Hello! Wow, it’s 2021 and already things have gotten even more bonkers than they were in 2020. This future we’re living in can be pretty disorienting, so we thought this would be a great time to revisit a story about someone else having a pretty bonkers new year: Philip J. Fry.
We watched the pilot episode of Futurama, which both of us have seen as adults, but not for a few years. Neither of us wrote a summary, but we both remembered the loose plot premise: Fry goes to deliver a pizza on New Year’s Eve in 1999 and falls into a cryochamber that freezes him for a thousand years. He wakes up to find out that he is now destined to be a delivery boy in the year 3,000.
We had a lot of fun watching this one, which (spoilers for our lightning round questions) we both thought definitely did hold up. What we both didn’t remember was the extended joke sequence about a suicide booth, which we didn’t feel aged well.
Inevitably, when talking about time travel and the year 2020, we had to bring up Julia Nolke’s “Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self” series of videos.
We talk a bunch about our memories of New Year’s Eve 1999 and the Y2K panic leading up to it, and Geoffrey tells us all about a job training class he took from a whack conspiracy theorist who warned him about “KY2000” and the impending collapse of society. Of course we then had to acknowledge how this might have influenced Geoffrey’s previous podcast, Doorway to the Hidden World.
Julia wonders how past guest Kimberly Meyer feels about Futurama’s heads in jars.
Anyway, Happy New Year! Our 2021 wish for you is a boring year where news calms doooooown! And may you have eggs outside your house!
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New Year Special: The Futurama Pilot