying alive. Fire! Look out! You almost got neutered. Well, it ain't as bad as getting killed. For me it is. I'm getting you out of here.

Ow! You know, it does work great because, you know, Jim Naver is obviously very gay. I don't think he was out by 2001 when this aired. I don't think he was. I mean, but obviously gay. But it's also a threat to fry's existence that not only is this man like dumb and danger prone he's also like probably very very gay and he might not impregnate fry's grandma if he follows these feelings i i mean i love that like it's one of my all-time favorite futurama lines do you ever get the feeling you're only going with girls because you're supposed to and but also that Fry's reaction Fry is not a homophobic character but the situation

throws him into being violently homophobic what what don't ever think that again like he's just telling him like you're I and it it makes it even sadder or tragic of a scene because Enos is like kind of coming out to a guy he just met. And here he's being screamed at like, no, you're not gay. You're not. It's just. And also, I like that Mildred, her little kiss on his head. It makes it also feel to me.

She's written like the type of woman who in the 40s would have fallen in love with a closeted gay man. Like she's this kind of sweet old lady. But I guess, too, they establish that fry is already attracted to his his grandma so setting the stage there i suppose i mean you have to think of like causality and it's like well was enos ever fry's grandfather if fry was destined to be his own grandfather enos is just some random guy who's not part of the bloodline i guess a gay guy that looks like him yeah well i mean also do you want to like you want to talk about yancey fry and how that kind of doesn't make sense anymore after this i was also thinking that like it makes sense that enos is fry's grandfather uh initially because uh fry's dad is like a cold war vet like he's like a military man so it makes sense like it runs in

the family or whatever yeah totally though he says your grandfather was yancey my name's yancey your name's yancey it's like well no your grandfather's name was enos because that's what fry knows but what if enos was a nickname uh yancey enos fry yeah okay well like yeah enos could be his middle name he went by he goes by enos okay yeah i get that you know enos looking like fry is kind of a cheat, but also it makes sense why Mildred would be into Fry because he looks like Enos. That's right, but a hipper, straighter Enos. Yeah. I also, you know, I choose the thing that I think Burns throws out

in the commentary too, that I think that Fry is his own grandpa in this new timeline, but he comes from a timeline where he's not his own grandpa in this new timeline but he comes from a timeline where he's not his own grandpa and enos is and that they he creates life like he's he is from an alternate universe he's stranded from an alternate timeline and creating life from there that's that's my uh reasoning for otherwise they're like well where does his chromosome comes from if he just creates it himself and it's a closed loop of a y chroma it's so complicated that they address it in a later episode which i like oh man i well that one i just think of that line of looking at fry trying to eat that pineapple on

a string yeah that's right so yes i love when we see mildred watching them leave uh she's actually holding a cup coffee and a pie with a fried egg on top. Delicious. I now think with that look on her face, has she seen Enos run off with guys before? And she maybe has a feeling that this is not just innocent. She has a premonition about something. I was thinking that too because she looks sad. Yeah. She watches them run off together.

She has a wistful sigh. She's probably like, oh no, he's found another guy he's running off with and I'm going to have to deprogram him again or whatever. So Fry pulls up to an abandoned house, a suspiciously abandoned house in the middle of the desert with Enos. And they're now in the middle of nowhere,

the safest part of nowhere. And Fry tells Enos to stay put and enjoy the pinup calendar. And I love the little acting here because Enos slowly lifts the July page to look at the sexy cowboy underneath the the sexy lady pinup and in my mind i thought fry like whacked the page down but instead he just slowly pulls it down while looking at enos like no that glare he's like no it's very well timed

i love it i love that shot so much again it's not like fry being forced into homophobia just to try to uh exist like it's so such a funny thing but again i do just feel so poor so badly for enos that in the world he's trapped in he can't be gay like he even though he so innocently wants to be and everyone is trying to stop him well he can't be alive either yeah yeah it's true and uh fry locks enos inside and i love this uh this great futurama line finally i can continue to exist and he drives out of these gates and we see a sign that fry didn't see that says atomic testing in progress and scientists all these guys are dead of leukemia in like three years but they're all like too close to this explosion they're lifting their binoculars to see a glorious mushroom cloud explode after this

countdown and i like how it cuts to enos inside the house and he's looking at the cowboy and then he just turns his head as the window lights up and then we see the uh it cuts to the outside and then you sit with the classic uh you know stock footage of like the test house is being blown apart that's what happens to enos he dies like instantly poor at least uh well at least he got to enjoy looking at that sexy cowboy one last time he died uh doing what he loved the atomic bomb test was in that d69 episode too that's how they got back to their their present time yeah they had to fly through the blast yeah they had to use the energy of the atomic uh blast oh and that was the original ending to back to the

future that they had to change that's right yeah yeah uh but man yeah i i love on that secret commentary track with the animators hearing the uh hearing about how hard rough draft korea worked on that explosion like it's it's 2d and 3d stuff together and like the yeah the the slow mushroom cloud is like so great looking it's not like a stock mushroom cloud it feels like they drew their own uh to look specifically like uh you know an original version of it it looks very good to even 21 years later yeah it's a great little effect there's there's only one bad 3d effect in this it's when when to me when fry gets to the military base and is looking at enos talk to his uh commanding officer the look at the flag in the background, like it looks bad.

Like it really does just look like somebody squashing and stretching a PNG file. I guess they realized like, oh, SDTVs will be watching this, right? And like, well, no, no, not in the future. Our SDTVs now look as silly as that tiny postage stamp size TV they were looking at in the episode.

True, but now they're in demand by retro gaming freaks who want a 300 pound TV in their living room, killing their families. I don't care about recreating perfectly. Who cares? Emulation is fine, people.

Yeah, you know, for a photo shoot at one of the old game websites I worked at, they built a room to look like that and it had the old TV and for a second, sitting on this that. And it had the old TV. And for a second sitting on the shitty old couch playing on that old TV, I was like, boy, this actually does feel pretty great to me. I do feel like I'm 10 again. It looks cool. I just don't want it in my home.

There's too much space. I lugged around a 300 pound TV for about a decade and like six moves. And I just wanted it away from me. I was like, why does a TV need two people to pick it up? I love how light TVs are these days. You can spin around like they're pizzas. You can just flip them up and down in the air and snap them over your knee and buy a new one because they're so cheap. When your 60 inch TV breaks, you just go like, well, I'm going to just buy a 70 inch one now.

I'm not fixing this thing. Yeah. You know what? When we someday in the future sell off Talking Simpsons to Fox or to Disney. It'll be Disney. Yeah, we sell it off to Disney and we live in McMansions. I'm going to dedicate a room to being my 80s childhood room. I'll have a 90s room.

Okay. We can hop decades. We visit each other's houses. Exactly. You know, I like even skipping the TV altogether and just projecting stuff on my wall. Saves you more space. And then you gotta clean your wall all the time what what are you putting on your walls what the hell

you gotta clean all that blood these walls are filthy in here uh let's move on it's in my uh i project stuff in my bedroom nothing goes in there no no that's no food yeah then it's it's almost like having a murphy bed except for your tv that you can have the wall blank all the time yeah no posters though no unless you want them to interact with the movies i'm sure once bob and i are living together we'll have like an actual projector screen that we can pull down i hope so yeah yeah i want one of those so now we're in act three we're back at joe's cafe uh farnsworth and leela are in a booth mildred is taking their order. We get some Soylent Green jokes because the professor wants Soylent Green, a slice of Soylent Orange, and some Soylent Coleslaw.

Everything's Soylent for old Farnsworth. He loves it. And Lila has to remind him it's the 20th century, so the professor orders a variety of food, including a croque monsieur, the paella, two mutton pills, and a stein of mead. And Lila just wants a small injection of Femislim. So I feel bad for Leela. She can't actually eat food. Oh, poor Leela.

Do you guys still have those meads from Disenchantment? You know, I drank the last of them when I watched the new season of Disenchantment. I still have my Lucy one and we're having it while you're here. Okay. We may get... Isn't it super strong? We may have botulism. No, it's like 12% alcohol. One of them knocked me down, but i have lower tolerance but you got up

again yeah i did they're gonna keep you down then i had a whiskey drink and a vodka he was people all the time tmi mildred mildred is very confused by this also that now soylent is a thing you could buy if you're a weird tech guy really soylent is just like the the like the pouch of like flavor mush right yeah it tastes like pancake batter, apparently. Yeah. So this is another one of those things where a depressing futurist vision now turns into a thing you just sell to people. Yeah, it's like instead of enjoying one of the three base human instincts, I can just

suck on a sludge pouch and keep coding. It's more efficient. You just get the nutrients. That's all you need. Man, I miss balls energy drinks. I prefer that vision of the future. Have you seen Soylent Green? I've only seen clips. efficient you just get the nutrients that's all you need man i miss balls energy drinks i prefer that vision of the future have you seen soylent green uh i've only seen clips i've never watched the whole thing i gotta i gotta watch it sometime i haven't seen it i i saw it uh it's not worth it

i don't think i didn't think so you know you know the twist you've probably seen the ending that's all you need but watch the last uh 20 minutes see now that i did i at least watched the last 10 minutes because at least the old man and the lisa and other episodes of simpsons parodied it so i was like all right i should just see this original version just watch the phil hartman snl sketch that's good too soiling cow pies are people uh so moving on mildred is confused uh she's just like uh two chili dogs coming up and lila reminds the professor are you sonic the hedgehog what's going on here chili dogs no no yes i no i actually don't even love chili dogs that much see the stop till stop stealing sonic valor over here so lila reminds the professor they're stuck here if

they can't get a microwave and the professor says oh lord we'll have to endure the horrible music of the big bopper and then the terrible tragedy of his death you know he's right big bopper is his songs are not half as good as richie valens or buddy hollies he was just lucky uh for his legacy he was lucky to have died alongside with them that everybody remembers him equal his act was just a musical phone call yes it's like a one-sided phone call a horny man on the phone with a girl who wears chantilly lace i just know him from that one simpsons joke goodbye baby i don't know what his music sounds like at all uh you've never heard it no there's a funny like very very tiny joke in the movie walk hard where i believe john ennis is playing a big bopper type and they show

part of his act and the phone call goes on for too long. That's right. Or like the phone call is breaking up or something but it's very funny. He's seriously just like answering the phone? No but it's sort of like the Bob Newhart act but musically it's like hello baby and then he's like talking to someone you can't hear and that's like the song is mostly like talk singing right?

This is a big bopper speaking. Oh will I what? Oh will I what? Oh baby you know what I like. Yeah, that's the song. Well, phones were fairly new at the time. Or at least becoming popular. It's one of those phone rock songs you heard so much about. See, and again, if he wasn't in such a rush to get on that airplane

and just taking the long drive with that other guy, we'd have heard so many more big bopper songs into the the 60s we all saw the kids in the hall sketch uh they let the monkey fly the plane and that's why it crashed that's right yeah i'm buddy fucking holly uh we talked about like the big animation choices in this episode i like some of the small ones too i love this little moment where they they're just at this impasse and linda's just kind of errantly playing with the salt shaker and she looks out the window, just like a nice little observational touch,

like how she's playing with it, you know? Yeah, I love that little absent-mindedness. And I also really, Cohen shouted this out, and I didn't notice it until he did, but the top, the diner tabletop, the design on it, so great. It's like, you know, Starfield kind of.

That weird, like, Star Trek insignia you see on the weird, like, top the design on it so great it's like you know starfield kind of that weird like star trek insignia you see on the uh the weird like that that kind of uh 50s 40s style graphic design it's like little shapes and like and like stars and dots and things like that i don't know you'll have to see it there's got to be a name for that there was also an interesting thing art lady what's the name of it i don't know there was also an interesting thing i heard rich moore mention on his commentary, too, that he said that, and I noted it most of the time, but I didn't see any time where this is untrue, but he says, when something against progress or the past or a bad thing

happens, it happens to the screen left. And if something good happens or they go closer to the future, it happens screen right. And it does, it is true, like, say, in this scene, when Leela notices the dish, she is looking to screen right to see it. So that was just a really interesting little touch that Rich Moore kept

in there as director. That's why he's an Oscar winner. It's nice subliminal storytelling. So yeah, she sees the microwave dish outside. She says they have to steal it, but the professor is still into this idea of like no we must preserve the past and then this is when fry breaks the news that he did not preserve the past in any way well i killed my grandfather whoa wait if you killed your grandfather why do you still exist i don't know. Maybe God loves me. Killed? In an atomic blast?

No, sir. I'm afraid I don't take much solace in the fact that the implosion trigger functioned perfectly. Ah, there, there. If it makes you feel any better, his body was vaporized, so there's no chance of him coming back as a zombie. I'm not worried about that. Then you're a braver woman than i you remind me of venus would you mind walking me home how far is it that's a great delivery by billy how far is it yeah very heartless uh rich moore as a fun small detail not implied not intended by the writers this is him doing it he stuck a picture of the empire state building up by the payphone to imply like oh mildred has some interest in new york and that's why she moves there and that's why fry's family is there oh wow i didn't notice that yeah i never noticed it too a very small black and white photo you can barely see it when she's on the phone with

the general or whatever yeah i never even like questioned why uh fry's grandparents would be in uh roswell yeah he ends up in new york i i guess what happens is mildred is left pregnant by this guy fry who vanishes the next morning and then she just tells everybody that her fiance enos got her pregnant and then that's the lie that goes on to yancey fry uh and on the the man who is fry's son who will raise fry and join the military after the grandfather he thought he had it's getting complicated yeah but but i yeah you can see that she's grieving but i'm glad you know a grosser show would have had a joke that fry thinks that a grieving woman will be easy to convince to have sex with, but how far is it?

He's not planning to take advantage of a grieving woman. And he's not fully convinced that he will still exist. He thinks he's about to stop existing. I also do love Bender's laugh at the idea that God loves him. Maybe God loves me. So this is when a C ration plan lands at the army base. They wheel out this giant crate and President Truman busts out of this box of canned eggs.

Love it. That's wheeled down the ramp. Just his arms exploding out of it. Yeah. And I looked up this on the internet. It's a fun little tool, folks. You should use it, by the way. C rrations are specifically

wet, canned combat rations. So canned eggs would count as C-rations. That totally makes sense. Wow. That is some deep stuff. I guess I didn't really need Cohen to clarify this on the commentary, but he said he credits a lot of the old-timey talk of

Truman to Oakley and Weinstein. Yeah, they were freshly off of mission hill and working on these last two seasons i believe when we were watching that deep space nine uh the military general played by charles napier he called truman that piano playing democrat which i did not understand that's funny well i mean of course he would have contempt for a democrat in the way of playing but piano playing yeah i didn't know this about truman i don't know all the facts about truman is he beat dewey uh he nobody thought he would take over uh as vice president and that he he dropped the bomb like those were those are those are all the biggest truman facts i know i

was hoping that truman would show up in that star trek episode me too me too he kept calling on the phone but you never actually see truman himself i was hoping he would burst out of a crate of eggs but this is the good thing about animation like you don't need to hire someone who looks like truman you just draw him in even though that was like a high concept star trek episode it was still like we're gonna stay in this one room for most yeah they had like a tiny set yeah yeah was was that deep space nine episode before or after the uh forrest gump uh style time travel app where they went back to the old episode of the original series the uh the tribbles episode oh it was it was before okay all right that that one season

four this one in that one they use all the i remember that time travel one because they use all these forrest gump technology to like basically film them into scenes from the tribbles episode that's gotta look pretty rough no it looks really good oh really wow yeah okay well they covered it on uh we hate movies oh yeah that's right nexus and they like to do it's one of like the all-time best episodes it's a great funny episode i i love that they're there with wharf and they see that the klingons in the original series look nothing like wharf as a Klingon. Yeah. And they ask him like, hey, those guys are Klingons.

And he's like, we don't talk about it. Wow. But yeah, it's apparently it is a if you go to memory alpha, the super duper Star Trek wiki, there's a very in-depth reasoning about why Klingons went from looking that way. And then 80 years later look like Worf with the head ridges. They got the forehead wrinkling surgery. Bob, have you seen what Klingons used to look like? What's wrong with them?

They just look like stereotypical Asians. Is it like White Guys with Scotch Tape pulling their eyes back? Kind of the Fu Manchu mustache. I can see why they changed that. Instead of forehead ridges, it's like they just drew eyeliner onto their foreheads, kind of. And if you look at Worf even, he kind of has that mustache, though.

That Fu Manchu kind of thing, yeah. So Truman is meeting with all of these military folks. This is a top-secret visit. No one has to know about this except for senior officers, scientists, and one single conspiracy nut who no one will believe. Love that. And this conspiracy guy last takes a picture we see the result it's a blurry photo of six lights in a dark sky this might be based on a real photo but i looked up like ufo photos or whatever and this did not come up but i assume it's supposed to look like one of the many blurry uh indecipherable ufo pictures you've seen in the past yeah i feel

like i've seen a photo like that before but maybe you're right maybe it's meant to be a generic blurry ufo photo it feel you know as photo technology has improved i think that too is why we don't get as many of these alien sighting things like people this i'm stealing a joke from a person i forget on twitter but uh the joke was we all have phones all the time now, and nobody finds aliens or Sasquatches or anything. All they get is filming the police murdering people. That's all you get when everyone has a phone. That's the only horrible phenomenon we can capture.

Oh, by the way, it seems Harry S. Truman played the piano. He released several albums. What? And he refused to play piano with Nixon. Oh, wow. He's got principles. Yeah. How do you like that

well he did commit uh humongous war crimes so that's true but what president has it yeah i mean these were kind of famous though no no i know it's actually pretty horrifying it's pretty horrible i do not want to make light of it does biden play an instrument uh i'm sure he plays the spoons if he gets him whiskey into him now he he's a drunk, man. He doesn't drink nothing. He's dry in so many ways. He's a very dry man. He plays the ice cream cone and loves driving a fast cone. Once he finishes eating ice cream with a spoon,

he starts playing them. Mr. President, please. So a tank rolls by this military hangar. The commanders tell Truman their experts have reassembled the alien ship parts to its original design, and we see that bender's parts were crafted into this ufo uh trap door drops open a beer bottle spills out and breaks on the floor and uh this is when truman says whistling dixie i want this at the area 51 for study and they tell him that's where they're building the

set to fake the moon landing he says well then we'll really have to land on the moon, invent NASA, and tell them to get off their fannies. That's a great line. That's, you know, NASA was officially founded in 1958, but its precursor did exist in the late 40s, which, you know, maybe was run by some Nazis or former Nazi scientists. Operation Paperclip. It brought so many great people to our nation.

Again, I know all this information from the X files because they then they used all this stuff do we no longer care about putting people on the moon uh doesn't seem like it hasn't happened a long time yeah i mean when nasa really cut back on it and there's that international space station that but like it's half owned by the russians so i think that's a little iffy now too so yeah you know technology is so good these days it could easily fake it no yeah yeah yeah but why even bother i guess it doesn't even interest people anymore it's true it was only to prove we were better than one country and doesn't matter anymore so no more space race no no i it's great that the space race was no it's who gets to the moon first is the winner every other first that russia did before us that doesn't count in the scoreboard it's only who got to the moon first is the winner every other first that russia did before us

that doesn't count in the scoreboard it's only who got to the moon first and then we can just let the country fall apart we won i you know i guess it's uh we're supposed to expect that the private sector is going to like go to the moon and then mars well we have jeff bezos with his suborbital launch boring get anywhere i yeah i believe elon musk uh take care of your 13 children and stop trying to get to mars there's still child support on mars i'm sorry yes uh again here's another joke i'll steal from twitter the people said that the reason these guys want to invent all their rockets is because it's really hard to sexually harass people and get away with it on earth these days so that's why they got it they got to do the sexual harassment in space in our

next clip here truman meets Zoidberg. If you come in peace, surrender or be destroyed. If you're here to make war, we surrender. Both good. The important thing is I'm meeting new people. Bushwa, now what's your mission? Are you planning to make some kind of alien-human hybrid? Are you coming on to me?

Hot crackers, I take exception to that. I'm not hearing a no notes to this space crab if we want information we'll have to do us an old-fashioned alien autopsy hooray you know stop talking about space sexual harassment here he is zoidberg propositioning the president i just love is like i'm not hearing a no like zoidberg he likes sex withberg he likes older Baldwin we saw him sucking on the professor's head in the Atlanta episode right

yes yeah though that was after he had some pheromone sprayed on him right right like I'm so into you right now yes yeah I guess in that case he he needed an invitation but hot crackers and nerds that's both a great couple of phrases

there by by old arius and also he's like if you declare war we surrender it's that simple i also love that he calls for an old-fashioned alien autopsy even though this is the first it's not the first alien autopsy apparently it's an old-fashioned one that they've been doing for a long time uh man it's uh yeah i just love zoidberg is so desperate for any contact even even the getting an autopsy he's like hooray like he's he's just he's and he's involved with like he's making new friends he's meeting new people they might cut him open while he's alive it's actually like a vivisection not an autopsy because he's not dead that's true yeah he's you what? Zoidberg, too, they say on the commentary,

they cut more scenes with Zoidberg in the interrogation, but there's not on the deleted scenes. Yeah, it's just the one. So we're getting to it, folks. Here's our next clip. Here we go. In which Fry does have sex with his own grandmother. Oh, I know how you feel.

My grandfather died recently. It's all so sad. At times like this, I just need someone to hold me. Mmm, you like holding me, don't you? Hey, you know what always cheers you up? Baking me a nice tray of sugar cookies. How about these cookies, sugar? Yeah. I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't even exist.

But I do exist. Which proves you can't really be my grandma. There you have it, folks. There it is. You went over one of my favorite jokes in the episode where she says, every little thing reminds me of Enos.

And she has a framed photo of a mushroom cloud for some reason. Did the army send that to her? That's great. Yeah. And in the background, another Rich Moore touch, he put the Ten Commandments in her living room because Fry breaks every one of them in this episode or almost every one of them. Yeah.

He kills. He has sex with the family member. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess, you know, look, Fry is the family member yeah i so yeah i guess you know look fry is a freak for this but let's you know he's a stupid idiot who thinks she's no longer his grandma and then on top of that you know he probably hasn't had sex in a while and then and also he is drinking whiskeys you know and he's not uh fully uh he's not making the right decisions and he's he's convinced that uh you know that that's not making the right decisions. And he's convinced that

that's not his grandmother. He's fully convinced. I also do love the design on her very 40s giant bra. The bullet bra. That's a good one. If Marty was convinced Lorraine wasn't his actual mother, he probably would have went for it.

Yeah, I think he would have. Well, I mean, too, that's like, you know, it's just the oedipus complex thing coming through i suppose or what's the line that jay sherman says we want to have sex with our mother but not grandmothers yes futurama is advancing it it's true yeah he's taking they're taking it to the net level beyond that and it's also that her name is mildredred. A classic old lady name, too. They chose a good one. So we cut to the morning. The paperboy throws a newspaper on the porch.

We see the headline is, Crackpot Photographs Truman Again. And it's his blurry photo of the UFO lights. This is also one of my favorite cuts in the series, too, because you have Fry being made out with and the time cut. And then to really reinforce how effed up it is, they have the happy music like, do, do, do, do, do, do, like to start the next scene.

For the reveal of them all glaring at him from the window in disgust. I like how it takes them a while to react. They're like waiting for someone to call action to finally react. But they're all like peering in. They all are making a disgust very well known they knock on the window they wake fry up uh farnsworth wants to know what the hell he's done and fry says relax she can't be my grandmother i figured it all out and this is where fry learns the shocking truth in our next clip here of course she's your grandmother you you perverted dope! Look! Come back to bed, dearie.

It's impossible! I mean, if she's my grandmother, who's my grandfather? Isn't it obvious? You are! Did you say something, dearie? I'm a bit hard of hearing. AAAAAAAAHHHHH! Commencing excavation of the subject's chest cavity. And in this corner, Zoidberg!

Come on, lighten up! What is this, a funeral? Heart funeral heart take i've got four of them stomach contents one deviled egg deviled egg the same deviled egg there you go yes and i remember watching this live uh in the year 2001 right after 9-11 and this was generally surprising and shocking in a fun comedic way like i was like oh i can't it's 7 p.m number one this is 7 p.m on a sunday and i was like this is this is a new kind of joke and i'm happy to be here for it to witness it so yes i was very proud of what the show had become at this point and yeah i wish that was one of those things that you could just like wipe from your memory and watch again because it really was just like the best comedic surprise. I like how the proof that she is his grandmother is that she acts like his grandmother.

Yes. There's no like DNA proof that Farnsworth brings up or anything like that. It's like, look, she's acting like a grandma. She ages up like 50 years to like bake sugar cookies and uh have like a listening horn in her ears and farnsworth uh should be upset because that means he's also a product of inbreeding oh i didn't even think of that yeah that's true i mean he's so far removed that i don't think it affects him much but still uh man yeah i well you know how it is you go to you go to bed with madonna you wake up with a grandma that's how it goes is that how it works is that what they say

but but no i i yeah i love i love that mildred i guess just through being impregnated she has now become a grandmother and just acts like one i i also love fry's desperate head shake when he's asked like isn't it obvious he's like like the little head nod like no he doesn't want to believe it well i also like this because it is applying like a very high concept uh explanation of a low culture pop culture thing and that's the song i'm my own grandpa so they took that song and they're like how do we take a plot uh out of this like how do we make a sci-fi plot out of this and they did so this song is from 1947 a billion people have covered it including uh

tom arnold in the movie the stupids he He performs this song, I'm My Own Grandpa, a movie nobody saw. And also, this is performed on The Muppet Show by somebody, I forget. But yeah, Ray Stevens covered it, Willie Nelson covered it, and here is a clip from the 1947 Nolte song, I'm My Own Grandpa. Now many, many years ago

when I was 23 I was married to a widow who was pretty as could be. This widow had a grown-up daughter who had hair of red. My father fell in love with her and soon they two were wed. This made my dad my son-in-law and changed my very life. My daughter was my mother cause she was my father's wife. So it's like four minutes of this explanation as to how you can be your own grandpa.

But yeah, it's Futurama applying a high concept sci-fi premise to explain this rotten novelty song from the 40s that everyone has covered. And there you have it. And it came out the year this episode takes place in. That's right. Yeah, 1947. Yeah, I wasn't even thinking of that. Wow. You know, I have a good memory for Muppet songs.

I do not remember that one, though. That's a classic.'s a classic i love that that's twisted yeah everyone go out and rent the stupids it's got to be like on uh to be or uh mooby or roku i'm gonna keep saying syllables until i figure this out oh yeah i see why i don't remember it was just the it was sung by the goga lala jubilee jug band meeting so it's just a bunch of like the colorful weirdos like not not any of the memorable muppets it was made to denigrate the sons of the soil it is also that yeah it ain't gonna happen so uh yeah that's that's explaining that reference so yeah i'm my own grandpa they're just referencing that classic piece of uh pop culture goofy pop culture i i also do love uh zoidberg eating that

egg over and over again he just constantly constantly and also that you can take anything out of zoidberg and it won't kill him apparently he's just he's just full of organs they just throw them at the president later oh that's so great and he swallows all his food yes just straight yeah i like the hard cut to back on the ship and leo's just slapping the hell out of fries like snap out of it i think she's also slapping him because she's disgusted you know there's some violence behind that well at least he's been screaming since between the two scenes like non-stop because he is uh you know at least he didn't gouge his own eyes out like a king oedipus rex but uh basically it's the same kind of insanity

he's been pushed to and this is when Farnsworth is done with the prime directive let's get the hell out of here is what he says I love that screw history yeah Fry protests he's like oh a lesson in changing history for Mr. I'm my own grandpa it's a great line so yeah with a mighty screw history

the ship takes off it just fires a rocket that's where the title of the episode is written. And it has a Zoidberg version of the Kilroy character. Ah, right. I didn't catch that. I just love the cute little thing that's written on there. I mean, yes, this also feels like the Treehouse Five Homer time travel thing. Because there's just something hilarious to me of a character going like you know

don't touch anything i'll touch anything i feel like just you just throws caution to the wind and just says i don't care anymore a consequence be damned i just want to smash everything yeah that's basically the premise of back to the future three yeah yeah dog goes screw history yeah i want to make uh this work for me i've already extended my life in the future let's get an old bride from the past and that's so smart in that movie that he saves a woman who was going to die anyway so he doesn't change the life of somebody who already existed it was a dead woman underrated movie back to the future part yeah you know and i don't understand why this happened but it's so weird how in that movie uh his um great great grand great whatever grandfather looks like looks like

marty but then the grandmother looks like lorraine well the uh the screenwriter explains uh all the men in the family are attracted to women who look like lorraine oh okay yes yeah it's in their blood yeah also leah thompson she needed something to do in that movie yeah uh hey leah thompson is sexy no matter what uh decade you're in yeah if she's kissing a duck or if she's some Irish lady. Man, that movie really gave me appreciation for just gun tricks. Like, that's a special effect. No, that's levitating stuff or time travel. It's just seeing Tom Wilson spin a gun around on his revolver around and stick it in his holster.

He's also underrated. He carries a lot of those movies. Oh, yeah. So this is a big actionster. He's also underrated. He carries a lot of those movies. Oh, yeah. So this is a big action montage. This feels like a movie. It really does. The conspiracy nut sees the ship taking off, firing lasers at barrels, blowing things apart.

He screams, UFO, UFO. We see his picture, and it's the famous surgeon's photograph of the Loch Ness Monster from 1934. Yes, which, Bob, listeners have heard me already tell Bob about this on the Little Mermaid podcast. But I've recently been alerted to the theory of Nessie equals whale penis. Oh, right. That's right. That if you use that, the people on ships who thought they saw sea monsters probably just saw the giant 16 foot long blue whale's penis

popping out of my god why was it sticking out of the water uh you know what was it doing well they were excited and they're just showing off i guess i don't i i mean really it is yeah a whale penis in s uh in excited uh is quite big hey we've all been there in the bathtub you know if you want to see a big bird penis look at an ostrich oh yeah i didn't know this some birds it's out there yeah oh some birds have pre-onsol penises yeah it's pretty crazy i thought it was all cloacas everywhere no a few lucky birds look up ostrich penis yeah well maybe some other day all of our listeners do it now we put it in your head so we're back at the alien uh vivisection one scientist is sawing something inside of zoidberg he's like no no

i need that to speak and they saw they look at each other and then start sawing quicker like no shut him up i also love that they're wearing their you know protective suits but truman's just like nerds to that i'm gonna stand here in my regular outfit it's so great i love how much fry and leela are violating the past because they just like drop in in jetpacks lila is like karate kicking the scientists and uh he even gets kicked by lila's mighty boots truman yeah the truman went through the rest of his life having seen aliens and jetpacks flinging him around i i also just love that he says you know it's a reference to perry white's great caesar's ghost and old superman stuff but he says great roosevelt's ghost because he just died right yes yeah uh so fry's pulling organs out of zoidberg throwing them at the president uh sir and the press zoidberg the

president is gagging on my glass bladder what an honor gas bladder sorry gas bladder and i also like that fry kind of smiles back at him too that he agrees like that is an honor i'm happy for you and uh farnsworth is saving bender uh with his like hover recliner where he blashes the wall but he's also asleep and he has to wake up to realize what he's doing and he picks up bender's body by like reclining the chair and lifting it with his feet i think it was them realizing like they made they're like, Farnsworth looks too cool here. We got to have him be like unconscious when he enters the room,

not meant to have looked cool. And soldiers open fire on the ship as it lowers this magnet to grab the dish. It rips the roof off as well. That's when we see the Sergeant Carter style guy about to tuck into his toilet lunch. And he goes, eat us. And Fry says, he's dead, sorry!

I almost wanted to see that Sergeant Moore in the death of Enos. He's like, oh, I didn't hate him after all. I actually love the little guy. I'm so sad he's dead now. There was no time for an Enos funeral in this jam-packed episode. So yeah, this is all action. The fighter pilots are pursuing the ship. The bullets are bouncing off of the ship's hull.

It dives into this hangar to do some barnstorming, but instead of going through the hangar, it goes up out of the hangar. That's so great that it can move in three-dimensional space that a regular airplane can't do. It's such a cool sci-fi chase thing. It's just an exciting chase. And they're in the bottom of the ship

looking out at the shrinking earth below. Farnsworth says, choke on that causality. And Bender screams, 1947 can kiss my shiny metal. And then he falls out into the ground below. So he falls back down into Roswell.

His head by itself, just like Data's head that's left back in Mark Twain times to then be discovered in the future again to complete time's arrow in that season five to season six two-parter which is also when he meets they meet Guinan in the past too who was friends with Mark Twain I have not seen this one it's a great oh it's a great one

I remember seeing it live and between the summer like man how are they gonna get out of this one those they had so many great season finale cliffhangers on TNG. I've been showing Bob episodes of Star Trek here and there lately. That one, it's a two-parter, so it's a bit too long to show before this recording, though. Look, I wouldn't put it in a top ten. It's okay. It's a good one. Yeah.

Especially because Data's one of my all-time favorite characters. I love... Something about this analytical robot man really speaks to me well fry uh they have to go to the future now fry mournfully cries out bender's name as they travel back to their 31st century home and we're back at planet express zoidberg is freshly duct taping his vivisection wounds and he says good as new and lila holds up an organ asking don't you need this one and he feigns death and then pops up and says gotcha i like his little claw grabs and he goes gotcha i love his like his death act out is so funny and i also love the animation on lila

just tossing the thing behind her like like just like this uh this jokester i hate him yeah it's probably like a gallbladder or appendix or something he doesn't need. Or one of his four hearts. Yeah, it's heart number two. Usually, like, the joke by this point is like, Zoidberg is poor and lonely, but Zoidberg having like weird organs and like weird biology was like the first Zoidberg joke along with him being a bad doctor. Yeah, yeah.

So they're going back to some older stuff, which is fun, because there's like, they discovered the poor and lonely trait later. I love seeing Zoidberg torn apart, especially because he feels no pain and is not sad about it. He's just like, oh, yeah, rip everything out of me. I don't care. But in our final clip here, it is time to rescue Bender. Oh, poor Bender. He must be so lonely right now.

Trapped a thousand years in the past. Hey, wait a second. Anything? No. Wait! Oh, stupid jerk! He's alive! Please! Bender, what was it like lying in that hole for a thousand years? I was enjoying it until you guys showed up. Well, now everything is back as it was. And if history doesn't care that our degenerate friend Fry is his own grandfather, then who are we to judge?

Amen. So Nina and I came to the same conclusion about this Bender plot that's not related to Star Trek. Nina, what did this remind us of? I want to know if Henry can figure this out. We were both reminded of a certain JRPG that has something similar to this. Well, that's Chrono Trigger, isn't it?

Yeah, Robo is left behind 400 years in the past in order to help propagate some land. Yeah, to grow this forest. So you turn the desert into a forest. And then as soon as you drop him off, you immediately just go to the year 1000 and get him. And he's all rusted and he's shut down. Oh oh that's so cool yeah i i wasn't thinking of that that it is a lot like this is not as noble of a thing obviously uh i also love that bender doesn't care like he actually wasn't lonely at all he loved being alone for a thousand years it's probably pretty easy to pass the time when you're a robot you can just like shut yourself off or oh yeah centuries i also you know think about this for another uh time f uh is

that bender and fry's bodies were both frozen in time from the year 2000 to 2999 wow wow i never thought of that okay so they have something in common now uh but but i also do love the just the light of like and if history doesn't care that our degenerate friend fries his own grandfather then who are we to judge that's just how they move on from it they're like you know what we all know you're your own grandpa but let's just forget about it let's move on with our life but then it turns out this has an effect yes profound effect which i love that that's why nibbler picked him out like because of his his time anomaly brain gives him the no brain waves or the specific not a missing type of brain this this very dirty plot twist based on a corny old novelty song and forms like the first

episode of the series yeah and actually i i'm gonna pitch this to macaraning for the new series that let's say fry and his family go on vacation to Roswell when he's a teen. Young Fry meets Bender's head. They have an adventure, but they both lose their memories at the end. That could be a plot. I like that. Yeah. And then, well, then he has to rebury his head out there.

Yeah, I like that idea. That's a fun story. Yes, I'm going to pitch it. I'm just going to tweet at, well, David Cohen's on Twitter, Matt Groening's pitch it. I'm just going to tweet at, well, David Cohen's not on Twitter. Matt Grady's not on Twitter. I'll find somebody. You know, I'm Twitter friends with one of the new Futurama writers. Maybe I can pass along to him.

I'm working on my specs right now. I don't know. I'm wondering if this was touched on by Futurama Comics at all. I guess we should ask Ian. Ian, yeah. I feel like this is one of the things where he'd watch this episode and think, wait a minute. This means Bender's head was in the past i could do something with that there's quite a few vitrama comics to go through oh yeah it does sound like something clever that uh a great

a great comic writer like ian boothby would come up with yeah but we are actually on our way to a weird hell concert all of us together so we have to wrap up here but yes i'm glad to have nina on this episode uh maybe i'll eat my words later but i feel like this is the best episode of uh this era and probably by that metric the best episode of futurama prove us wrong new hulu series prove us wrong yeah can you outdo this i doubt it the the late philip j fry actually is uh high up on my list as well like i really do love the uh it's time travel plus the the the sadness and the emotion but yeah just the action and the adventure of this and that it's also like it feels like them finally like you know choosing to do something they put off doing for forever

made it extra special you know and and yeah i the only the only negative i'd say on it is i if this was movie length, then they would have had time for Amy and Hermes to get some plot stuff in here. Unfortunately, they didn't get invited to the supernova. And so they miss out on the big adventure. Any final thoughts, Nina? I like Star Trek a lot. I'm glad we talked about Star Trek.

I'm glad I watched some more of it. I mainly know it through the We Hate Movies side podcast. Yeah, listen to the Nexus on their Patreon. Yes. Hey, yes hey wait we've got a patreon but people listening are already part of that but you know yeah if you like giving the patreons we hate movies has got a great patreon i'm a patron yeah and also um i like the gayest episode ever episode on this yeah yeah i i'm now i didn't want to listen to it because i feared uh stealing from any of their thoughts but yeah i i'm gonna listen to it now. I really did love their one. I enjoy all their ones.

Their one on Gomer Pyle is a great episode as well. We just gave a few facts. If you want to know more about his life as a closeted gay man up until his later years and how that affected his career in Hollywood, great episode for that. Also, you can learn more about Gomer Pyle

and how that episode is eerily similar to Bart the Lover in a way we'll talk about in probably like five or six months yeah yeah well it's coming up sooner than I thought it is yeah we're getting through season three pretty quick basically there are no new ideas everything's been done yeah but don't

rip us off unless you're go bayside which is what I took the idea for yeah that's where podcast that was what we ripped off first but yes uh thank you april richardson and we'll see you guys next month for godfellas see you then Mr. President, our experts have reassembled the parts from the alien ship into its original design. Hmm. Ah! Whistling Dixie!

I want this sent to Area 51 for study. But sir, that's where we're building the fake moon landing set. Then we'll have to really land on the moon. Invent NASA and tell them to get off their fannies!