Futurama's pilot episode, Space Pilot 3000, features a delivery boy named Fry who during New Year's Eve is still working at Panucci's Pizza. During one of his deliveries (his last at that shop), he is accidentally frozen in a cryogenic chamber and does not wake up until 1000 years later.
While he is frozen, the viewers are given a quick glance at the events during that 1000 years. New York City is destroyed by aliens, rebuilt, then destroyed again until it is finally rebuilt to the city that Fry wakes up to.
After being welcomed in the new era by two scientists, he meets Leela, an alien who is tasked with assigning Fry his permanent job. After Fry discovers he will still be a delivery boy like his past life, he escapes and gets his first actual look at the world he now lives in where he also meets a robot named Bender who eventually becomes his best friend.
We see that there are weird-shaped buildings, flying cars, transportation tubes that are able to take you to another place by you telling a computer where you want to go, mutated fish and even preserved heads of famous personalities as seen in the Hall of Heads. This shows that Futurama has a very idealistic or romanticized view on the future.
On the other hand, the means by which Fry went to the future was not the typical time machine. The show tackled the subject of cryogenic freezing or preservation. During the time this episode was released in 1999, cryogenic processes were still under research and it was only last year when a human being was put under cryogenic sleep. Having said this, Futurama's concept was still based on actual science research and it is not solely fiction. And its view on science is very ambitious but progressive at the same time.
Hasmin Gaile Gavica
2013-16603
No comments:
Post a Comment