Futurama: Volume 1

1. Space Pilot 3000
A 25-year-old pizza delivery boy named Fry spends New Year's Eve 1999 lamenting his lame existence. That night, he accidentally freezes himself in a cryogenics lab and awakens at the dawn of the year 3,000! With the past 1,000 years behind him, Fry decides to make a fresh start. He tracks down his great-great-great-great (etc.) nephew, Professor Farnsworth, and gets a job with his intergalactic delivery service. With the help of his two new friends, a beautiful one-eyed alien named Leela and a degenerate robot named Bender, Fry prepares for the ride of his life in this bizarre new millennium.

2. Episode Two: The Series Has Landed
When one of his first deliveries takes him to the moon, Fry can hardly contain his excitement. For the others, it's just a routine trip, but Fry is shocked to discover a giant lunar theme park! He convinces Leela to go exploring and search for the original moon-landing site, but their excursion soon becomes a matter of life or death! Meanwhile, Bender puts the moves on a moon-farmer's daughter and suffers the consequences!

3. I, Roommate
Everyone is sick of Fry so he has to get his own apartment. He decides to become Bender's roommate. The only catch is that Bender's apartment has a volume of 2 cubic meters. Fry convinces Bender to look for a better place, they get a new apartment, only that Bender's antenna interferes with the TV reception (a thousand years and televisions still use plain antenna? some things never change). Fry prefers to stay in his apartment instead of going back to Bender's, but Leela convinces him to. When Fry asks where to put his stuff, Bender suggests the closet, which is big enough for Fry to live.

4. Love's Labors Lost in Space
On a mission intended to save endangered animals on a collapsing planet, Leela and the crew run into legendary starship captain Zapp Brannigan. A self-proclaimed ladies man, Zapp sees Leela as a potential new conquest. When the captain refuses to aid the animal rescue, Leela and her crew try to leave Zapp's starship. But Zapp throws Fry and Bender in jail, and summons Leela to his "Lovenasium." They ultimately escape and arrive on the doomed planet, where Leela finally finds love - with a cute, and very useful, creature named Nibbler.

5. Fear of a Bot Planet
At Madison Cube Garden watching a blernsball game, Bender complains about the poor treatment of robots. They're only there to clean up, polish the balls or water the fields. They never get any respect. Later, Bender must deliver a package to a planet inhabited by murderous robots that kill humans on sight. He discovers a robotopia - a land where the robot is king! However, when Leela and Fry are captured, Bender must choose between protecting his celebrity status or saving his friends.

6. A Fishful of Dollars
A thousand years is a long time to save up money, and Fry's savings account has been racking up interest. When Fry discovers just how much - over 4 billion dollars - Fry goes a little overboard. After completely redecorating the apartment, splurging on expensive spa days and treating his friends to innumerable luxuries, Fry discovers the ultimate expense. Anchovies. This rare delicacy as been extinct for years, and Fry must battle the evil conglomerate known as Mom, plus Pamela Anderson Lee's head in a jar, to get them!

7. My Three Suns
The crew visits an arid planet in the Galaxy of Terror distinctive for it's three suns and liquid alien inhabitants. Fry, after delivering a package under the scorching heat, quenches his thirst with a bottle of cool blue liquid. Fry soon finds out he drank the planet's royal leader and is named the new emporer. Fry abuses his newfound power, even appointing Bender second in command, until the aliens retaliate and the real battle for power begins.

8. A Big Piece of Garbage
A big piece of garbage that was released a thousand years ago is now on the way to Earth to destroy it. After Fry, Leela and Bender fail on placing a bomb on it, the city has to build another big piece of garbage, yet that may be a problem since trash doesn't exist in year 3000.

9. Hell is Other Robots
Bender becomes addicted to electricity, so his sins make him go to robot hell. Since he is condemned to live there for eternity, it's up to Fry and Leela to save him from Beelzebot, the robot devil.

Immensely satisfying in both style and substance, 'Futurama' is not only funnier and better written than 'The Simpsons', it also succeeds grandly in depicting a convincingly complex future setting - in fact one of the most balanced and believable ones in all of science fiction (neither a utopia nor a dystopia), filled to the brim with fantastic but faulty technology, humdrum pop culture items and hilarious products and commercials ("Arachno Spores - The Fatal Spores With the Funny Name", "Fishy Joe's Extreme Walrus Juice - Ride the Walrus").

Being a huge science fiction enthusiast, the many inside jokes contained in this show alone could keep me entertained for weeks. Every single bit of alien language and binary code means something hilarious, there's obscure math references such as the Alive-Null-Plex (a majority of the staff writers have advanced math degrees), there's nods to Clarke, Asimov, Lem, Sturgeon, Foster, Dziemianowicz, Orwell, Dick and many, many more. Not to mention 'Soylent Green', 'The Twilight Zone' (Bender's "To Serve Man" apron, 'The Scary Door'), 'Blade Runner'... the list is practically endless. To quote David X. Cohen: "[We're] the most overqualified writing staff on television."

Then there's Christopher Tyng's fantastic scores (especially `A Clone of My Own' and `Roswell that Ends Well' are superb), the too-good-for-TV computer animation, and some of the most memorable and hilarious characters ever, especially the deliciously evil, free-associating Professor Farnsworth and Dr. Zoidberg, a combination of a lobster, a vaudeville comedian, and Curly from The Three Stooges ("It's good cholesterol, but it spreads like bad cholesterol!").

Also, I cannot help but adore how darkly grim, in fact almost Dickensian, this series can become sometimes. This is possibly the only prime-time show that ever got away with completely degrading or vilifying its main characters (in `A Pharaoh to Remember' Bender works hundreds of slaves to death), as well as with destroying entire civilizations and killing millions of innocents. Then there's wonderfully offensive blasphemy (such as Zoidberg's impersonation of Jesus Christ), cannibalism, prostitution, incest - you name it. I love that stuff!

Some of the later episodes, such as the parallel universe tale 'The Farnsworth Parabox', are staggeringly intricate and well crafted, with absolutely mind-blowing results. This puts 'Star Trek' to shame, people.

Favorite episodes: `Love's Labour's Lost In Space', `Fry & the Slurm Factory', `A Head in the Polls', `Why Must I Be A Crustacean in Love?', `The Problem with Popplers', `Mother's Day', `A Taste Of Freedom', `Less Than Hero', `Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles' and `The Farnsworth Parabox.'