Talking Simpsons - Labor Day Bonus! Talking Futurama - The Luck of the Fryrish

Episode Date: September 6, 2021

Happy Labor Day, everyone! As a special bonus, we're giving you a free episode of Talking Futurama to give you a taste of what our Patreon subscribers get over at patreon.com/talkingsimpsons. And it's not just a free episode; it's one of our best—a look at the all-time classic "The Luck of the Fryrish" with special guest Karen Chu of Good Job, Brain! If you like what you hear, and want to listen to 39 more episodes of Talking Futurama (with more to come), head on over to patreon.com/talkingsimpsons and sign up at the $5 level to access the rest of Talking Futurama, as well as our miniseries covering The Critic, King of the Hill, and Mission Hill. And at the end of October, we'll be covering our 10 favorite episodes of Batman: The Animated Series via our next miniseries, Blabbin' Bout Batman: The Animated Series.  Thanks once again for listening and please enjoy this bonus podcast!

Good news everyone we have a special Labor Day treat just for you people in the Talking Simpsons free feed that's right it is a free episode of Talking Futurama normally behind the $5 paywall at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons and yeah of course this is Bob Mackie how's it going? Hey and it's Henry and you're hearing this if you're listening to it on Labor Day itself it's my birthday so a special birthday gift for me to you. People are getting gifts on your birthday? That's right yes okay i guess i can go along with this but yes normally talking futurama is behind the five dollar paywall we decided to give you a taste of it with our look at the episode the luck of the fry rich with special guest karen chu so if you like this you want to hear more we've done everything up to the end of season three at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. Sign up for five bucks. You can hear all

of it, plus our podcast series about things like Mission Hill, The Critic, King of the Hill, and so many more bonuses. If you are not a patron, we have like over a hundred bonus podcasts behind the paywall that you haven't heard, and you can hear them all immediately the second you sign up at patreon.com slash talking Simpsons.

Yeah, you know, if you are a Simpsons fan and always wish we talked about futurama we do it once a month on our patreon and we you know have dozens of episodes we've covered over the years just a futurama alone on in addition all that other stuff and we also wanted to share this one because uh we don't often have a guest on talking futurama but our pal karen chu who, who has the great podcast, Good Job Brain, that just returned, she wanted to record with us

for such a sweet episode as Luck of the Fryrish. We couldn't say no, and we are also, I've just been thinking the whole time since we recorded her, everybody's got to hear this one. We can't keep our treasure hidden.

We must share it with the world, except then you can pay us for the rest of it right yes yeah here the rest then and yeah that and I mean if you signed up now it's the start of September next month is our next mini series blabbing about Batman which you'll get every Friday

on the Patreon as well that's right so please enjoy this free little treat if you want to hear more again the address is patreon.com slash talking simpsons. Once again, television has given me a reason to live. Good news, everyone. It's Talking Futurama, where we pray to the horse god. I'm your host, space hook patent holder Bob Mackie, and this is the Talking Simpsons Patreon's

chronological exploration of Futurama, who is here with me today, as always. Why, it's Henry Gilbert, and I'm twice the V he ever was. And who do we have on the line? Whimmy wham wham wazzle, it's Karen Chu. And today's episode is The Luck of the Fryrish. Ah, the Breakfast Club soundtrack. Man, I can't wait till I'm old enough to feel ways about stuff.

Today's episode aired on March 11th, 2001, and as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real-world history. Welcome to the world of tomorrow! Oh boy, Bobby, Janet Jackson's All For You is top in the charts, Onimusha debuts on the PlayStation 2 stateside. And Ke are dubbed over by natalie portman in the movie so you don't even hear her voice but then her first starring role was in this thing that

is honestly so far beneath her of like yeah it's a disney abc sunday night movie where it's like robin hood had a daughter and now she's robin from the poor no thanks but uh but after kieran knightley became a big star uh right after a few years after that then this got like put out on dvd and like the disney tv movie aesthetics of it were all pulled away in the advertising it's like a brand new kieran knightley movie princess of the east i assume she did phantom menace then went back to england for a few years then did uh bend it like beckham and uh pirates and that was where she took off but i guess there was tv stuff in america there was princess of thieves in between that yeah bend it like beckham was the the big one but uh this was her big american debut not not counting uh playing one of the handmaidens of uh padme

amadala there are no small parts if you play natalie portman clone and uh so we have oni musha launching in america right after the is the american launch date or this is the american launch date it was january for japan and march for america A very sleepy fall for the PlayStation 2, I guess. And this game, it's like Resident Evil, but in Samurai times. And weirdly enough, there was just a PC port of it, and I bought that about a year ago, and I tried playing through it.

I thought it was fun until I got to A, a sliding tile puzzle, B, with a time limit, C, that kills you and sends you back to your last save point if you don't finish it. At that point, like i don't have time for this it's 2021 or maybe it was 2020 then but still but still and uh what was the other news item henry sorry uh janet jackson's all for you is like number one with a bullet it is strong on the charts yeah i don't know what that is and she's uh i think she's about to sing it on the MTV Movie Awards as well. Like, it's all for you. That was it.

Look, I'm not. That's how it goes, right? Beautiful. All for you. Is Janet Jackson in this room? She better not be. Now, that Onimushi game was the first PlayStation 2 game, apparently, that sold a million copies. Like, it was the first one that was a big game

yeah people were so hungry for content they bought zone of the enders to get that metal gear solitude demo was probably around this time too yeah yeah well i now think about that the ps2 like that had come out in the fall of 2000 and then just five six months later you get an original game by capcom that's like wow how big we're still waiting on that on ps5 there's like that like resident evil 8 might come out and that's still cross gen anyway so what even is there to play on a ps5 there are no exclusives anymore anyway this is our gamer talk yes yeah sorry i actually oh i actually have a fun fact about Onimusha. So the video game, the character was actually modeled after an actor. His name is Takeshi Kaneshiro, who I went to school with.

Whoa. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he was kind of an idol back then in Taiwan. He's Taiwanese and Japanese. Okay. idol back then in Taiwan. He's Taiwanese and Japanese. And people used to wait outside our school because he was a budding actor and he's

very good looking. And the Onimusha series was one of his big breaks in America. Wow, that's incredible. I think a big thing with those games that you pointed out, Karen, is that they have to get the likeness rights back for those characters, which is why Onimusha 3 has Jean Reno in it. And that will never come out again in any format.

Oh, I see. Yeah. So I guess he's still for sale. But Jean Reno is just like, no, I want to earn money. Well, I would think Jean Reno is purchasable. It's just too high a price. Capcom doesn't want to pay for a PC port of a PS2 game. Maybe one day. But yes, you heard her voice we've said karen a few times but yes karen chu is on the

show welcome to the show karen excited to be here thank you guys for uh letting me be be a guest on your on on this wonderful podcast uh futurama is one of my favorite all-time shows. And just a little quick disclaimer, there are some words that I have problems pronouncing. English is my second language. And they're like three words. And lucky for us, one of them is Futurama. In my brain, I think I'm saying Futurama. But sometimes my mouth just comes up with Futurama. So if I go back and forth, you might hear that.

It is because I think my nerves and my muscles aren't really connecting there. We'll allow it. I mean, people, there's a distinction between Mario and Mario, and I'll take both, honestly, because Mario, that's the authentic New York way to say Mario. I'm more of a, I'm mad if I hear a Mario. Mario is the Japanese way to say Mario.

But yes, Karen, you're back just in time because the long way to return of Good Job Brain is just around the corner. That is your trivia podcast. Yes, I know these guys mostly from games, but also now we're all in the podcast game together as well. I started Good Job Brain, a trivia podcast, almost 10 years ago. And we're currently recording new episodes and a new season will be out.

And I was also recently on the TV show The Chase on ABC. Wow. And some people might know you karen speaking of 10 years ago from oneup.com the very early days of oneup.com where you designed a lot of the early logos for that site including the first retronauts logo yes yes the whole podcast suite one of yours uh you know the world of warcraft podcast legendary Legendary Thread, and of course, Retronauts. That was a really fun one. Glad to see it evolve and having so much success now 10 years later.

No, I remember my flight to Berkeley when I was coming to California with dreams of my future in 2006, listening to those podcasts and thinking like, man, these people are all so funny. I'll never get to be on a podcast though. Look at you now. We're really ahead of our time.

I remember even, you know, it was just when, you know, Apple started having podcasts and this is so long ago, I remember our one-up video content. It was pre-YouTube. And we would distribute them by giving links out to the CDN and all the ads are baked in. It was wild times, wild times. The time when every website had a proprietary video player and none of them functions they said we will not give anything to youtube this is all ours yeah yeah and then they realized it was much easier just to give things to youtube and post them there

but karen what is your experience with futurami you seem like you're a very big fan were you there from the very beginning no so i grew up overseas and so so most of the serial televised, you know, animation I'd watch was was pretty much anime. And there were there were only a few U.S. cartoon shows that kind of crossed the ocean to me. But they end up being dubbed and localized. Right. So a lot of that, you know, it's all translated um a lot of the jokes are are kind of you know local politics like you know south park um and so i you know i just never got into you know the animation block the fox kind of prime time shows because it never really got to me and also out of my ignorance you know i grew up with the perception that primetime US cartoon shows were kind of like

fart jokes and a lot of gags and shock value. So I was very happy to be proven wrong when I came to America. And I was dating a guy who, there's some people who need music or TV shows to always constantly be playing in the house or, you know, when they fall asleep. And so he just downloaded a bunch of Futurama episodes, and he would fall asleep to them. I've never watched those shows. So I'm, you know, so I couldn't sleep. So I would just stay up watching his little laptop of like, you know, going through the entire seasons of Futurama. And I fell in love with the show. It was so smart. I have a lot of kind of gaps of like Western pop culture. So

it was fun to like retroactively learn some of those things. And I like ensemble, ensemble casts, you know, very kind of like, to me, it's kind of very like heist ish um or like an rpg party and it was just smart and funny and just something so different and i really fell in love with you know the the entire show all the writing um i think one of the the best things about you know i i didn't i didn't get to grow up with the simpsons um so i'm not you know i i definitely am not as familiar with the simpsons kind of the the graining simpsons feel but i feel like it's probably the same there where futurama just has layers layers and layers and layers and every even now you know yesterday when i was watching this episode there are new things that I've never noticed or paid attention to.

So that's just, to me, you know, such a fulfilling and funny and quotable experience to be part of the Futurama fandom. Yeah, we've seen these episodes, I don't know, 20 or 30 times probably before this, and we still encounter new jokes. Or, oh, that is a hidden joke in this scene, and I didn't even notice it before. So much density to the writing and the animation on this show, yeah. And I think falling asleep to Futurama is a very common history most of us have, because in the mid-aughts when Futurama would kick off the Adult Swim programming block, once it restarted at 2 in the morning, you knew, it's like, like i should probably go to bed and then you just fall asleep to bender digging up corpses a similar experience with me me and my husband is that um when we started dating i i had

trouble falling asleep because when i would be alone i would have on podcasts but i was like i don't want to play podcasts for the new person I'm dating. But then he's like, no, if you want to listen to podcasts. And so then I pretty much got him into all these obscure comedy podcasts. And now eventually he listens to all of them with me, which is nice. So before we start talking about the episode, it's time for a writer's corner. And on our show, whenever we encounter a new writer on the show, we talk them and their history and the writer of this episode is ron weiner not wiener not wiener if your name is spelled wiener say it's weiner everyone will believe you that's even worse what's worse being a wiener or a weiner you know well i'll tell you what he's a child

of privilege don't feel bad for him all right so uh he started as a story editor in season two but this is his first episode uh sorry first season writing episode but karen on this show throughout the history of the show everybody is from harvard so it won't surprise you this show is even more harvardy than the simpsons so this guy he's a 1995 graduate of harvard wrote for the lampoon that part is obvious but not only that but his father is a professor at the medical school of harvard and his brother is also a harvard graduate so he might have the most harvardy person on the writing staff you might have literal blue blood is that is that critic joke crimson the crimson blood of the harvard graduate you're right crimson so going through his career

really quick so after leaving harvard after graduating he applied for this paramount writers program and uh he was placed in his first writer's room for the short-lived sherman hemsley sitcom on upm good behavior wow is he like a principal or something in that that sounds sort of familiar he's the guy i think he's like a principal or something but it's like seven episodes that aired on upno remembers it so from that ron weiner went on to uh the weird owl show and uh he wrote on almost every episode of that and then he briefly wrote for the final season of news radio the john lovett's years oh yeah or one year really oh yeah yeah but most of the season so after that he wrote a few episodes of father of the pride uh and then moved. Oh, sorry. So, of course, he's on Futurama.

And after Futurama, he would go on to write for Father of the Pride. And then he moved on to be a supervising producer on Arrested Development, the final Fox season. tale well his his career um uh i i just want to say that there's another show that i watched because my my ex-boyfriend watched a lot or fell asleep to a lot and and that was 30 rock okay and i actually i actually fell in love with 30 rock as well and while i was watching 30 rock you know all the seasons of it i thought to myself i was wow, I wonder why I really like the show. And it dawned upon me that I was like, wow, this reminds me of Futurama a lot. Like just something about the writing, the layering, making fun of the punchline. And I thought it was so Futurama adjacent, which hopefully leads you into a Rob, Ron Weiner, his career.

He ended up writing for 30 Rock. That's right. He played a major role on 30 Rock, which is why he was not part of the Futurama reboot. He wrote 11 episodes across seasons two through six, and he was like a supervising producer. He won an Emmy for the 2009 episode of 30 Rock that was nominated that year for Outstanding Comedy.

That's his only Emmy. So what a loser. Only one. And get this. Two through six are the best seasons of that show, yeah. And get this, guys. He also wrote for the Netflix sitcom. I believe he's a co-creator or just an executive producer. It's called Friends from College, and get this. The premise is, what if a bunch of Harvard graduates got back together in their 40s? I think it'll go something like this.

One season. I'm watching already. So relatable. We all remember going to, if not, probably in the pitch room, he's like, look, maybe it won't just speak to Harvard people. It'll be every Ivy League school. Talk to Stanford people, the Yalies, the people from Dartmouth, everybody. There's not enough shows about the Ivy League.

And then he wrote for the entire run of Silicon Valley, and that's the last thing he's done. So. Everybody. There's not enough shows about the Ivy League. And then he wrote for the entire run of Silicon Valley and that's the last thing he's done. So what a career he's had. Although, of course, he was born inside of Harvard.

I'm sure he was born in the obstetrics ward or whatever. But of the guys who are, you know, not every Harvard graduate is a funny writer. So at least he wrote

funny things. At least that. And this is one of the best episodes of Futurama like there is. graduate is a funny writer so at least he he wrote funny things at least that and this i mean and this is one of the best episodes of futurama like there is so yeah karen when i threw out a few episodes for you as suggestions uh why did you choose this one so again i remember very clearly my my ex boyfriend asleep snoring and me in a completely dark room staring at a little laptop. And this episode started playing. And I think it was the first time a cartoon TV episode made me cry. And it was just, it was as funny as all the other episodes.

But there is a real kind of a touching sentiment i love the episodes where you see fry's past life especially his family life and it was i think the first time that we really saw his family um and it was just so touching i'm sure you guys agree and i think all the futurama fans agree that this is probably one of the the most uh sentimental and and awesome episodes out there let's i mean other than jurassic bark that that's like a one and done for me and for a lot of people but yeah this was what a beautiful episode yeah no i if i if i can speak personally myself too that this one well it's funny in this episode as one of my favorite all-time futurama lines which is i can't wait till i'm old enough to feel ways about stuff yeah and i will say when when i first watched

this when i was 18 i didn't fully know how to feel ways about stuff like i i am an older brother to only one brother i'm three years older than him which is basically the age range of yancey and philip in this episode and when i saw this when I was 18 and he was 15, the episode I was like, it's all right episode, I guess. It didn't really touch me. You know, eight, five, six years later when I had moved away from home and I was seeing this on Adult Swim and thinking about how it's about how two brothers had bad times growing up

but as they as they get older in a way they both learn like oh i actually had a lot of stuff in common with my brother i probably shouldn't have i i shouldn't have been so mad at him just all stemming from like when yancey is so jealous of the attention Philip gets. I was like, I think I was like that when I was 3'2", and it just continued rolling from there. So I guess the bigger thing I'm saying is now this one really touches me. It makes me go like, oh, yeah, I should have been nicer. I bet you don't have to. I think anybody with siblings, it probably works with. You don't have to have specifically a brother in the same age range.

I mean, I don't feel personally connected to it, but it still moves me. I am the younger brother to an older sister, and I was the resented one. See, you were the Philip. I was the antsy. Even I have an inherited name that I don't love, though I never wanted to go by my brother's name or be jealous of it. But, yeah, it's – I don't know. Every time I watch it, I think like I should call my brother more.

Like I basically call him once a year, but he is even less communicative than me. I'm putting this on him. Listeners know that he calls me less than I call him. Please find him and track him down. Let Henry know he said these things. But we both love The Simpsons. We both love Futurama.

The last time I saw him, I was like, oh, you listened to that podcast of uh comedy bang bang i was in the same town that was recorded and i wish i could have gone to it i'll just like we have so much in common that that's what and i see it in fry and philip and yancey in this one too that they actually have so many things in common but and yet they don't like each other for it. It's anyway. Yes. They really captured the the youthful jealousy rivalry. Like to me, that is so, so true.

In my experience, I have an older sister and they just captured that kind of irrational, you know, big emotions of jealousy just really really well i'm a big sucker for the fry flashback episodes because i love time travel and i love the stories that start in the quote-unquote presence i guess wait wait no in the past so like before the futurama timeline i love when something from fry's past connects something in his future there's always the most clever stories usually the most emotional stories and this you're right this is the first time we see his family which will feature more into the comedy central years of the show than in these years, really, right? Well, I think this definitely was another landmark moment for the show because I do think in season two they had some heartstring pulling ones as well and all that. figured out the formula of like oh this is this is how we make an emotional episode we don't have to be like afraid of emotions or not have a joke at the end or something you know uh jurassic park

is you know very clearly a sequel to this but also the one where leela finally meets her parents like that also works very similarly to this too and i guess the the only complaint i have about more modern futuramas is really that in bender's big score they create a time travel timeline that invalidates this episode that i really don't like i like that movie but i forgot what the paradox is uh well so fry travels back in time to the year 2000 and reconnects with his family and spends 12 years with them before taking on his this is a giant spoiler for bender's big score but i'm assuming you listeners have heard it or watched it came out 14 years ago but yeah so it establishes that he was there for 12 years and he reconnected with his brother like yancey the emotional ending of this really hinges upon yancey having not seen fry ever again after the year 2000.

And so Bender's big score takes that away. And it does it even more so for Jurassic Park. It actually extra invalidates Jurassic Park. But I really don't like that change. But otherwise. We will get to it. But this episode begins. We see the birth of Fry at the Brooklyn Pre-Med Junior Hospital. It's the 20th century

of course and we see where fry comes from and maybe why he turned out the way he did because his parents are uh both insane and emotionally unavailable i think it's uh it's a good bit that 1970s brooklyn is like literally in a garbage dump and though now it's like famously gentrified like that's what yes uh i guess for that 70s uh you would assume it's an earlier to mid 70s birth date for fry so he would be 50 now yeah i think fry i think his birth date should be 74 possibly 75 because he's 25 and 9th and new year's eve 1999 when he goes to the future so he's probably a 74 baby and this definitely places him in time because when we see his childhood, it is in 88, 89.

Oh, and I also, for historical sakes, the opening cartoon here is the 1936 Mary Melody's Boom Boom, which stars Porky Pig with his very short-term companion, and it beans the cat. So they were pork and beans. Get it? I preferred Gabby the Goat. Oh, Gabby the Goat's way better than Beans the Cat.

So I forget, the parents have names. Do the parents have names? Not in this episode, probably. Not in this episode. No, man, I should double check that. It's okay. Oh, I mean, the dad is Yancey, actually. Oh, duh.

Yeah, yeah, sorry. So the dad's reading Cold War, a warrior magazine, and the mom is very interested in this baseball game, which I think, okay, I don't know a lot about baseball, but I think you should not be into the results of the ninth inning. Is that what the joke is there? Well, I guess the game was won. That's how she's excited.

At first, I thought the joke was she's just a Mets fan, which would fit for, you know, where they live. But instead, she's like, no i thought the joke was she's just a mets fan which would fit for you know where they live but but instead she's like no she loves all sports every single piece of sports uh apparently no her name the wiki just has mrs fry okay interesting i thought maybe in the future they would have given her a name i have a question about uh fry's lineage and in his parents so we know that he's his own grandfather so is this his mom or his father that is his offspring i want to kind of hurts they weren't thinking about it i don't think they had that in mind at this point maybe they did who knows but i think his mom looks more like him than his dad yeah so i think grandma mildred was the mother of mrs fry well you know the uh the the i i just looked this up it's private enos fry so apparently

enos was okay mildred lied that enos what actually fathered and then died but but if his name's enos then did he just go by enos as a nickname and his real name was Yancey? Because like he said, his father, the military service does fit with what Yancey Sr., Fry's dad, is talking about. That just raises further questions. Yeah, so Fry was raised by his own son then in Yancey, right? I think so. I think I need to draw this first before we can talk about it but yeah uh so in this next clip fry is born and grody leans into the pitch it hits him the mets win

this is the happiest day of my life here's your baby ma'am yeah okay thanks so what should we name it you pick i picked dinner last night. Well, I was thinking of Phillip, after those screwjobbers. That's a fantastic idea. More morphine, please. Look, Yancey, it's your baby brother, Phillip. I want to be named Phillip. Me, Phillip.

Me, Phillip. Son, your name is Yancey, just like me and my grandfather and so on, all the way back to Minuteman Yancy Fry, who blasted commies in the American Revolution. Philip, until I find a suitable model of an ICBM, you'll have to make do learning to fear this toy spacecraft. Mine! Mine! do learning to fear this toy spacecraft oh that's uh i i love that the morphine is why she chose that that's so great i and i we were talking about hidden jokes in the show i was i guess i wasn't paying attention to the the broadcast the radio broadcast but the mets won because the player got hit by the ball on purpose oh that's good okay i did miss that he leaned into the pitch oh wow i i did hear you know

what i'm corrected he said yancey says like my grandfather and his father he didn't say like my father oh so he that doesn't make it incorrect with enos maybe they had that on their mind i think well yeah because roswell that ends well is the same season yeah so yeah yep now uh i i wonder how accurate is this to to childbirth uh these these jokes here the morphine part definitely uh is is is is pretty accurate uh you're pretty calm you can't really feel anything and just just like her her her kind of gaze into the wall a little bit empty and not there yet you know you're paying attention to some things is very accurate um i i would say that was those uh you know now watching that part i was watching that part last night i was like oh this this makes so much more sense to me now that i've given birth like

yes i was gonna say it seems unlikely that you could be distracted enough by a radio broadcast while you're giving birth but who know i don't know i don't speak from experience here obviously oh anything anything that that keeps you distracted. You know, a pink color on the wall. You're like, wow, this is nice. If you're about to give birth. This is really cool. If you're about to give birth, listen to one of our podcasts and report back.

Yes. Did it make the experience better? 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 electricisland.ie. Oh, what an excellent idea. My mom was watching.

She remembers that she always brings up like, oh, the night you were born, I watched this movie. And she never forgot it. And my sister was named after a Barry Manilow song for some reason. Oh, wow. What's her name? Mandy. Yeah. it uh but i and my sister was named after a barry mandelow song for some reason oh wow what's her name mandy yeah oh this the song homer sings yes but changes to mindy the i and yeah no i mean this scene here like this was the one right at the start i was like oh yeah this reminds me of me because i uh i i never went by by Henry until I entered the working world.

I went by Max growing up. Long-time listeners know all this. But I definitely know Yancey's feeling of like, do I got to be the third of this? Like, I don't want to be the carry on the name. And on top of that, I definitely identify with Yancey's jealousy. But for me, as a little kid what happened was my little brother did get all the attention because you know he's the new baby and that was

hard for me to deal with as an immature little kid and so and on top of that like my my little brother's fine now but he grew up with uh in his very youngest days very bad ear infections and so of course i look back on it like of course my parents needed to pay a lot of attention to him because he was sick and they he needed like help but tell that to a three-year-old who's like hey me what about me my sister had asthma boo-hoo hey it's the bob show i'm over here play with me so and yeah yancey the little thing he can do is just make his brother cry which is like how how mean and also i do like the bit that fry always just he grew up with a rocket ship to look at and then why he loves being in the future so much perhaps that's that's very cute

and this episode directed by chris loudon there's lots of really clever visual things whenever if they have to transfer to the future or the past they always do it in a very clever visual way like in this case the rocket yancey throws it out the window and we transfer to the to the future and that's the planet express ship uh and i love just how like nobody says this is why fry is this way like nobody says that out loud but when you see a ultra afraid of communism military father plus ed a very distracted mother sports mother yeah you're like oh this is probably like when they see the way yancey salutes his father like that is like oh boy you you guys went through some stuff he turned out okay it seems though seemingly yeah uh so i forgot this episode begins uh so many future episodes begin with uh you know what is blank like in the future

and this one is what is a horse racing track like in the future and i forgot that this what uh this is where this episode begins uh it's a lot of good jokes i i've i have been to horse racing tracks you know my dad likes the ponies and so i i'd seen a few of them but uh these all these gambling jokes are funny though it's also funny that this aired i don't know what was produced first or written first but it aired four weeks after the saddle sore galactica episode of simpsons so two two horse race episodes in a row i wasn't even thinking of that yeah this is the better episode this this is definitely better than sales for Galactica, yeah. Just a barrage of sign gags at Flushing Downs.

Very funny. Chevron horse gas, drinking and betting, a winning combination. Welcome Deadbeat Deads. Trojan horse condoms. Horse condoms. And in Alienese, the text says, not without my egg case, tonight on Lifetime. So lots of signs. There's just eight sign gags on one screen. Yeah, that's the Sally Field Lifetime – like one of the big Lifetime movies, I think.

Not Without My Daughter. That's the big one, yeah, that everyone parodies the name of. One scene of this horse race opening that really resonated with me is when they go to the food stand and it was horse orders. And they make a bunch of like horse jokes. And at the end, I think Hermes orders a horse Coke. And then the guy at the stand says, horse Pepsi, okay? And Hermes goes, nay. Coke versus Pepsi.

For me, it's Diet Coke. But that runs deep. And that hit me very hard. Every time I'm in a restaurant, I order Diet Coke. And someone goes, oh, you know, is Diet Pepsi okay? No. Just give me water. This is the first time I've seen that.

In my recollection, the first time I've seen the Coke is Pepsi okay kind of thing reflected on television. television because i am with you i'm not a diet coke drinker i don't drink a lot of soda anymore but i hate pepsi i can't stand pepsi it's bad bad news i as a non-soda drinker i have no stance in this thing i guess as far as branding goes i guess i i prefer the i prefer the pe generation. It's the, you know. Woodstock 95? When was that, 94? 94, because 99 was five years later, yeah. But I've seen many a friend go like, no, Pepsi is not okay. Leave me alone. Like, if you're serving Pepsi, then you must have Mountain Dew,

so I'll just have that. That's usually what I've seen. If I could be a corporate shill, the Coke with coffee coffee the coke coffee blend that they sell now is actually pretty good and has half the calories of regular coca-cola so that's my recommendation for this episode by the way we have that entire clip of the horse uh horse-based condiment booth or sorry horse-based food booth come on come on hey leela how about a kiss for good luck? I meant tongue luck. And the winner is number four, Stephen.

I am so unlucky. I've run over black cats that were luckier than me. Get your piping hot horse burgers, horse fries, horse cakes and shakes. We got tongue straight from the horse's mouth. It all sounds good. All our horses are 100% horse fed for that double horse juicing goodness. I'll have the cholesterol-free omelet with horse beaters. And you, sir, how can I horse you?

I'll have a horse coke. Horse Pepsi okay? Nay. There we go. Now, I capture that for a reason because I love the escalation where everything is made of horses he even goes but how can i horse you and even for whatever reason the coke and the pepsi is made of horses too oh god i baked in horse goodness goodness

the the word horse is in every sentence like at least once it's so and just the the comedy of it too that i love is that you're at this horse race which is you know it probably makes you think wow aren't horses amazing creatures or like you it lifts up horses as you know normally at least in america like you don't horse meat is not really served pretty much anywhere and so meanwhile at a horse race where you think no one would want to eat horse, or very few people, there is a large horse stand that everyone goes to to eat horse all, every part of a horse.

And a horse that was fed other horses. That's how mad cow disease started, right? That has to be a mad cow joke, yeah. Yeah, and also before that, we have a joke about checking the finish of a race. Instead of a photo finish, it's a quantum finish. They're checking the results with an electron microscope.

And there's the line, no fair, you change the outcome by measuring it, which is a reference to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which would become famous 10 years later with Breaking Bad. When he calls himself Heisenberg because of that, and it's way more famous famous now but that's where that comes from as a as a dumb idiot watching it i in my first viewings i was like i don't know what this in reference to i thought it was just i thought it was farnsworth complaining about like by measuring it and saying who the winner was you made me lose boo that's how i always took that joke but it is 10 times smarter than i was then on that. I will say- I agree. Yeah.

I thought it was like a Schrodinger's cat kind of situation where by measuring it, you're changing, you know, like the cat in the box, but by opening the box, then, you know, you're determining whatever the outcome is. I think the, you know,

Bob, you might want to check on the Heisenberg effect. I think it's commonly said that this is Heisenberg effect, but I think that's by distance. And I think this is actually the observer effect. I'm going to blame David X. Cohen for saying Heisenberg. They said Heisenberg on the commentary. But also, on the horse race stuff, I have to really compliment the animators for like, they have to draw drawing one horse is hard, eight horses way harder.

And then a bunch of centaurs running. Famously, all animation started with the horses, right? The photos of the horse running because there was that big bet, do all the horses hooves leave the ground? And then someone realized like, oh, if you draw a horse a bunch of times, you can flip them back and forth and make the horse run it's fun and then mickey mouse was born it's that simple i also i i mean really for the guys at rough draft korea uh guys and gals there i feel bad especially for the joke of uh what if a horse was covered in ads like a uh like a race car it's like that much line density there's There's a reason not every horse running on the track is covered in ads.

And this is still an SD show. I could make out one of those ads. I think it was Elmar's Horse Glue. It's still a 480p show. And then right after that, we unfortunately get a scene of Billy West doing Amy's dad. Oh, right. Not the biggest, you know, he wouldn't do that now.

No. I'd say that. If the show came back, they'd hire the appropriate actor. But it's still them trying to get Amy to marry someone. And apparently this jockey that wants to have sex in a suitcase is good enough for her. I do. The joke of putting a jockey out to stud, meaning he is a man who wants to have sex. And that they own two people.

They own several horses and two jockeys. I guess them owning humans is kind of that flies by there. Yeah. I guess one kind of plot hole in this episode, although I think it could be discounted, is that if a guy named Philip Fry was the first person on Mars, the Wongs are from Mars. Wouldn't they say, oh, Fry, you're the same name as the guy who was the first man on Mars? But I don't think they care about Fry. I think Amy is too ditzy to remember who the first man on Mars was. So I think you can discount it that way.

Yeah, that's a good cover for it. Though also, Fry did go to Mars University, but Fry wouldn't be that observant to notice it there either. I don't think so. So at this point, Bender is going to stack the odds in his favor by drugging all the horses with comatonin, and he also tranks a jockey before he gets discovered. Apparently in the original script, he didn't trank a jockey. A man was sneaking into the stables to have sex with one of the horses, and that's what he tranked.

So good change there. I like the jockey comes back. Yeah, good change there. I like the jockey comes back. Good call. Good change. Also, this was one from the wiki, but I double-checked it. The thing he uses to dose the horses looks exactly like one version of the Star Trek's hypospray mechanic, which is the thing anytime you'd see you know beverly crusher or bones give somebody a shot yeah it looks like one of those thingies so no needles in the future that's how

advanced things are in in the star trek years yeah so despite praying to the horse god uh all the horses are too sleepy to run i enjoy john dimaggio is sleepy horse. It is a contagious yawn. It is. I also like how Bryce says, like, I know I don't usually pray to you. Sometimes I wonder if you even exist. And the winner is Harry Trotter by an entire racetrack. The one horse that Bender didn't draw. Again, I guess Harry Potter is becoming a huge book series in America.

It'd be a movie later that year in 2001. I'll give them credit for at the time it was a deep cut to do a harry potter joke before the movies were out i will say at least in the u.s simpsons got their parody out before the movies too yeah but by a couple months but it was clearly like uh gene or someone else there al gene or someone else there was saying like well the movie's about to come out so we should have something for that i i also i have to say that bender getting away with this that's on the horse race uh people who run it because the when you dose one horse you the point is to dose the horse who'd probably win and then you dose the and then the you bet on the one who would have been second place if you dose every horse

it's very obvious that that happens and uh you know the officials probably would throw out the results but instead there there's no this is a very unsanctioned race i think there's no officials on the on the premises i do i do love bender saying they'll teach those other horses to use drug to take drugs so fry uh he angrily holds out his last dollar, saying they'll never take it from him, but of course it flies out of his hand into a slur machine, back out of it and onto some power lines.

And he climbs up the pole to get the dollar back, and I love his quote, I may not know much about horses, but I know a lot about doing anything for one dollar. And this is when he zapped briefly by trying to grab the dollar bill with the rake, and then when he realized, like, oh, this will electrocute me, he pulls it back. He's like, whew.

And then he gets hit by lightning. Yes. He falls into a trash can full of garbage. With more garbage poured on top of him. I like that that guy, when he says it, he's like, that's one unlucky guy. Is he, like, putting him out of his misery? Like, all around him. Horse garbage. garbage also him saying

my name isn't philip j fry like he has to hit his philip name so hard the the the only time it was said before this one was as a joke in the poplars episode right right i think just on the web you'd see the character's names they would never call him philip or say philip in the episode which uh we've covered it before but the reason he's philip is because as a tribute to phil hartman who would have been in the cast of the show had he not died in 1998 so uh him him being philip j fry that that is why also in the electrocution thing what i think makes it extra funny is that it is a constant shot like one single shot of fry going up and down like it it makes the waiting for the obvious result even funnier because if they were to cut and show him from a lot of different angles like then it would cut the tension of the moment it's true it's much better for the single shot

i love that and uh in the beginning of this episode every time he is knocked out by something there's a flashback they eventually stop doing that otherwise they'd have to knock him out six times in this episode to have a flashback although that could be funny too uh but uh yeah here's another flashback to the late eight this time to the late 80s kareem's got the sky hook but philip j fry's got the skyhook, but Philip J. Fry's got the spacehook. Yancy drives. He goes up with his patented spacehook. Hey, that's my patented spacehook. You stole it. You're not the president of it. That's right. Holy camoly! A seven-leaf clover!

I'm dying of old age! Game over! Phil wins!ancey's fans are stunned there'll be no celebration at the antsy dome lucky and of course that is uh tom kenny as yancey and he is about to become one of the biggest animation stars of all time as spongebob squarepants is about to explode on nickelodeon it's already on the air but it wasn't late 2001, early 2002 that it becomes the biggest show on TV. I love parts when Philip gets a break. Do you know, like something good happens to Fry and that doesn't really come that often. So it's so nice to see, you know, to see Fry succeed at something because you always see him fail most of the time. I think his bad luck is what makes him a...

The episode argues that his bad luck is what makes him good at being the lead character in an animated sitcom because horrible things happen. And funny things. Yeah, they wouldn't be funny if he wasn't... Him getting knocked out constantly, that is because he has such bad luck. It makes him a better

lead character i i also i like that the the tragic comedy of it is that if yancey hadn't been a jerk and had gotten the ball himself instead of making his brother get it he the discovered that clover yeah in the clip he that's where he does discover the seven leaf clover yeah and that uh that seven leaf clover i i don't know if you guys looked into it like are there real seven leaf clovers uh but i i could find two different news stories a decade apart about finding really really yeah so uh so at the most recent one was march of this year actually a pair of young brothers discovered a seven leaf clover wow and this was in north carolina they discovered it and uh i in its picture it looks kind of like this seven leaf clover but there was one that was a picture perfect version of the seven leaf clover

discovered again by another british a british boy in the year 2009 that looks exactly like this one and so what do they do with them do they just laminate them or seal them in lucite or uh i think the the 2021 kids at least sealed them in like uh yeah preserved them in some way i hope that british kid did too but it's it's funny that like you can find a seven leaf clover i also think there's a funny bit in the 2021 article that says it says multiple times they found a seven leaf clover i also think there's a funny bit in the 2021 article that says it says multiple times they found a seven leaf clover and also a four leaf one which makes me think that one brother found the four leaf and the other found the seven leaf and they were jealous of like don't say which brother found which clover but say two of them were found just at the exact same time to save

the kids feelings i mean yeah if if my little brother discovered a seven leaf clover and i didn't i it would have made me very angry as a kid i i definitely it would have been hard to contain my jealousy for sure but but so these are real things they're actually i have been to seven leaf clovers found i recall looking for these a lot as a kid but in my adult life i'm not looking looking for four-leaf clovers. Although I will say that they don't bring you luck because I had one in my wallet because I think my grandpa found one and my grandma laminated it or something.

So she gave it to me. I kept it with me, but I lost it when I got mugged. So that's not bringing you luck. I need more leaves. I need more leaves on my clover. Oh, the irony. Well, your mugger's very lucky now, though.

True, true. Maybe I got him an easier sentence. No, I'm sorry, Bob. But, yeah, I think it is kids finding it in both these stories because they're the only ones who are, like, that close to the ground and bothering to look at it. I walk – I do a morning walk around my neighborhood every morning for the last year, and this was the first time when I did all my walk.

I was like, oh, that's a patch of clovers. I could actually look for it. I was like, what am I doing? I'm an adult. I'm not wasting time looking in here. Now I'm like, oh, they're weeds. Yes. Yeah.

Disgusting clovers. I'm going to touch these. Like dogs probably pee on these like eight times a day. I bet there is a secondhand clover market on eBay or something where you can can find people to find you four leaf clovers they can't be that rare or how how there has to be somebody out there who's like trying to breed only four leaf clovers like they only grow in four leaf breeds i should look this up if not there's a market out there to invent the way to make it only four leaf clovers so after this we get a very clever fade from uh fry holding the clover to the print the planet express table so i like that and

fry's head is still sizzling from uh i guess hours earlier maybe a day earlier getting zapped there's there's amazing match cuts over and over again in this which matt graning kind of mocks he's like isn't that easy to do an animation you just but uh but one of my favorite parts is is coming up i don't know if this robot was in it i think was in one other episode i remember very clearly but the wig robot shows up to give fry his hair and i always thought that robot was really weird looking and then I think the robot was in the Roberto episode and I just remember really clearly the robot brushing its own hair being like I'm a pretty pretty girl

and it's so haunting so this robot later goes insane for that right okay yeah the commentary like the animator there Rich Moore the superv talk yeah the commentary like the the animator there rich more the the supervising director he's like he's terrified by this hair robot and that's why that's that's how i think they went with like he's kind of innocent here but yeah in the roberto

episode i think that's why they're like let's make him as creepy as possible and brushing his own hair that's the inventor uh invented by ron weiner so the first appearance of wakebot i i also uh yeah the on the match cut too not just is it a seven leaf clover to their table but the seven leaves line up with all seven people around the table so it's very clever and we hear more about the seven leaf clover clover and that Fry put it in a secret hiding place he told no one about, not even Scruffy. And Scruffy leaves the room very conspicuously. I love how offended Scruffy is.

He's like, I've been trying to get that secret out of him for a whole year. And now in our next clip, Fry has a mission. So the clover is still in the hiding place, maybe? Yeah, maybe it is still there. Underground in the ruins of old New York. Helping some ant defeat another ant. Or helping some piece of dirt turn its luck around.

Dirt doesn't need luck. I'm going down there to get my clover back. Now, some of the tunnels have metal bars, so I'll need someone who's good at bending. Leela, how about you? Sure, I'll do it. Like hell you will. Bending's my middle name. It is? Yep. My full name is bender

bending rodriguez here's the entrance from this moment on i declare my bad luck officially over he was fun so in that clip you can't uh see it obviously but there was a reference to the pjs that was the uh what was on the manhole cover they pried off so pjs obviously i think still on fox at the time very barely i think it was about to get sent away to uh uh upn next but all right yeah yeah no uh that was it's a that reference was like a recurring loop of winks towards each other because the PJ's manhole cover had previously been in season two in Second That Emotion. And then in an August 15, 2000 episode of the PJ's called Cliff Hanging with Mr. Super,

a parody of the TGIF classic Hanging with Mr. Cooper. But anyway, in that episode there is a milk carton with Fry's picture on it. So that was their wink back at Futurama and maybe that's why they're like, oh, they just did a reference to us in Futurama or on PJ's and let's just

bring back that PJ's band whole cover. At that point it was a WB show so they were promoting another network. But yes, more references to Bender being from Mexico. I think the last time we saw this in our look at the series was he had made in Mexico on the inside of his door. Yes. His chest door. When he was offended by Zoidberg's bandito costume he had put on.

Yeah. But this is the first time we know bender's last name is rodriguez and to be remembered from now on i i also another great like joke construction is fry obviously he always is a dummy who says to lila like hey who do i know bending lila could you do it a lesser version of that joke would be liila going you idiot bender can bend the thing a better joke which they do is Lila saying sure I'm up for it like she's just like yeah you know and I'll just bend stuff she's pretty strong yeah so act two opens on old New York and I love when they go down there because you always forget in the show that they're on top of the previous city

yeah and they don't really do enough with that i think yeah you know it's they really could hang around with it more i think they uh this is the first time they've been there since the first episode then right yeah i'm pretty sure yeah and we find out more information about lila's wrist thingy in that they don't really know what to do with it it's just on her character design so apparently if they get bored they can play tetris on it and i think the last time it was used it was a tracking device. And in this episode, there's a deleted scene on the DVDs in which Leela tries to open the Ronco record vault with a laser on her wrist thingy. Yeah. They're trying to figure out what to do with it.

The two deleted scenes from this are wrist thingy jokes. Because the other one is, instead of the Tetris line, which is funnier, she says, like, hey, I'm detecting a whole bunch of radon here. And then Fry says, stop being so suspicious. Or superstitious. Superstitious, right. But I did prefer a joke about playing Tetris on your Game Boy hand thing. And Bender remarks, old New York, the city that inspired a casino in Las Vegas. And I think I've been to that casino. I went to Vegas like twice in my life. But that inspired a casino in las vegas and uh i think i've been to that casino uh my i

went to vegas like twice in my life but that was a fairly new casino was built in 97 and not imploded yet uh as far as a roller coaster is one of the first hotels to have a roller coaster yeah in it the taxi cab roller coaster i i've never worked up the guts to ride it i have heard it is a painful roller coaster and then it's like if you're somebody who gets off a roller coaster, like say Big Thunder Mountain, and go like, oh, my back doesn't feel great. Apparently the New York to York one

really is going to jack up your back. I think Goofy Sky School at California Venture gave me goofy spinal injuries. That's a baby coaster that uh leaves you with adult pains yeah i new york new york is my favorite casino on the strip i'd say i never i never stay in that i stay in the mgm grand but right across the street is new york new york it was uh when i first took my husband there who does not like uh las vegas at all i was like no let's go to New York New York you're from New York you love all the pizza and the hot dogs so authentic oh yeah so uh they have all of Manhattan to themselves

fracking do everything he's ever dreamed of which involves uh screaming Howard Stern is overrated which is funny because Billy West was on the Stern show a lot up until the uh early to mid 90s when he left to do a lot of stuff in LA he was their voice guy on there yeah that's funny i the extra giggle he gives i wonder if that's billy west's real giggle of like you know what i feel this he is uh speaking of billy west career also how many times he says yancey in here like how can you not think of doug right i'm surprised i've never heard anyone else remark upon that on the commentary or anything where yeah doug's middle name is yancy doug the nickelodeon character and later the abc character and other other pranks fry pulls on the empty streets of manhattan is knocking a payphone off receiver off the cradle

and then asking lila remember when mary giuliani cut down on jaywalking no yes and then fry tries to jaywalk and gets run over by a lizard. So this is the second knockout-induced flashback. Yeah. I also love that a Giuliani joke pre-9-11 is so fun. Because I was with Lila and Benner and all these New York specifics in the year 2000. I was like, I've never been to New York. I don't know all these specifics. I don't know where these streets are.

I don't know if it's here, but I remember Lila saying, oh, the old comedians were right. It is different than LA. Oh, yeah. It's a little later, but yeah. Let's hear this oh, the old comedians were right. It is different than LA. Oh yeah, it's a little later, but yeah. Let's hear this flashback with some breakdance training. As you know, the big breakdance battle is Saturday. So if we want to win those

Jam Master Jake autographed parachute pants, our crew has to pop, lock, and bust the freshest. Noticeably F.A.T., drop us a beat. Name? Cosmic F.A.T., drop us a beat. Name? Cosmic F. Style?

Outer space. Special moves? The moonwalk. The robot. The zero G. Name? Cosmic Y. Style?

Deep space. Deep space? Special moves? The space Y. Style? Uh, deep space. Deep space? Special moves? The spacewalk. Hey. The robot. The robot? That's similar to mine.

The zero G. What are you doing? You totally ripped off my routine. You calling me a biter? Why do you always have to steal everything from me, Yancey? Find your own life and live it. Stop, Ellen. Word.

Well, I'd like to see you try to steal this, the septuple headspin. And I think when I watched this originally in 2001, I thought this is the first time I've seen a flashback to something so recent. Because at that point, it was only maybe 12 years earlier. And this really places it in time because uh in 1988 the show yo mtv rap started on mtv and that exposed a ton of white people to rap music and if you look at the posters in the background we have raucous ducaucus and also uh a parody of benetton ad yeah the benetton ad campaign that that ad campaign started in 89. So it's sometime around 89. So for a 2001 show watching it then I was like, wow, I've I've I've watched The Wedding Singer. I thought that was pretty novel. That took place before this flashback. I didn't see Freaks and Geeks because nobody did until it came out on DVD. That was the early 80s. This is the late 80s flashback in 2001 was very, very novel. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the specifics of it, too. Like, the dude Dave Herman is voicing, he looks exactly like Boogaloo Shrimp from the

Preakett movies as well. That Adam's apple bothers me on that character, though. It's a little distracting, yeah. Is that an Adam's apple or a chin? I can't tell if it's a weak chin or an Adam's apple. Fry's dance skills never resurfaced either in the show, I don't think. Well, actually, he does do the robot one time. I take that back.

But Lila's way better at doing the robot than him. It's true. But he does the dance of his people in protest for Walking on Sunshine, I think. That's true. I also, yeah, hearing it isolated really lets you appreciate the skill of that beatboxing there. Yes. And that is John DiMaggio, obviously the voice of Ender. But also he was part of a two-man comedy rap crew called Red Johnny and the Round Guy.

Now, if you want to know more about them, there are clips of them playing on different MTV shows. Because I think they were in New York, so was MTV, and you can come down and do your little act on the Spring Break show or the Jon Stewart show or whatever, so you can see Jon DiMaggio probably in his early 20s with another guy doing this comedy rap bit.

Wow! His joke is that he was Red Johnny and the other guy was the round guy, but he was actually putting on a lot of weight, so no one could tell the difference between them. Well, it's like I can see why their group broke up, too, because like Red Johnny, it's like you're really good at beatboxing. And this other guy like talks over you and he's not that funny. Like it's he's I can I can see why DiMaggio is like, you know, I'm going the other way here, buddy. But yeah, they even talk about performing at the Apollo at Harlem uh like he'd he'd performed a lot in new york i i like

that but yeah he's he is really good at beatboxing like if you if you want to go online and go onto youtube you can watch a clip of john stamos not excited to watch them as john stamos introduces them so that's uh That's great. Also... Stamos thinking he's too good for this. There's so many classic jokes in this episode, but I really appreciate the name Noticeably F.A.T. as a parody

of Notorious B.I.G. That is a good name. And also great animation on that septuple head spin. It's really well done. Yeah, I like the and also again yancey is just stealing everything from him he's cosmic why but that i like too that philip and and yancey despite being you know raised by a such a militaristic uh conservative father

they didn't want to stop themselves from like getting involved in in more you know urban activities like uh break dancing i i like that i don't i wonder how their father feels about it but uh we don't hear his take on this i think yancey he is his break dancing days are limited yeah i would think at the least yancey sees it as a as a common conspiracy as all things are so now it's time to find fry's house so in the past we see yancey chasing fry away and now we're in the future and it's time to find their house. This is a joke that I just realized was a joke

upon this viewing, as Fry says, we're at West 71st Street, and according to Fry, he's never heard of it, and downtown could be in any direction. Now, if you've never lived in a big city, the streets are usually named in order. So if you go in one direction, the streets will decrease in that direction.

So it's pretty easy to find your way around. and that is a joke it's a grid system that was i was very curious if that was just a manhattan specific of like if you're on west 71st street you are downtown or whatever like it's but okay yeah it's it's that fry is too stupid to understand that would just count up or down and you'll be closer or farther away from where you need to be and that's when uh bender becomes a train briefly which is pretty funny uh somehow is his legs can move in that way but i i love that it's really because he's he just wanted to do it because he gets off on the electricity he's jacking in again i love it when it's his pupils like you can tell his his pupils change into squares for a split second there.

I have to say, I have not been on BART, that's our train system in the Bay Area, in a while. But Bender's announcements are pretty clear. Whenever I'm on BART, it's always... That's all I can hear. And if you're not paying attention you're like what stop is this what's coming up next is there a delay but no uh sometimes you get a guy that's clear on those intercoms sometimes you don't but bender very clear yeah well also the people like kind of sit in front of the intercoms too everyone's talking over it you'll never hear anything you have to be

be very present mind i i miss taking the bart so much i. I just love zoning out on it. Me too. I mean, that's as much as people don't like commute. To me, that is my me time. It's somewhat comfortable. Actually, if you guys haven't been on BART these days, it's really nice now. It's very robotic. They've replaced some new trains.

And so I do miss it actually i uh this is all local stuff so you might be bored by this but i did take the bart recently within the past couple of months because i had to go to the post office in oakland to do some official thingy that i can't do here and i got one of the trains of the future which is what they call them which is a fancy new train and there was nobody on it oh man i once i'm fully vaccinated i'm just gonna take an afternoon of like no it's riding this part for like an hour just in a circle because i miss it i just i i've been trying you know my husband especially is very worried about it being a germ hot zone he's like please don't take the part if you don't have to like so there

you don't know where that u driver's been. I do. Yeah, I mean. He could have been huffing a bag of COVID before he picked you up. I know. The rare times. I've only taken a Lyft like three times this last year even to go anywhere. I just went nowhere. BART has never been cleaner, but we'll move on because everyone is getting very, very antsy.

They're just like when Leland Bender were having to hear all these Manhattan specifics. They're just like when Lila and Bender were having to hear all these Manhattan specifics. They're just like, tune it out. But a similar joke they've done earlier is that whenever there's a train involved in old New York, a homeless person either spawns or you become homeless. Yes. Yeah, true. I like the term spawning. Where did he come from?

Great homeless guy noise. I mean, it's mocking the untouched and that's you know sad but it's uh it is a reality yeah it's uh i miss i i have now got even nostalgic for like that sense of hey there's three seats empty right there i could sit there why is nobody oh you just sit down like somebody who doesn't smell very good is in one of those seats lying down and that's why every other seat's open it's something you learn quickly when you take the subway. Yeah. Let's hear some of Fry's Brooklyn memories,

and one of my favorite jokes is in this clip. Gosh, my old neighborhood. That's the bench where I found some shirts. That fire hydrant. In the summer, we'd light on fire. On that corner, some guy with a bushy beard handed out a socialist newsletter. Was it poorly Xeroxed?

You better believe it. The old comedians were right. This place is a lot different from L.A. Some guy with a bushy beard handed out a socialist newsletter. Was it poorly Xeroxed? You better believe it. The old comedians were right. This place is a lot different from L.A. Pardon me. Did I overhear you say you used to live here? That's right. Did you know Andy Goldman?

Yeah, he was my neighbor. Why? I mutated from him. Get out of here. What's Andy up to these days? The short answer is, I'm teaching. He'm teaching he seemed nice sure when he's sober holy camoly the house i grew up in it's still there man father time really took a bat to this place and then we go to the past it's identical yeah this that reminds me of uh i don't know if this is a common experience but uh my wife visited my hometown with me a few years ago and i felt like fry where it's like i used to get a sandwich there it was really good

and that's where i returned my library books just like all the memories that were important to me that she did not care about it was very nice to me by the way about it but i was just like boy this is i must be boring you with all this pizza trivia no that that hometown experience of like also meeting an old a friend to your uh person who never met them before i was like oh they're nice it's like yeah when they're sober it's like yeah i kind of had that experience with several old friends and back in florida that is one of my favorite jokes on this show uh the sure when he's sober and then he frowns a little bit where there's so much history packed into that little joke

and that fry is upset that this andy goldman guy tricked another person and thinking that he was nice he's like god even lila falls for it yeah oh god you're right i love that and also short answer i'm teaching like that's yeah great uh such a great version of like uh just small talk you have at a party i and you know what those poorly xerox socialist newsletters they've been replaced by podcasts and twitter it's true you better believe it yeah we include them in every podcast i want to see i wish they'd included a picture they say that writer for the show eric caplan that just is his house like his parents live in a house that look like that on the outside and i can't believe it like how how can you look

my parents didn't take care of their front lawn but they didn't have like literally like a toilet roof or whatever yeah i think they meant the actual house design not the dilapidated nature of it oh okay all right i looked up that neighborhood and it is very nice it's a very nice brooklyn neighborhood where fry grew up so i don't know what his parents do for a living but they're i guess maybe it was easy to make a living in the 80s i guess it seems like it yeah well if you're a boomer they bought it in the 70s so yeah they've uh i well so i like that they fry grew up on the worst house on the block the one everybody complained about like look how ugly this is.

That was Fry's home. I do enjoy whatever his mom is doing because she puts the golf ball into the world's best mom mug and she breaks it. And seemingly that's what she was trying to do. Yes. And very, very absent where she's not paying attention to the situation and Fry is trying to stop Yancey from stealing his clover. And she's just like, Yancey, stealing stealing is wrong and not even looking at them yeah yeah i uh this you know this construction of the plot is really smart because they need to explain why fry doesn't have it anymore and also why he would be so unlucky to say be frozen in time so he can't couldn't have had it on him then

so where would he have put it and he needs to put it someplace that would be safe and also wouldn't be destroyed over a thousand years and so they set up that his dad built a bomb shelter and he put it inside of a record safe in a bomb shelter i guess that does explain where his dad came from in terms of the characterization where they need a bomb shelter to keep this thing safe yeah it must all come from like all right it has to be built in a bomb shelter well why would his dad build a bomb shelter because he's desperately afraid of the commies even into the end of the uh cold war he's like the commies are going to take it i just know i love the line that kremlin joe let fly with the nukes. Yes. It's great. So Fry sticks the clover inside the Breakfast Club soundtrack, which we'll hear a bit later,

inside the Ronco record vault, a reference to the Ronco brand of products. Ron Popeil was in an episode in the first season. So I like that they're saying your products are good. They'll survive in a war, an apocalypse. You're right. They're only nice to Ron Popeil. He even invented how people put their heads in jars. Yeah.

My family didn't own any Ronco products. I've always wanted that inside the egg scrambler because that seemed the most fun to me. We grew up at the tail end of the Ronco era. I think the heyday was the 70s for Ronco. Yeah. Oh, we have to hear the clip again. I'm sorry because I love the line so much. Ah, the Breakfast Club soundtrack.

Man, I can't wait till i'm old enough to feel ways about stuff so uh one of the best lines of all time and i've used that line so many times in my life when i'm describing like growing up it's like it was time to feel ways about stuff and so i watched this movie i read this book and this is the first time uh they made it a direct movie reference like actually called out the title and you see in the in the little record sleeve you actually see the movie art you know done in the the graining style like i i feel like this must have been one of the the only you know or a few times that they actually spell out the the movie i think so because it's so specific and uh you're right i love the graining

style of the poster art, and I kind of want that somewhere. But by the way, what is all of our experience with that movie, Breakfast Club? I watched it. It's very strange, because I went to school in Taiwan.

They actually showed it to us in like a health class equivalent. Maybe about bullying. I'm not really sure what the purpose what the, what the purpose was, but I remember watching it in health class and not feeling very related to it. Cause you know, America in the eighties was just not very,

you know, in my brain. Right. I was not very familiar with it, but it was, you know, it was a very intense movie. How we use electricity can be smarter,

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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 electricarland.ie. For me, growing up and hearing the name The Breakfast Club, I kind of took it literally.

And it's like, oh, yeah, it's about a club that eats breakfast or something. But then because when it came out, I think I was three. I think it's an 85 movie. But I saw it eventually get this I went to catholic school and I had a christian films class because I I signed up for a class where I wanted to watch movies and it was basically like let's watch movies and pull out christian things in them or whatever and I watched it for the first time then and I thought it was pretty good but I do remember the teacher either fast forwarding through the weed smoking

sequence or picking up the next day after that sequence when a part of the movie was cut out. I had no idea what that was, man. I had no idea. I was like, oh, they're smoking cigarettes and dancing. I think it's cut out on TV too. When I watched it for the first time on DVD, maybe a few years after this episode aired, I was like, they smoke weed in this movie? Oh, wow. As a kid, I just saw it as the funny cigarette scene i was like this guy sure like their tobacco cigarettes more than most people do that's that's how i yeah you know i don't think i have watched that film without commercial interruption because

i've only seen it i what i so i've seen the clips and stuff of like famous scenes uncensored but to me the breakfast club is full of censored words and a bunch of commercials in between scenes like i i've never actually sat down and watched it like i the brat pack in general i like their films okay but they they never were that important to me uh growing as a youth. Now, the soundtracks, I went through a real, like, 80s phase of listening to 80s pop hits in the 90s, but probably because I heard covers of them by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes or Save Ferris, and I was like, oh, I want to hear the originals of these.

And I'm sure it's a coincidence, but it makes sense that one of the characters in the movie is named Bender. Yeah. Judd Nelson's character uh he's like you know he got me a pack of cigarettes smoke up yeah when you watch that movie it's a bunch of monologues for young actors that's what it feels like just strung up all in a row but yeah it's uh let us know your breakfast club thoughts because i'm sure it's fine there's some weird stuff in it i don't like ali sheedy's makeover and in the end the nerd gets to do all their homework, which is weird. Yeah. Hey, he likes it, Bob.

The nerd likes that. He's feeling included. The girl talks to him. Yeah, well, it also teaches, like, you know, the jock could date the weird girl. It's like, I don't like that. No, they're not made for each other. But yes, after this, they're looking for the clover in the future.

This was the storage room. My dad spent years turning it into a bomb shelter. And yet you guys never had a single nuclear war. What a waste. This is it. My Ronco record vault. I still remember the combination.

Three. It's stuck. The Achilles heel of the Ron code design is its structural resonance frequency. Allow me. There we go. Here it is. The Breakfast Club soundtrack. You mean Breakfast Club sandwich. There we go. That's it. cleaned out my clover that thief how do you know it didn't disintegrate everything else in here held up okay except sports by huey lewis what a burn on huey lewis that's a good i wish i i wish i understood that i mean like i understand the context of that joke but you know obviously i i

don't know huey lewis and and his apparently horrible album i guess that they're they're i getting a dig on i yeah i guess the joke is that by 2001 sensibilities uh that huey lewis in the news specifically the album sports is not a good album and if you put it on people going yeah this sucks i like his back to the future adjacent songs that's basically all i know about huey lewis yeah me too i i want a new drug that's a good song i like the better one it's called ghostbusters i know ghostbusters ripped it off i like that apparently that was many different soundtracks i think it would have been better with rockwell somebody's watching me that was that was the other pitch they they named in there but

so i was trying to overthink the science of this here so we know later that yancey explodes the vault so he must then after exploding it open reset it to be closed again uh so it must be that explosion hits the same resonance frequency that bender did as well to pop it open that he didn't explode it open to and damage it by having an explosion it made it open just like bender does that's i love that what a great explanation that makes so much sense i somehow just thought like oh the combination didn't take or you know the safe isn't actually that good with the communal but that that makes total sense i love it i i want to believe that i also i i spotted a bart doll on the shelf in bender's vibration scene that was fun but the first time i got the joke of fry opening up the jacket which

once you take the record out of it nothing would be in there but he puts his face into it says the whole place has been cleaned out. Well, now we're in a new era where kids can wear those as hats again. When we were growing up, there were no real records laying around, but now kids today, put those on your head. Your parents will be really mad at you because records cost like $40 now.

For me, records are for framing. They're to be put in a frame on the wall. I have like four records right over there I have not put up on the wall yet. But of the Fooley Cooley soundtrack and a couple of Ghibli films. Good choice. So this is when they leave the house. Fry is stewing.

Leela's trying to comfort him in that, you know, brothers always fight. You know, your brother just didn't have a chance to tell you that he loved you. Yeah, which Leela's right. She is correct. It is true. So the recent viewing for me, like I never really caught this part and it just kind of, you know, is a foreshadow and it's really, really sweet. But as you're watching for the first time, you're like, no, he's a jerk. Leela's being a dumb girl trying to comfort him.

Yeah, exactly. And this is when they stumble upon what they think is a statue of yancey because it has fry seven leaf clover in his lapel but the statue says philip fry the mystery has not been solved yet and apparently fry thinks that yancey stole his name too along with the clover uh you know it is uh convenient that yancey's son looks almost exactly like him i think if you were to i i think they even do a match cut of just face to face to show it but you know uh we saw how similar fry looks to his mom let's just say the the fry genes are just very powerful and then overwrite his like yancey's son doesn't look anything like his wife i don't think so i like how bender falls under the spell

of this new fry immediately because he says, apparently this brave Adonis, this Cadillac of men, was the first person on Mars. That's so great. And also, anytime someone gets hurt in Futurama, the sound of that hand just crunching. I'm glad his hand was okay after that, but yeah, don't punch statues. This is the show telling you all the kids at home that. The statue always wins. If you're going to take down a statue don't do it bare handed that's all i'm going to say uh so we're back at planet express headquarters and the philip

statue is there with them they took it out of the old new york and all they found was and all they found was the hits of the 90s and one amazing collection i love that oh i i miss those commercial maybe those commercials are still on tv now and i don't watch commercial tv but i miss them of just a bunch of names scrolling by and one is highlighted and they say foreigner whatever and because of that so many songs i think of only in five second increments and then another song plays right after that so yeah it's very very sad like somebody sad. Like somebody's watching me. Somebody's watching me. Or Huey Lewis in the news. I want a new drug.

So now they're investigating the statue. That clover helped my rat-fink brother steal my dream of going into space. Now I'll never get there. You went there this morning for donuts. First person on Mars. Oh, so your brother was that Philip J. Fry? I'm Philip J. Fry. He stole my name after I got frozen.

Shut up, friends. My internet browser heard us saying the word fry and it found a movie about Philip J. Fry for us. It also opened my calendar to Friday and ordered me some french fries. Philip J. Fry. Astronaut. Philan french fries. Philip J. Fry, astronaut, philanthropist, entrepreneur, was a great man truly worthy of narration. Fry was the first man on Mars,

a feat that has never since been equaled. That should have been me! The ever-lucky Fry made his fortune after striking oil in the bathroom of the mansion he had won in a lottery. That's my clover! Yancey stole it! After a whirlwind fling with Icelandic supermodel Njord, Fry scored a string of top ten hits with his rock band Leaf Seven, known for their hypnotic rhythms, driving bass lines, and memorable hooks.

So this entire time, I know the answer to this mystery, but I have to remind myself, oh, yeah, Fry thinks this is Yancey. Yeah. Oh, God. Everything about this I love. Like, one, Fry screaming, like, that should have been me. Like, so good. That's what I'm known for. And also, this documentary on Philip's life is at first about a rich success man, and then it turns into a behind the music about what a great day we just

did uh behind the laughter not too long ago for talking simpsons but yeah i was like oh yeah they're doing a behind the music parody here yeah number one one thing i really love is is the the weird proto alexa joke that farnsworth says in the beginning where he's like oh yeah you know my computer heard me say fry and did all these fry related things and i think about like these days currently when you you know say something to to alexa or echo or whatever smart home thing you have and it does a bunch of stuff and it was like wow that was that joke was so before it's time uh yeah i uh i laughed at it then i don't laugh at it anymore the no i mean every time i go to a website that has like a google ad box in it and it just shows me like hey we know you were just looking for this on amazon

are you sure you don't want to buy it i'm like how i i wish i was not being listened to as much by my search results as it is they need to find ways to make those things not advertise things that you've just purchased yeah it's like oh you want this vacuum cleaner uh filter it's like i just bought one don't you want more i just bought one uh so yes uh this this documentary goes on to say that fry now spends most of his time at orbiting meadows the uh the graveyard with the seven leaf clover that will give him luck in the next life some egyptians believe yeah perhaps some egyptians believe top tom kenny is great doubling up here like he's yeah it's it's funny how tom kenny was not a regular on this show like he was more of a every now and then type guy i mean i guess they only have so much money for a voice cast and the regulars but man so the orbiting cemetery will be nearby in a

couple of hours it's time to go grave robbing. Bender has his kits. And yeah, we pan over to the statue of Yancey. And then we fade to Yancey in the past. Or sorry, the statue of Philip. And then we fade to Yancey in the past. And we see he's about to get married, presumably in the mid-90s. And he's wearing his dad's Vietnam tuxedo, which makes his dad seem even more insane.

That tuxedo got me through name and style. Well, no, this wedding has to be in the year 2000 onward because Fry is missing and he went on stupid. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Actually, I double checked this. The mother Fry says, like, I'll never forget the day he disappeared. Wisconsin won the Rose Bowl, 17-9. It is true.

January 1st, 2000, the Rose Bowl was Wisconsin versus Stanford, and they won it 17-9. It is a true joke. I looked it up too, yeah. So accurate sports joke on this very nerdy show. And so Yancey wants to rummage through Fry's things to see if there's something to play at the wedding. And this line has stuck with me because it's so cruel.

His mom's saying, your brother's gone, but his crapsher isn't. Oh, man. So at first she's like, yeah, it's so funny that right before that she says, oh, I miss your brother. But his crap still is. Like, I don't miss this. Oh, shit being here. Also, another reference, like he pulls out that pennant. What's it say white fish

and that was white fish that was the community college he dropped out of the coney island yeah oh yeah oh so good and disgusting it is disgusting we went over what white fish means and uh you can look it up yourself and yeah listen to the mars university one you learned it then uh and then a crude drawing of a stick figure on a rocket ship and then we pan down to see that fry drew it when he was 20 yeah and i like when yancey covertly pockets it we don't know why but we'll see at the end of the episode no this whole scene this is another of those scenes that is just so perfect that works on a on a second viewing so much better that if you are agreeing with fry up to this point in your first viewing you are with him of like yeah

yancey steals everything from him here he sees this drawing that fry has any pockets it's like he's stealing his old drawing and then once he finds the clover you're like and this is when he stole it and had all the success because he ripped off his brother fuck this guy that's wrong give him the idea to go into space yes yeah uh but But then we find out the sweet reason he saved it. And also, apparently, they joke about it on the commentary, but from my internet research, you cannot make Play-Doh explode by lighting it on fire. This was Dodo. Oh, okay.

Well, Dodo, maybe you can. And so he takes out the Breakfast Club soundtrack, which will clear out the room, is what his own comments are. And I guess he replaces it then after he's done with the record. Yeah, I guess so. He keeps it, but still uses it. Or if he didn't even use it at the reception, he just put it back. But I like, too, that even though this episode uses the closing song from Breakfast Club to great effect,

characters in it agree of like, oh, this is a bad album. If I were to i play it everyone's gonna leave my reception i think in the early 2000s uh we were on the brink of being very nostalgic for the 80s but not quite yet we were still like disdainful of the 80s yep and so we are finally at orbiting meadows you'll never get any closer to heaven and it's a great joke i love that lila is very impressed that yancey is buried in the World Hero section, and Fry says, I should be the one in that grave. Yeah.

It's Fry missing the point of, like, well, you'd be dead now if you were this guy. Don't you like being alive? And they all salute these soldiers guarding the World Hero section, and Bender salutes with a shovel, and they clearly don't understand what's happening next. Oh, that's so great. I love these military guards. They stand guard at all times there. They don't think anything's wrong

if three strangers walking in with three shovels into a graveyard. It's such a good gag. I love like Bender's, you know, thieving past or thieving references. Oh, that's such a good gag. He clangs the shovel with his head. I will say I'm glad bender's here

for some jokes but i think they would lay off this a bit more when they're emotional episodes in the future where i think they're too afraid of being too sappy so while this emotional things are happening there are jokes about bender stealing corpses maybe a bit too much it still works on me but i think they do it to better effect later when they're they're not afraid to be sentimental these jokes in the lead up to the digging up are funny to me but yeah i would say once the revelation happens that's when i would have just been like no don't even don't say any more jokes but you're i think you're right in general bender is here because they are scared of not having a laugh you know but he does find

john larroquette's spine. Yeah. Was John Larroquette a world hero, or was he just in another grave? I guess he will be a world hero at some point, because it also has the grave of the unknown comic from the Gong Show. And Shaq's leg, not Shaq himself, but at some point his leg is detached from him, and App becomes a hero.

I think his leg is big enough to be buried separately, just in a regular-sized coffin. Sha coffin jack's leg still attached at this point i just watched jack do a pro wrestling match and he's he's still got it wow jack still got that how many moves did he do uh let's see i'd say three or four he went through a table he actually went through a table and did a power bomb so uh but yeah john larroquette apparently they had lots of different names and i guess they're like john larroquette that's the funniest like one to hear it's fine it's it's a random enough celebrity but i had to i had to look him up and i you know obviously i didn't grow up i think he was famous for for night court which which i

wasn't familiar with um but i do i you know rereading his imdb i was like oh i recognize him as the bad guy from Richie Rich starring Macaulay Culkin I forgot about that he is also I believe the uncredited narrator in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre yeah the remake yeah oh no in the original in the original yeah okay I remember him in the remake uh ads as well okay maybe he came back for that one wow that's impressive and uh well now it's comic book time for me though because fry says all right it's clovering time oh which is a reference to the marvel character ben grim the thing of the fantastic four every time i record here with henry i have to look at a picture of fred and barney uh in straw boater hats with the thing

yes yes it's one of my most prized material possessions. But no, the thing, after Spider-Man, Spider-Man's number one for me, but the thing is my second favorite comic book character ever. And I love, his saying is, it's clobbering time, not it's clovering. But also worth referencing,

he is also a son of New York, and Brooklyn even, I i believe just like fry and he had a tumultuous relationship with his older brother as well okay comics and what street did he grow up on yancey street really no okay full circle i don't know how intentional all of those references are but the thing is jewish too right he's also jewish that's what i thought yeah he's well basically uh he had jack kirby his creator a jewish man uh who jack kirby and the thing and ben grim are basically the same guy like that was his self insert don't steal that's and marvel stole it they didn't listen but uh but yeah the thing is is jack kirby

probably the closest character to him in real life and so uh to jack kirby ben grim was always jewish but they didn't openly talk about the religion of superheroes back in the 60s so it was left unspoken it wasn't until the late 90s that they officially said, like, Ben Grimm is Jewish. Another Jewish comic creator, Carl Cassell, finally made it canonical. Carl Cassell, a great comic writer on his own who also is, like, a great Jack Kirby historian. Anyway, that's comic book talk. I've seen online the Jack Kirby Hanukkah cards he would send out with the thing. Yes. Wearing the traditional garb.

Yeah, in, like, rabbinical outfit. And what is the thing if not the golem of Jesus Christ? Oh, my God, you're right. Oh, wow. I don't know how to think of this. So here is our next clip. It's time to dig up a corpse. Philip Fry, the original Martian.

It's all lies, every word of it. He wasn't original. He wasn't a Martian. He wasn't Philip Fry. And since when is he a thee? You're twice the THE he ever was! It's clovering time. So, had any ideas for names, Yancy?

I'm sort of thinking of one. Daddy has a present for you today. Do you know what it is? It's a lucky clover that can help you be successful whatever you do, even breakdancing. And it once belonged to someone very special. I know what name you want to give him, Yancey. It's okay. Really?

Son, I'm naming you Philip J. Fry, in honor of my little brother, who I miss every day. I love you, Philip. And I always will. Aw, very touching. And you know, it's rare that kenney is asked to deliver lines like that he's usually the goofiest character voice ever of course he's spongebob squarepants he was half

around rocko's modern life he's usually very loud screamy characters but uh very very good line reading from him on you i'm not i'm not gonna lie but like just hearing that audio i i'm already tearing up oh me too i got goosebumps I cry very easily but oh man what it's the realization it just hits you so hard after planting the seeds throughout all the flashbacks you know with like Yancy being

like oh I wish my name was Philip J. Fryer like yeah he stole his name and they really planted in until this moment and I was just like oh it hits you hard it really got me the first time especially i was not expecting this kind of twist and you know again i said it before but it's it's easy to forget that this is a mystery we've seen in a billion times this episode it's just like oh yeah because even the show misleads you where it fades from yancey's face in the past

to the statue of philip in the future so it's misleading the viewer into thinking like yeah that's yancey he stole philip's name but no philip is the son of yancey and we see in the uh in the future so it's misleading the viewer into thinking like yeah that's yancey he stole philip's name but no philip is the son of yancey and we see in the uh in the nursery that he has framed fry's spaceman picture and put it above uh philip's crib so essentially that is what inspired philip probably to become a spaceman yeah yeah it's all it's all so beautiful and that yancey is so unselfish with that that seven leaf clover he doesn't ever use it for himself he gives it to his son from then on like he and it made it a gift an unintentional gift on on philip the r fries part but a gift to his own nephew as well and it's just yeah i mean it's so sweet this scene too they make sure there's no jokes there and yeah and

the wife uh and it has to multiple times call him yancey just so the audience knows like he did not change his name and and also you know a worse written thing would have had him they wouldn't have had the wife there yeah and it would have had him just insisting like i'm gonna name you philip i like that they make sure of showing that it was the mother and father's choice on the name he wasn't insisting on a name i do like that too and and also you talk about bookends of this episode the episode begins with a young yancey pissed off that he can't be named philip and then he makes fry cry and in this ending he gives the name philip to his son and makes his son laugh so oh that's great because but they both take place in like a hospital nursery yes both scenes i wasn't even thinking about that's great it's

it's just so touching and to see i mean the look Fry's face, that the fade to white as he is reading the information that the flashback will then reveal, like that Fry feels like the worst guy in the world that he assumed all these things about Yancey. And it turns out that Philip exists as a tribute to him. And it's like brotherly love sent forward a thousand years into the future. Like, it's just so,

it's just so beautiful. Yeah. It's hard. Part of it is also like, as, as the audience, I, I feel in a way a little bit tricked to be a bad person,

you know, for, for myself as an audience to believe in you know even though like the timing doesn't seem right and you know something's kind of weird but you're you're believing in fry like yeah that guy's that guy's a jerk and then in just this one scene you you you see yancey mature like he's a he's a grown adult man and he's on his own journey but in in some ways as an audience I was like oh he's still that that asshole kid um and it just I just feel like shame on me as an audience to to believe in all of this that's true I mean this is a flashback that we

don't see from Fry's perspective yeah yeah by going through this journey with fry you are assuming all the same things so it it does emotionally uh i mean in a good way manipulate you to drama that makes you also feel like fry in that moment that you assume the worst about yancey and so seeing that he was such a great guy and and did such a great thing in tribute to the brother who he truly loved like it it makes it all the more touching which is why it sucks that right next to that is a joke about bender robbing his yeah like stealing his wedding ring yeah yeah let's hear i always felt like fry should tell him like freeze please put that back put his wedding ring back please let's hear that in our final clip here lies philip j, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit.

Hey, Derek, I got the clover, plus his wedding ring. Sorry, ladies, I'm ticking. Hey, Fry, you want me to smack the corpse up a little? uh bender i think fry needs a moment alone all right grab a shovel i'm only one skull short of a mousketeer reunion i'm not gonna play the whole thing. It's on Spotify. Simple, simple minds. Don't you, in parentheses, forget about me.

Yeah, that song, as it works in the film Breakfast Club, is a really good song. But when I think of that song, I think of this ending. Like, I think of a zoom away from an outer space cemetery. You don't think about the family guy episode it was used in before this that's uh you know yeah that see all right i don't want to make this about how futurama is better family guy but futurama takes that song from the movie and recontextualizes it for its own meaning in a different setting and even just taking it from

the breakfast club soundtrack being a plot point in the episode. When Family Guy uses this song, it's for Brian to give the exact speech that Bender gives at the end of the movie and then pose like Bender does. That is a difference in style. It's just inserting a character and just making a direct parody. But yeah, I like how it's thematically appropriate because of the lyrics

and also the Breakfast Club soundtrack was an important part of the story plot wise. And yeah, it's just such a beautiful, I mean, it's also a great song. Like I do like that song a lot. But yeah, that just Fry crying at the side of the exhumed body of his nephew. And then, I mean, it's just bones at this point. It's not like that bad but i but also that makes me feel better in my head how i envisioned it with this this current watching is is like ew his body's just there and bender's gonna like smack it around i i really didn't you know it

didn't really kind of gross me out before but then now it's kind of like oh what a that's a little bit too soon right now but you're right they're bones it might be just dust it's kind of like, oh, what a, that's a little bit too soon right now. But you're right. They're bones. It might be just dust. It's been a thousand years. I don't know how bodies decompose. I'm sure there's lots of research done on that, but I'm pretty sure you're in skeleton town at that point.

You know, hey, I'll just say this. If John Larroquette's spine still exists as bones that Bender can take, then a contemporaneously aged Philip of the year of the 2000s would also just be down to bones then too that that that's the guess i'm making but but yeah and also yeah lila has to walk bender away because she's like you're enough funny town let's let's just have fry feel this thing right now get the jokes out here i i really like that i think that that's one of the the you know moments between lila and and fry that's quite tender um you know for her to to share to actually care about it yeah showing that she cares and she feels like she doesn't have to come in and comment

on anything to fry he needs time alone to process everything. Yeah. And that she can trust Fry with emotions, that he actually has at least the level of emotional intelligence to feel this in this moment. Yeah. And by the way, an update on Simple Minds, they are still together. Their last tour was interrupted by COVID, but apparently they are putting out a new album soon.

And so, yeah, they've been producing music since 1977. Wow. Still out there oh how do you think they play uh do you think they play that song once or twice at each it's a triple encore and it's all three songs i'm pretty sure hey they seem pretty cool in the show with it yeah oh yeah what do you what else are you there for God. Yeah, this episode is just so good. I think it is my favorite emotionally touching one. I do think Jurassic Park, everybody's had a pet. It makes you sad in that way, too.

It really gets me. But I think, too, the construction of this, it's a trick you can only really pull off once. When they do it again with Jurassic Park, I was kind of waiting for the twist. It's like seeing another M night shamalan movie after seeing six cents that even the good ones and i i do think he's made other good movies i don't think he's like a hack director but once you know the trick once when you're looking for it it's a different

experience but so that's why i think this one touches me just a little bit more than jurassic park in addition all the brother stuff too yeah it was the first time they did this magic trick and i'm a big sucker for time travel mechanics this is full of them and i just love seeing them when they're executed well and it's also very emotional too so thumbs up uh karen any final thoughts on the episode oh you guys got me teary-eyed uh thank you guys for for going through uh letting me in on this and then kind of living through i love seeing henry and bob you guys's friendship and like conversation and your observations are are so astute and you're so knowledgeable so that was such a such a pleasure you know i think i think going back to the sentimental episodes i

think this one you know jurassic park in a way is a little bit of a a cheap kind of tearjerker but the other episode and you guys probably know this better than i do i don't know if it was before this episode or or in a in a later season was when lila gets stung by b oh yeah that'll be coming up in the fourth season towards the end i think yeah that gave me kind of similar vibes to this episode too where you're kind of on a journey as the characters are figuring out what's happening at the same time in the show um just like you know we're kind of like you know with fry this episode, figuring out what the mystery is. And I think that episode is very touching as well. Probably another episode that made me cry.

But this one definitely was just me in that room. I remember with tears just streaming down my face over this cartoon. And it wasn't about romance. It was about sibling love, which is something that we don't really see, I feel like, that often Brother. The show can take you so many places. But thank you, Karen Chu, for being on the show. Where can we find you online? And of course, Good Job Brain is coming back in just a few days as of this posting. So please, where can we find you and the podcast? You can find us on all podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts,

on our website, goodjobbrain.com, and also on Twitter and all the social, goodjobbrain, one word. And hoping to spread the world with some amazing trivia about our little world once again. I'm so happy you guys have started to back up. That is so great. I'm sure so many people are so excited to see, to hear you guys once more. So thanks again for listening folks. We'll see you next time for the bird bot of ice Catraz and we'll see you then. I just wish your brother were still around to see this.

I'll never forget the day Philip disappeared. Wisconsin won the Rose Bowl 17-9. Oh, I miss him. Oh, that reminds me. I was thinking I'd rummage through Phil's records for something to play at the wedding. Have a look downstairs. Your brother may be missing, but his crap sure isn't.