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Futurama debuted on Fox on March 28, 1999, and while it didn’t have the same success as The Simpsons, he is the superior animated series.
Matt Groening Debuted Futurama in 1999
It was 27 years ago, on March 28, 1999, that Futurama debuted on Fox. The series was set up by showing a young man named Philip J. Fry (Billy West) working as a pizza delivery driver who accidentally falls into a cryogenic pod and ends up frozen until he is finally woken up on New Year’s Eve in 2999. He gets a job as a cargo delivery boy for his only living relative, Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth. He also falls in love with Leela and becomes friends with an alcoholic robot named Bender. Joining Billy West in the voice cast was Katey Sagal as Leela, John DiMaggio as Bender, and Phil LaMarr in several roles.
What made the entire Futurama series so incredible was that Matt Groening demanded he have sole creative authority away from network executives, and then he hired a writing team that included three people with Ph.D.’s, seven with Masters degrees, and a total of over 50 years at Harvard. This was a smart sci-fi animated series, and while the humor was often slapstick ay heart, it took the sci-fi aspects of the series seriously.
Futurama was also very different from The Simpsons. While that series was a family comedy similar to The Honeymooners, Futurama was a strong satire that showed everyday life in the future with a parodical comparison to today’s real-life society. Groening used a lot of adult humor as well, with black comedy, off-color humor, surrealistic scenes, and self-depreciation, to deliver a quirky story about broken individuals doing the best that they can.
The first episode of Futurama started from the very beginning, with Fry delivering a pizza to Applied Cryogenics, where he was involved in the accident that froze him. When he woke up in the future, where he is assigned to the permanent career of a deliver boy, causing him to run away. It is Leela who is assigned to force him into the role, but by the end, she quits her job, saying she hates it, and she nad Fry join forces with Bender to go on the run as fugitives, looking for Farnsworth, who finally hires them to crew his spaceship. It was a brilliant premiere and set things up for what ended up as a groundbreaking animated sci-fi series.
