Monday, January 13, 2014

'Space Pilot 3000' Reaction Paper

Labrador, Ana Micaela B.
2011-02178


Futurama shows the typical, almost ‘romanticized,’ expectations that humans already have for the future – flying cars, quick transportation, oddly shaped buildings, completely sentient robots, the possibility of aliens and other life forms, and other allusions to technologic possibilities of the future.

When Fry was frozen in time, the window next to him displayed how history is a cycle: a community is developed and sustained, and is eventually driven to the ground and taken over by a higher power that seeks to rule over it, until a stronger power comes along to establish newer structures. The scene in which aliens take over the Earth differs very little, in terms of concept, from how ancient kingdoms would wage war against each other for the sake of claiming each other’s territory, population, and technology to prove their power.

Not only do such cyclical ‘wars’ change the physical environment of a community, but also affects the way a society behaves with the passing of time. The language used in the future is different from the present (‘jobless’ versus ‘job–abandoners’), and present taboo ideas may be seen differently in the future (ex. the concept of suicide; presently it is a sensitive subject, but in the future it appears to be a very ‘normalized’ subject, with the regular presence of ‘Suicide Booths’).

What’s interesting is that its use of time travel depicts how the future as a whole is unpredictable, but despite this, there are a few ‘universal constants’ that will always remain. Besides the aforementioned ‘cyclical wars’ that shape a society, popular sayings and social structures from the past have not changed much, even in the present day. People now still adhere and hold on to words of famous icons (ex. the cameo of the popular icon Leonard Nimoy), and jobs are still seen as extremely important and something that must be followed to an absolute point (ex. the popular saying, “You gotta do what you gotta do”).


Overall, time travel in Futurama, and the show itself, shows how stark the differences between the past, present and future are, and yet also highlights evidence of similarities between these three points in time.

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