I Dated a Robot
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| Futurama episode | |
| "I Dated a Robot" | |
 The crew and Lucy Liu's head hide from the Liu-bots. |
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| Episode no. | 47 |
| Prod. code | 3ACV15 |
| Airdate | May 13, 2001 |
| Writer(s) | Eric Kaplan |
| Director | James Purdum |
| Opening subtitle | NO HUMANS WERE PROBED IN THE MAKING OF THIS EPISODE |
| Opening cartoon | "Censored" |
| Guest star(s) | Lucy Liu |
| Season 3 January 2001 – December 2002 |
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| List of all Futurama episodes... | |
"I Dated a Robot" is the fifteenth episode in season three of Futurama. It originally aired on May 13, 2001.
[edit] Plot
After the crew sees an episode of The Scary Door, Fry decides to do all the things he always wanted to do; and the Planet Express crew obliges. After demolishing a planet, visiting the edge of the universe, and riding a dinosaur, one of his few remaining fantasies is to date a celebrity. Fry and Leela venture into the Internet to visit nappster.com and download a celebrity's personality. Fry downloads the personality of Lucy Liu into a blank robot, which begins projecting an image of her.
Fry and the Lucy Liu robot begin dating, aided by her being programmed to like Fry. The other Planet Express employees, concerned about his relationship, show him the standard middle-school film (similar to Boys Beware) that predicts the destruction of civilization if humans date robots. Unfortunately, Fry ignores the movie and keeps making out with his Lucy Liubot.
Bender, offended by the concept of competing with humans for the attention of female robots, sets off with Leela and Zoidberg to shut down Nappster. In the Nappster building a broken sign eventually reveals that the company is actually "Kidnappster". Breaking into the back room Bender discovers that Nappster has been kidnapping the heads of celebrities and making illegal copies of them. Leela grabs Lucy Liu's head and the four take off. The Nappster CFO loads a backup disk of Lucy Liu, and creates a horde of Lucy Liu robots ordered to kill (by having their settings changed from "competent lawyer" to "erotic assassin").
Leela and her group, running from the robot horde, duck into a movie theater, where Fry is seeing a movie with his Lucy Liu robot. Everyone ducks into the projection room. Zoidberg discovers a five ton bag of popping corn, and sends it pouring onto the robots on the theater floor. The robots eat their way out from under the corn and start shooting popcorn kernels from their mouths at the room. Fry's Liu-bot points the projector at the other robots, and the heat causes the popcorn to pop, bursting the robots. At the request of the real Lucy Liu, Fry blanks his robot. A hypocritical Bender begins dating Lucy Liu's head.
[edit] Cultural references
- Nappster is a parody of the Napster file sharing service. In this episode, the "napp" in Nappster is a contraction of "kidnapp" and the company's real name is "Kidnappster".
- Fry rides a "T-rex" at Jurassic kiddie Park.
- The current premiere at the theatre is titled "Charlie's Angels 3: The Legend of Charlie's Gold", in a reference to the follow up to the City Slickers film, "City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly's Gold".
- Hand Crafters is an obvious parody of LensCrafters, a company providing prescription eyeglasses and eye care.
- When the alien humors himself over buying the Milky Way via eBay his bidding paddle has the number 667 written in the alien language on it, a reference to the Mark of the Beast.
- Also, to the left of the alien is David X. Cohen, executive producer of Futurama.
- The box of blank robots says Mac Formatted.
- The Lucy Liu-bot asks for Fry to "take a moment to register" her, a reference to product registration, which many computer applications will ask the user after installation. When Fry declines, she says she will remind him later, a reference to a common choice on product registration applications: "Remind Me Later".
- Metal Fever is a reference to the derogatory slang phrases Jungle Fever and Yellow Fever, used to describe white men who date black and Asian women respectively. It also refers to the phrase 'White Fever', used to describe black men who date white women.
- In one scene, Bender tells Leela to "stifle there, meatbag" while sitting in a large brown chair. This is a reference to the line frequently uttered by Archie Bunker (as well as his famous chair) in All in the Family.
- When they are being damaged, destroyed or otherwise harmed, the Liu-bots use many typical, clichéd phrases used by many science fiction computers and robots, such as "System Error", "Does Not Compute", and so forth.
- The guy behind (Kid)nappster says that in the room of the celebrities someone is going for the Tetris world record.
- The line "I would've gotten away with it wasn't for those meddling adults!" is a parody of the line often used in the Scooby-Doo cartoon series.
- Before leaving the room with the celebrity heads, George Michael's head says "Please pick me up before you go go?", which is a reference to a song he wrote with WHAM!.
- The "Competent Lawyer," "Icy Dominatrix," and "Erotic Assassin" settings are references to Lucy Liu's roles in Ally McBeal and Payback (in which she was both a dominatrix and assassin) respectively.
- The sound Lucy Liubot makes when she dies is the sound that Pac-Man makes when he dies.
- The episode of The Scary Door that the crew watches has several references to episodes of The Twilight Zone. Among them:
- The Fever - the main character of the episode Clyde Smith getting addicted to a slot machine.
- A Nice Place to Visit - Clyde getting all he wants (in this case a slot machine where he always wins) and seeing he has no longer anything to do and thinking he's in hell (actually he's in an airplane).
- Nightmare at 20,000 Feet - Clyde being in an airplane where he sees a Gremlin tearing up a wing.
- The Man in the Bottle - Clyde discovering he is actually Hitler.
- While at Nappster, the worker says that they have Gweneth Paltrow and Cleopatra, but the Cleopatra head is actually Cher.
[edit] Continuity
- Lucy Liu's head also appears in the episode "Love and Rocket", still inside Bender.
- Although the Professor says there is only one other parallel universe, the episode "The Farnsworth Parabox" suggests otherwise. This could be explained, however, by the fact that the parallel universe inside the box in "The Farnsworth Parabox" was created by Professor Farnsworth himself and did not exist previously, or that he was unaware of the other universes, despite their existence.
- When Professor Farnsworth is showing Fry the video of why not to date robots, the aliens invading Earth destroy the planet in the exact fashion as Bender did when Fry was frozen in "Space Pilot 3000".
- In "A Fishful of Dollars", Pamela Anderson's Head says that she wants to go back to the Head Museum. In this episode, however, she is at Kidnappster. However, Pamela Anderson's head could have been stolen or kidnapped by Kidnappster while it was at the Head Museum.
- This episode is one of many which contradict season four's "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" where it's revealed that any mention of Star Trek is considered taboo. Here we see a chatroom called "OldTREK-vs-NewTREK.web".
- The man in the film about not dating robots is the same man in the film about "global warming" in "Crimes of the Hot", albeit with a slightly different hair colour.
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