< Futurama

Futurama/Tropes I to N


Brett Blob: Hey Cubert! Is that your family mansion?
Cubert: Why don't you ask your mom? She's coming over for a sex visit!

Leela: Does that dummy have a brother?

Melllvar: If I can't have the original cast of Star Trek, no one will!

Fry: You can't lose hope just because it's hopeless. You gotta hope more, then put your fingers in your ears and go "Blah blah blah blah!"

Hermes: "I don't even know how this was supposed to work!"

Joseph "Fishy Joe" Gilman: "After all, the only reason we don't eat people is 'cause they taste lousy."

    • And, of course, "Fry and the Slurm Factory" combined this with a Shout-Out:

Fry: "Oh my god! What if the secret ingredient is people!"
Leela: "No, there's already a soda like that, Soylent Cola."

Fry: "Oh. How is it?"

Leela: "It varies from person to person."

    • In "My Three Suns," the crew visits a Neptunian butcher shop in New New York.

Fry Wow! You have every type of meat here but human.
Shopkeeper What, you want human?

  • Impaled with Extreme Prejudice
  • Impossibly Delicious Food: In Fry And The Slurm Factory, Fry is put in a death trap to drink concentrated slurm until his stomach bursts. He can't stop eating it, even long enough to save his friends. When Leela frees him from it by dumping it down the sewer, Fry tries to chew his own arms off to follow it.
    • The entire Earth ends up with an addiction to Poplers. They're so delicious, people even have a hard time stopping eating them when they find out the truth behind what they are. Then again, in a society that has "Soylent Cola", that is not that surprising.
  • I Need to Go Iron My Dog: Parodied in the Superhero Episode. Three times in a row.

Leela: Oh, I completely forgot, I left my apartment on fire!
Bender: As for me, I'm late for my L.S.A.T.'s.
Fry: And I can't take life anymore! [Leaps out the window]

  • Inherently Funny Words: "Pazuzu!" Though it would be unwise to repeat it three times fast.
  • Informed Flaw: Calculon tells the protagonists about Project Satan, where the most evil car parts in the world were used to build a car. Among these were the window wipers of the car from Knight Rider. When Fry countered that KITT wasn't evil, Calculon responds that the window wipers were, it just didn't come up much in the show.
  • Innocent Aliens: Dr. Zoidberg, who thinks most doctors are poor.
  • Innocent Innuendo: In "Put Your Head on My Shoulders", Fry and Amy connect while stranded in their car. In the next scene, the recovery truck worker arrives to find Fry and Amy's car windows steamed up. Instead of having sex, however, Fry and Amy are merely playing cards.
  • In Spite of a Nail: In "Roswell That Ends Well", the Professor wants to take every precaution against altering history... right up until Fry sleeps with his own grandmother. At this point he just gives up and launches a full scale, laser blasting assault on the 1950's Roswell military base to get its radar dish while delivering what is probably the best line in the entire episode.

Professor Farnsworth: Choke on that, causality!

    • In "All the Presidents' Heads", the Professor horribly maims (possibly even kills) his own ancestor, while Bender conspires to put himself on one of the first American flags. Zoidberg also meets Andy Warhol, who paints a picture of him. Other than that, it appears to have had no meaningful effect on history.
  • Instant Expert: When Bender temporarily becomes captain of the Planet Express, much to Fry's annoyance. When Fry lambastes him and accuses him of not knowing the first thing about being a captain, Bender instantly reads the entire manual and then uses the info to chastise Fry. Justified by the fact that he's a robot.

Fry: Have you even read the captain's handbook?
Bender: (flips through entire manual) I have now. And what's Peter Parrot's first rule of captaining?
Fry: (defeated) Always respect the chain-o-command...captain.

Leela: Fry, you've become so lazy you've become a fat sack of crap.
Fry (indignantly): Sack?

    • Similarly, in "When Aliens Attack," Amy puts on a new bikini top:

Amy: How do I look?
Farnsworth: Like a cheap French harlot.
Amy: French?!

  • Island Help Message: Bender can barely spell "HELP". Because he had used most of his rocks to explain who he was and how he had come to be on the island.

"TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: I, BENDER, BID YOU HELLO! YOU DON'T KNOW ME, THOUGH YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF ME, BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT. LONG STORY SHORT... I NEED HELF"

  • It Runs on Nonsensoleum: Anything Prof. Farnsworth explains. Lampshaded in one episode when Fry cuts a Farnsworth explanation short by saying that it's magic. Ironically, that Farnsworth explanation was one that used real-world science.
    • "I've got it! The ship stays still, and the engines move the universe around it!"
      • In case you're unfamiliar that was based off of the so-called "The Alcubierre drive". Which could, in theory, work just fine with faster-than-light travel. The show also has quite a few other examples of actually basing plot points off of real science.
    • "In regular fossilization, flesh and bone turns to mineral. Realizing this, it was a simple matter to reverse the process!"
    • Also the Central Bureaucracy. An organization that runs full stop on a combination of Pirate Code and Big Book of War philosophies, some of which their rules border on Calvin Ball mentality, all cubicles (or at least the section that we see) are constructed in a hovering Rubik's cube, the lines are impossibly long, and those who have managed to go inside and are not bureaucrats go insane within minutes.
  • It's Been Done: The creators have explained that Amy Wong was originally created to be a female character who was always hurting herself, thinking that it's typically only males who get to engage in the slapstick. They evidently didn't realize that there's already a trope for that. True, that's mostly a Japanese Media Trope, but it does have a Western counterpart.
  • It's Like I Always Say...
  • It's Up to You: The Planet Express crew has saved the city/planet/universe from annihilation dozens of times. Sometimes this is justified with Fry's "special" brain.
  • I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Bender to Flexo's not-quite-divorced robot wife who remembers she remembers she loves Flexo after all.
  • I Will Wait for You: "Jurassic Bark", which even makes use of the song that named the trope in the ending, which makes the ending even more heart-wrenching.
  • I Would Say If I Could Say
  • Iron Lady: Parodied with Da Chief in "Law & Oracle".
  • Ironic Echo: Several examples, but a very prominent use occurs in "A Head In The Polls" when Fry realizes just how much of a bastard Nixon truly is and vows never to vote for him. Nixon's response? "Like one vote ever really mattered", a harmless phrase that was used as a minor gag earlier in the episode. This also crosses over with Wham! Line.
  • Jerkass: Bender on a good day. Zapp Brannigan is even worse, and far more smug, and far more sexist.
  • Jackie Robinson Story: Leela with Blernsball.
  • Joker Immunity: Robot Santa
  • "Jump Off a Bridge" Rebuttal: Parodied in the first episode.

Bender: I'll have to check my program... (looks away from Fry momentarily) Yep!

  • Just Friends: Fry and Leela.
  • Just Like Making Love:
    • Parodied in "The Series Has Landed", when Amy is trying to retrieve the keys to a spaceship from a claw arcade game.

Bender: "Come on, it's just like making love. Y'know: Left, down, rotate 62 degrees, engage rotor."
Amy: I know how to make love!

    • After Fry first tries a delicious Poppler, he declares "It's like sex, except I'm having it!"
  • Kangaroo Pouch Ride: Bender's Game had orc spear-throwers riding in giant war-kangaroo pouches.
  • Karma Houdini: Bender sometimes has to face some kind of punishment for his behavior, but as often as not he just does whatever he wants without having to face any real consequences. In fact, there's a surprising amount of episodes where he's directly or indirectly responsible for everything bad that happens to the crew, and he gets away with it.
    • Lampshaded and subverted in "Three Hundred Big Ones", where Bender has stolen an expensive cigar and flaunted it at a fancy party; at the episode's end he notes "My story kinda petered out without me learning a lesson," at which point two cops recognize him from security footage and begin to beat Bender senseless while he enjoys this closure.
    • Made fun of in "Hey Leela Leela", where, after the episode ended with the Rumpldyhumps getting healthcare, plumbing, and electricity, and all of the orphans from the orphanage getting adopted and paying jobs, Leela simply cannot understand that everybody got a happy ending, and demands that somebody teaches her a lesson.
  • Karmic Twist Ending: Parodied with the Show Within a Show The Scary Door. The best example is the one where the bookworm's reading glasses break after doomsday.

Bookworm: Finally! Solitude! I can read books for all eternity! (glasses fall off) It's not fair! IT'S NOT... Oh, well, my eyes aren't that bad. I can still read the large print books. (eyes fall out) IT'S NOT... Oh, well, lucky I know Braille. (hands fall off) *screams* (tongue falls out, head falls off) Hey, look at that weird mirror!
Bender: Cursed by his own hubris.

  • Kill All Humans: Bender expresses a desire to do this while sleeptalking, Fry hears him and is disturbed. "I was having the most wonderful dream...I think you were in it."

"Hey, sexy mama. Wanna kill all humans?"

    • Whenever I said "Kill All Humans" I always whispered "except one." Fry was that one. (That one has its impact lessened by the revelation that it was just a hallucination of Leela's.)
  • Kill'Em All: Every short story in the Christmas special ends like this.
  • Killer Rabbit: Nibbler, and arguably the rest of the Nibblonians. They're tiny and adorable...and capable of destroying much larger opponents (including the seemingly invincible Brainspawn), running a Secret Society, and excreting Dark Matter. Though for some reason, they're utterly useless against the Nudists.

Nibber: Alas, our kitten class attack ships were no match for their mighty chairs. The universe is Doomed.

  • Kill the Poor: In the future, the unemployment problem was "solved" by making it illegal to be unemployed.
    • Also, poverty was declared a mental illness.
  • Knife Nut: Roberto

Roberto: I was designed by a team of engineers attempting to build an insane robot but it seems, they failed!
Vending Machine: Um, actually *Roberto stabs him*

Bender: Has anyone ever noticed how Fry always seems to turn on the TV at just the right moment?

  • Large Ham:
    • Hellooooo, Calculon. His hamming is ramped up to dangerous levels in "That's Lobstertainment!", when director Harold Zoid tells him he isn't emoting enough. His hamminess is on display off the stage as well in "The Devil's Hands":

Calculon: Well, I do owe you for giving me this... unholy ACTING TALENT!

    • Zapp Brannigan. He's not an actor, but he'll steal the scene anyway.
    • How dare you not mention Lrrr... RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8!
    • Puny tropers would do well to list Morbo as well!!!!!
    • The Nibblonians.
      • Not to mention that they would eat the Large Ham too.
    • "WELCOME, TO THE WORLLLLLD OF TOMORROWWWWWW!"
    • "I'M NOT FROM HERE! I'VE GOT MY OWN CUSTOMS! LOOK AT MY CRAAAAZY PASSPORT!"
    • Also Bender, from time to time. "And I... I can be an ACTING COACH!!!!
  • Large Ham Title: Lrrr, RULER OF THE PLANET OMICRON PERSEI 8!. He even shouts it when he's trying to go incognito.
  • Last-Name Basis: Fry's full name is "Phillip J. Fry". This gets a Lampshade Hanging by Amy in one episode. And Zoidberg (John).
    • Apparently this with Turanga Leela; but eventually subverted when we discover in that Leela's parents are "Turanga Morris" and "Turanga Munda", indicating that mutants arrange their names Asian style, with the family name first.
  • Latin Land: The Tijuana from "Lethal Inspection" is a textbook example.
  • Lead the Target
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
    • In "Fear of a Bot Planet", immediately before a commercial break:

Leela: This is a difficult decision! If only I had 2 to 3 minutes to think it over!

    • The entire opening to Bender's Big Score.
    • And in the first episode of the newest season, "It's some kind of new, comedy-central channel! And we're on it now!"
    • Robot Devil has a couple in the ex-series finale:
      • [after his own name is selected for Fry's hands] "What an appallingly ironic outcome!"
      • "Ah, my ridiculously circuitous plan is one quarter complete!"
    • Upon completion of the Fon Fon-Rubok ceremony in "The Beast With A Billion Backs", Amy joyously declares "Oh, Kif, this is just like a movie with this happening in it!"
  • Lego Genetics: The Decopodians contain parts of every known marine animal on earth, as well as every Yiddish stereotype imaginable, all wrapped up in the body of a six-foot-tall humanoid lobster.
  • Least-Common Pizza Topping: Causes a Logic Bomb to go off and make the robot waiter self-destruct when Fry tries to order it at Cosmic Ray's Pizzeria.
  • Leonardo da Vinci: In "The Duh-Vinci Code".
  • Leotard of Power: Leela when she became a superhero.
  • Lethal Chef: Bender is a literal one, since he has a limited knowledge of organic biology.
    • Though to be fair he did make one good dish and the rest of the time he's at least trying.
    • If he's following a recipe, he can cook as well as anyone, but he tries to improvise. Without a sense of taste, he has no basis on which to improvise from beyond "throw it into the pot," which doesn't work so well.
  • Lie Detector: The truthoscope used during the presidential debate in the episode "A Head in the Polls".
  • Limited Wardrobe: Lampshaded by Bender in regards to Fry:

Bender: "You own one pair of clothes and you're not taking them off while I'm around."

  • Linked-List Clue Methodology: Parodied in "The Duh Vinci Code" with Leela questioning the Professor's clue deductions, only to be angrily shouted down.
  • Literary Agent Hypothesis: Deconstructed in "Yo Leela Leela".
  • Living Crashpad: Bender has done this to Fry several times.
    • The Countess de la Roca (A Flight To Remember) did also, when she fell through the deck of the Titanic, but a family broke her fall. Since she weighs at least two metric tons according to Leela, things probably did not end well for them.
  • Locked Into Strangeness: Parodied with Zoidberg and the space whale. He's so terrified that he grows hair just so it can turn white. Lucky for him, the third time around he stops at the "grow hair" part.
  • Logic Bomb

Zap Brannigan: "I am the man with no name - Zap Brannigan, at your service!"

    • More traditionally, Leela attempts this on Robot Santa. His head explodes; however, he was built with "paradox-absorbing crumple zones", so a new head simply springs up to replace the old one.
    • An even earlier example a Logic Bomb proof robot in "Mother's Day": There's a wax robot janitor taking a nap in the hall of wax robot replicas of famous robots Mom ever built. When Fry tries to figure why the robot would do this, it just ticks him off, prompting an even more bizarre explanation that does nothing but advance Fry's confusion and even frightens him a little.
  • Logo Joke: 30th Century Fox.
  • Lonely Together
  • Losing Your Head: The heads in jars, Bender, Zoidberg, Hermes, Robot Santa (who produced a new one), and technically Fry (his body was damaged so they moved his head to Amy's shoulder).
  • Low Speed Chase: There's a chase scene at the Central Bureaucracy on "slowmobiles", hover-scooters that travel at slightly less than walking pace.
  • Luke, You Are My Father: Farnsworth is Igner's father.
  • Made of Evil
  • Made of Explodium: One of the bees crashes into the walls of the hive and explodes in "The Sting". As of the 2010 Christmas special episode, it appears ALL space bees are made of explodium.
    • One of Fry's fellow inmates in the robot insane asylum, Malfunctioning Eddie, tends to blow up at the slightest provocation.
    • After Zoidberg's slinky gets straightened by Bender, he tries to coil it back up and set it walking down a pile of books. It flops over and bursts into flames.
  • The Magnificent: The water people's rulers.
  • Make-Out Point: In the robot Slasher Movie.
  • Mass Hypnosis: ALL GLORY TO The Hypnotoad!
  • Matrix Raining Code: How robots "interface".
  • May Contain Evil:
    • Slurm, a soda advertised with the slogan "It's highly addictive!"
    • The Popplers, which turn out to be the offspring of an alien race.
    • The Slurm episode also parodies this with Soylent Cola, the taste of which "varies from person to person".
    • Also Soylent Green. Yes, that Soylent Green. Everyone is quite aware of what it's made of, no one cares though.
  • Meaningful Name: A number of the cast's names are ShoutOuts or Genius Bonuses to some degree.
    • Philip J. Fry himself, named for the dearly departed Phil Hartman.
    • Leela's full name (Turanga Leela) is a direct reference to Olivier Messiaen's famous Turangalîla Symphony.
    • Zapp Brannigan's name shares resonance with the semi-obscure term "brannigan", meaning an embarrassing drunken bender.
    • Bender... in more ways than one.
    • And of course, Professor Farnsworth, named after the inventor Philo Farnsworth, who invented the television.
      • And revealed in "All the Presidents' Heads" to actually be a descendant of Philo Farnsworth.
  • Mechanical Evolution: In the episode "A Clockwork Origin", Professor Farnsworth releases some Nanomachines to purify water on an uninhabited planet. Subsequent generations of nanites are more complex, and the situation very quickly gets far out of hand. In one day they become trilobites, the next day there's robot dinosaurs, the next cave-bots, then human-bots, and finally energy beings.
  • Mess On a Plate: Bender's final presentation in the episode "The 30% Iron Chef."

Morbo: The challenger's ugly food has shown us that even hideous things can be sweet on the inside. [Begins to cry]

Fry: Bender! You can't date the ship! It would be like me dating a really fat lady, and then living inside her! And she'd be all (makes space travel motions with his hands) Vrrrroooom vrwooo bweeee zooom!
Fry: Like a balloon! And then something bad happens!

Zapp: "If we hit that bullseye, the rest of those dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate."

    • In the Season 6 episode "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences":

Scary Door intro You're taking a vacation from normalcy. The setting; a weird motel with a bed that is stained with mystery. And there's also some mystery floating in the pool. Your key card may not open the exercise room because someone smeared mystery on the lock.

  • Mermaid Problem
  • Mile-High Club: An inversion in "The Duh-Vinci Code". While searching for a tomb underneath Rome, Fry asks Leela if she wants to join the "Mile Deep Club". She consents but they're interrupted by the Professor.
  • Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: In one "What if" story, Fry destroys the entire universe with a time paradox.
  • Mind Screw: "The Sting". And how!
    • "Obsoletely Fabulous" ventures here too but more mildly. The bulk of the episode is just a long string of fictitious events in Bender's head to make him appreciate the 1-X robots.
  • Misfit Mobilization Moment: In Bender's big score, this happens in the climactic battle against the scammers when Hermes' head is plugged directly into the battlegrid. Cue Theme Music Power-Up and much ass-kicking.
  • Mistaken for Exhibit: In "Mother's Day", Fry justly mistakes the janitor (who happens to be a robot made out of wax) for one of the wax robot sculptures in a museum.
  • Mister Seahorse: Kif Kroker's species has "males" who become pregnant by absorbing genetic material from other lifeforms via skin contact. In another episode, Bender allows Fry and Leela to homebrew beer inside his torso and it's treated like a case of pregnancy. In one of the spin-off comics, Zapp Brannigan basically gets this with the intent of using him as a human weapon.
  • Mobstacle Course: Bender's cow catcher on Freedom Day.
  • Modern Major-General: Zapp, at times.
  • Monster Progenitor: The Project Satan to all Were-cars.
  • Morality Dial
  • More Dakka: Mom's killbots, which have a minigun on each arm and one on their chest. They only ever manage to kill each other
  • Motivational Lie: The team makes use of this to get Fry to cry out the Emperor that Fry drank.
  • Mutants: A group of them live underneath the city in its Absurdly Spacious Sewers, including Leela's parents
  • Misguided Missile
  • Modesty Bedsheet: Morgan Proctor, when she and Fry got caught having sex in Bender's closet, and then running out to catch a taxi with the bedsheet covering her when Bender figures out the truth about her.
  • Mood Whiplash: Coma-coma-coma-coma-coma-chameleon...
  • Multi-Armed Multitasking: Elzar. The DVD commentary mentions that the animators went out of their way to have each arm work independently rather than have each arm on either side move in the same way.
  • Mushroom Samba: In the episode "Hell is Other Robots", Bender injects himself with electricity causing him to go on a mind trip.
  • Must Make Amends: Fry finds his old dog from the 20th century fossilized in a construction site. Feeling bad for abandoning it (despite not meaning to) he arranges for the professor to actually revive it. With Science!
    • In that same episode, Bender, in a fit of jealousy, literally kicked said dog's fossil into hot lava, but after realizing what he did, he went in to save him and recovered him.
  • My God, What Have I Done?: "I just told you, you've killed me!"
  • Name's the Same: Mike Rowe and Josh Weinstein are members of the production crew. However, they aren't that Mike Rowe or that Josh Weinstein.
  • Nausea Dissonance: In "Parasites Lost", after learning there are worms inside Fry's body:

Hermes: (eating popcorn) It's nauseating, mon! (eats more popcorn) Is there no way to get rid of the disgusting maggots?

Bender: Geez, what does it take to kill me?

Farnsworth: Doomsday device? Well now the ball's in Farnsworth's court!
[The professor presses a button on a remote, causing several different stereotypically "mad scientist" style machines to come up through a trap door]
Farnsworth: I suppose I could part with one and still be feared.

Fry: And what if I don't want to be a delivery boy?
Leela: Then you'll be fired.
Fry: Fine!
Leela: ...out of a cannon, into the Sun.

  • Not That Kind of Doctor: What happens when Zoidberg's ignorance of human biology is taken to its logical conclusion: his doctorate is in Art History.
  • Not What It Looks Like: Happens in the episode "Why Must I Be A Crustacean in Love" with Fry when Zoidberg walks in on both Fry and Edna who is kissing him on her sofa.

Zoidberg: Edna, I couldn't stand it any longer. I-- Gasp! Fry!
Fry: Dr. Zoidberg, it's not how it looks!
Zoidberg: Her caviar is on your neck!
 

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