Philip J. Fry
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| Futurama character | |
| Philip J. Fry | |
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| Age | 25-33 (chronologically 1007.95 years older)[1] |
|---|---|
| Gender | Male |
| Species | Human |
| Planet of Origin | Earth, specifically Brooklyn, New York City, New York |
| Job | Interplanetary Delivery Boy of Planet Express |
| Relatives | Grandfather: Himself [2] Father/Son: Yancy Fry, Sr. (deceased) Mother/Daughter-in-Law: Mrs. Fry (maiden-name: Gleissner) (deceased) Brother/Grandson: Yancy Fry, Jr. (deceased) Nephew/Great-Grandson: Philip J. Fry II (deceased) Distant-Future Nephew/Grandson: Hubert J. Farnsworth Distant-Future Great-Nephew/Great-Grandson: Cubert Farnsworth[3] Temporal Duplicate: Lars Fillmore (deceased) Ex-Wife: Turanga Leela |
| First Appearance | Space Pilot 3000 |
| First Line | "Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a giant monkey starts throwing barrels at you." |
| Voiced by | Billy West |
Philip J. Fry is the main character of the animated television series Futurama and is voiced by Billy West. He is usually referred to by his family name, "Fry".
Fry is a 20th century pizza delivery boy who awakes to life at the dawn of the 31st century after being cryopreserved since the first few seconds of the year 2000. According to the Volume 1 Futurama DVD, he was born on August 9, 1974, in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, being 25 at the time of the first episode.
The name "Philip" was given to Fry by Matt Groening as a homage to the then recently murdered Phil Hartman, for whom the role of Zapp Brannigan was created.[4] The "J" is akin to the "J" in Bullwinkle J. Moose, Bartholomew J. Simpson and Homer J. Simpson, in tribute to Jay Ward, creator of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.[citation needed]
Philip J. Fry is an example of an extratemporal character. His disappointments and incomprehension of the future and his joy at what the other characters find mundane in their native time are central elements of the show.
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[edit] Character
A common source of humor in Futurama is Fry's lack of intelligence and unabashedly pathetic lifestyle. He lives with his best friend Bender, rarely thinks more than five minutes into the future, frequently comes close to accidentally killing himself, and according to Leela does the worst W. C. Fields impression that she's ever heard. Despite being somewhat unintelligent, he has occasionally shown clever thinking in more demanding situations. He enjoys watching TV shows that follow the form "the world's blankiest blank" and singing "Walking on Sunshine", though the only lyrics he appears to actually know are "I'm walking on sunshine", so he hums the rest.
Fry is mostly childlike and unpretentious. Although he is largely self-absorbed, he almost always does the right thing when confronted with the consequences of his actions. He self-sacrifices for his friends and usually has a good heart. His overall appearance consists of red/orange hair that's styled into having two tufts spiked up in front (called "hair-horns" by Leela in Bender's Big Score), and two cowlicks on the ball of his head (note that Fry's cowlicks and ear are Matt Groening's initials, also seen and explained by Homer Simpson in a Simpsons episode), a white t-shirt covered by an unzipped red jacket, blue jeans, and black "Nikes". Matt Groening mentions in a commentary that this outfit is based on James Dean's outfit in Rebel Without a Cause.
Due to his experiences with time travel, Fry has created a number of predestination paradoxes. In the episode "Roswell That Ends Well", Fry travels to July 8, 1947. Much to Fry's disbelief, Enos, the man Fry thought was his grandfather, unconsciously indicated himself to be a closet homosexual. Fry ended up killing him by accident, and, having incorrectly concluded that the now-deceased man's fiance Mildred could not possibly be his grandmother, proceeded to have sex with and impregnate her, thus becoming his own grandfather, much to his absolute horror. When later reminded of this by the Nibblonians, he proudly notes that he "did do the nasty in the pasty". Later, when sent back in time to stop himself from being frozen, he is convinced to freeze himself (originally, he was frozen by Nibbler), thus allowing him to create the original paradox of being his own grandfather.
Because of his unique ancestry, Fry lacks the "delta brainwave", a normally-essential component of intelligence. Because of his "past nastification", as Nibbler puts it, Fry possesses a genetic anomaly that has caused him to assemble a random assortment of other brainwaves as a poor, albeit working, mind. This helps him save the universe twice from an evil race of flying brains, dubbed the "Brainspawn" ("The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" and "The Why of Fry"), as the Brainspawn's primary weapon, the intellect-draining "Stupefication Ray", suppresses the delta brainwave. Since Fry does not possess the wave, he cannot be rendered any less intelligent than he already is.
Fry is the deciding factor in the galactic conflict between the Nibblonians and the evil Brainspawn. In fact, the Nibblonians were responsible for Fry being frozen: their sages foretold that he would be needed to defeat the Brainspawn in the 31st century, but he would naturally have died long before then; thus, they had to freeze him in "The Why of Fry".
[edit] Timeline
[edit] Childhood
Named by his father for Phillips-head screwdrivers, he was the second and youngest child of his parents. He has one older brother, Yancy Fry. His mother ceded picking his name to his father, because she had picked what they had for dinner the previous night. When his father placed a mobile featuring a spaceship and planets in his crib (because he could not find one featuring nuclear weapons), his lifelong fascination with outer space began.
Fry lived in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, based on the fact that he, Leela, and Bender left the ruins of the New York City Subway at the Newkirk Avenue Station while searching for Fry's old neighborhood in "The Luck of the Fryrish".
During his childhood, Fry was particularly active. He took part in breakdancing and basketball, during which he found a seven-leaf clover that gave him the luck to beat his brother at both. He later locked the clover away in the family's bomb shelter in the cover of a Breakfast Club soundtrack in the "Ronco Record Vault", with the combination "3", only to have the safe opened by Yancy in search of a record to play at his wedding. Yancy later gave the clover to his son in memory of Fry and for luck in life.
[edit] Teenage years
Fry was a typical loser as a teenager and claimed to have spent his entire school time playing video games. He particularly liked playing Space Invaders while listening to his Rush mix tapes and drinking Shasta - so much so that his eyes bled from overexposure.(This may not qualify as canon, as it is shown during the "Anthology of Interest II" episode.) Also, in Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles, Fry reverts to the age of 14 and it is obvious his voice breaks. In an alternate reality shown by Professor Farnsworth's "What-If machine" (after Fry asked what life would be like if it were more like a video game), Fry's experience became useful when he was called upon to help General Colin Pac-Man (a play on the name of Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State) defend Earth from actual space invaders, a group of classic video game characters (such as Donkey Kong and Galaga) from the planet "Nintendu 64" who wanted quarters with which to do their laundry. Despite having played video games for the majority of his life, he admits to doing poorly on Space Invaders when faced with the last ship, exclaiming "I could never get the last one, my brother always got it for me!".
He has also had at least three heart attacks, implied to be caused by drinking excessive amounts of cola, over 100 cans per week, as mentioned in "Fry and the Slurm Factory". Presumably, he would have stopped at this point, but his drinking habits suggest he merely moved up to beer and Slurm.
Aside from his obsession with video games, he is an accomplished college dropout, dropping out after less than 3 weeks from Coney Island Community College ("Go Whitefish!"), which appeared to be a fairground ride. In the future, however, this is only the equivalent of a high school dropout; this motivates him to enroll in Mars University so that he can drop out from it. In "The Cryonic Woman", he claims that his parents kept him out of public school, deeming it a waste of taxpayers' money.
[edit] Adult life
Before being sent to the future he worked as a delivery boy at Punuchi's Pizza.
He had a very unkempt life-style and has made references to "mushrooms" growing on his bathmat or in his shower.
The episode "A Big Piece of Garbage" gives more information regarding his unkempt lifestyle, even stating that (when referring to human waste disposal) "One month my toilet broke, so I went straight in the garbage can". Even with this being his not so distant past, later on in the series he begins to show better personal hygiene, even taking showers ("The 30% Iron Chef").
[edit] Future life
By 1999, Fry was dating a girl named Michelle and working as a delivery boy for Panucci's Pizza. On December 31, 1999, after being dumped by his girlfriend and being told his stuff was left on the sidewalk, he was delivering a pizza to a cryogenics lab when he realized that it was a prank order for "I.C. Wiener". He was leaning back in a chair while drinking a can of beer at the lab when the clock struck midnight; and just at that moment, Fry fell backwards into an open cryonic capsule that closed upon him and froze him. In the episode "The Why of Fry", it is revealed that Nibbler gave Fry the choice to push himself in to later fulfill his destiny to one day save the universe in the future. He remained frozen for 1000 years, during which time New York City was destroyed and rebuilt twice. (It is revealed in the feature-length movie Futurama: Bender's Big Score that Bender was responsible for the first destruction while stealing the Nobel Prize for the reconciliation of East Coast and West Coast rappers in the 2300s) He was defrosted on December 31, 2999, sometime during the day (he did not defrost early; if the capsule interpreted "1,000 years" to refer to the average length of a year in the Gregorian calendar, Fry should have defrosted a few seconds after noon). Needless to say, upon reawakening, he found himself in a world very different from the one he left at the turn of the 21st century.
Trying to adjust to the 31st century, Fry gains the friendship of a cyclopic woman, Turanga Leela, and a bending robot named Bender. Together, they find Fry's closest living relative, the ancient Professor Hubert Farnsworth, who agrees to employ the three of them in his delivery business, Planet Express.
Now a fish-out-of-water, Fry often tries to recapture his past. He came into a large sum of money through a millennium's worth of interest accrued in a bank account (which had 93 cents in it before he was frozen) and furnished an apartment in a style befitting his twentieth-century lifestyle. He discovered the preserved corpse of his dog Seymour in "Jurassic Bark", and sought to clone him until he discovered that the dog had lived for twelve years after Fry was frozen. Fry assumed that Seymour went on with his life when he failed to return; however it was revealed in a flashback that the dog in fact spent the rest of his life waiting for Fry in front of Panucci's. However, in Futurama: Bender's Big Score, Fry's time clone is shown taking care of Seymour for twelve years; the dog does not die of age, but was accidentally caught in an explosion caused by Bender in an attempt to kill Fry, which traps Seymour in Dolomite.
Although Fry seems to have aged, his personality still resembles that of a child of very low intelligence, and is often portrayed as being very slow to pick up on events that are happening, as well as common sense. However, he is very knowledgeable about certain subjects, such as video games, television (such as Star Trek), movies (such as Star Wars), and scary stories. He also appears to know some basics in science; he appeared to know that he wouldn't be imbibed, because he was solid in "My Three Suns". Fry was also very oblivious to the fact that Michelle was not being faithful, although in "Space Pilot 3000" he told Leela that he was beginning to suspect that she was cheating on him, after earlier in the episode she had passed him on the road with another man saying "Sorry Fry, things just aren't working out." In "The Cryonic Woman", Fry shows Bender a picture of Michelle and "that ski instructor she was just friends with", a picture in which Fry is barely visible.
[edit] Alternate past
In Bender's Big Score, Fry travels back in time to January 1, 2000 in order to escape an obedience-virus that infected Bender, who had been ordered by three alien scammers to kill him. Fry also does so in grief, because Leela has fallen in love with a Head Museum employee named Lars Fillmore.
After eluding Bender, Fry then decides to transport himself an hour into the past so that he could eat the pizza that was delivered to the cryogenics lab. Upon the second transport, Fry encounters his temporal double (from an hour ago) and then accidentally falls back into the cryogenic chamber while trying to take the non-future money from the frozen Fry already in the chamber; when the first Fry was unfrozen on December 31st, 2999, he refroze himself for another 7.95 years, unfreezing 10 minutes before arriving to his funeral. While the original Fry resumes life in the 31st century, the duplicate Fry continues to live life in the 21st, resuming the same job in the year 2000 and moving into the apartment above Panucci's Pizza. He maintains relationships with his dog Seymour and his family during this period. However, it is revealed that he is deeply depressed with the fact that he will never see Leela again.
Deciding that he has to move on with his life, Fry gets a new job at the aquarium in 2003 where he quickly bonds with an equally depressed female narwhal named Leelu (an obvious homage to Leela as she has a similar name, purple skin like Leela's hair, and is unique like her as she has a tooth, which is rare for narwhals). However, after seven years, the aquarium decides to release Leelu back into the wild. Fry, thinking that Leelu would be unable to make it by herself after spending many years with him, decides to track her down in the Arctic Ocean. Eventually Fry finds Leelu and captures her, separating her from her mate. Seeing her distressed, he soon realizes his mistake and decides to do what would make Leelu the happiest by releasing her to be with her mate (who is orange like Fry's hair). Fry then returns to New York and says that all that matters to him is that Leelu is happy, as is Leela with Lars.
At this moment Bender, who has remained in the 21st century and is still programmed to kill Fry, shoots a laser beam into Fry's apartment, causing an explosion and setting it on fire. The fire burns Fry's hair off and apparently damages his larynx, changing his voice. Fry, looking into a mirror, realizes that he is actually Lars, so he heads to the cryogenics lab, placing himself in Michelle's cryogenic chamber and sets himself to be unfrozen in 3002.
Fry/Lars gets his job at the Head Museum, where he meets Leela almost 6 years later (since not long after their meeting it is shown to be Dec. 31, 3007). He eventually becomes engaged to Leela after dating her for a while, but at their wedding he learns that as a temporal double of Fry created through time-travel, he will have to die in order to keep from creating a paradox. Not wanting to put Leela through the pain of his death, he cancels the wedding only to later sacrifice himself to save Leela, in effect eliminating Fry's last existing copy as he was told would happen. Lars explains everything to Fry, Leela and everyone else in his video will, which is played during his funeral.
[edit] Friends
[edit] Bender
Fry initially meets Bender in the first episode of the series, where the two are waiting to use a suicide booth (Fry mistakenly believes the booth to be a phone booth). The impatient Bender pushes them both in, hoping to go for a "twofer"(Two-for-One). After Fry foiled Bender's attempt, the two formed a strong bond. As Bender put it, "Of all the friends I've had, [Fry's] the first.", revealed in "I, Roommate". It has been stated in a few episodes that Bender views Fry as a pet. Also Fry has wanted a robot as a friend ever since he was six.
In "I, Roommate", after being forced out of living in the Planet Express office, Fry moves in with Bender, only to find that his apartment is as small as a closet. They then decide to rent another apartment together. However, because of the interference from Bender's antenna, the apartment's TV, and other TVs from other apartments in the same block couldn't get any reception. For the sake of friendship, Bender cuts off his antenna so that the TV will get reception. However, they soon decide to leave that apartment and move back into Bender's previous apartment, only to discover that the apartment's "closet" is actually the size of a typical living room, with plenty of space for Fry to comfortably live in.
Bender and Fry, while being a rather odd couple, have a strong relationship, and have sacrificed things for each other over the years of their friendship, such as fame, money, and even their own lives. Their friendship is tested when the fossilized remains of Seymour, Fry's old dog, are unearthed, and Fry spends time worrying about him instead of spending time with Bender in "Jurassic Bark". Bender eventually feels sympathetic for the loss of Fry's dog, and even willingly jumps into hot lava just to save his dog, after throwing him into the lava in the first place (Ironically, it was revealed in Bender's Big Score that Bender himself was the one who fossilized the dog). Their friendship was also tested in "The Honking", when Bender is transformed into a were-car, doomed to kill his closest friend; however, Were-car Bender first attacks Leela, leading to jealousy on Fry's part. The situation returned to normal when Were-car Bender, offered his choice of victim by the original Were-car, proves slightly more eager to kill Fry than Leela, to Fry's great delight.
[edit] Seymour
Seymour was Fry's loyal and faithful dog. In 1997 while on a prank delivery, he finds an abandoned dog on the streets and names him Seymour (the prank name was Seymour Asses). After feeding the dog pizza, Seymour follows Fry who then decides to keep him. By 1998 he had taught Seymour to bark Walking on Sunshine, clean up, and wait for him after a delivery. Before Fry was frozen, Seymour attempted to prevent Fry leaving on his fateful New Year's Eve prank delivery.
He discovered Seymour's preserved corpse in "Jurassic Bark", and was eager to bring him back to life with the Professor's help, until he realized the dog lived twelve years after his disappearance. Thinking Seymour had lived a full life without him, Fry abandoned the project. In a flashback it is revealed that Seymour, like Hachikō, Greyfriars Bobby or Odysseus' dog Argos, seemingly waited out his entire life for his master to come home, never leaving that spot or giving up hope.
However, it is later explained in the movie Bender's Big Score that Seymour didn't actually wait the rest of his life, as a temporal double of Fry had returned to the past and resumed his old lifestyle although he now no longer worked for Mr. Panucci. It is also revealed that Seymour spends many years living with Fry. Now, his preservation is a result of an explosion overcoming him after Bender, who was sent back in time to kill Fry, blew up Fry's apartment above Panucci's Pizza. It is still unknown if the events of "Bender's Big Score" provoked a timeline split or not; the original timeline, were Fry was frozen and no one got to know about his whereabouts, and the alternative, created throughout B.B.S., were Fry resumed living his 20th century life whilst his original counterpart remained frozen.
[edit] Family
Fry's family tree is a bit convoluted, due in part to the reuse of common names, but mostly because Fry went back in time and became his own grandfather.
- Professor Farnsworth, Fry's great-great...-nephew and at the same time great-great...-grandson (plus two "greats")
- Cubert Farnsworth, Hubert Farnsworth's clone/son (biological clone, treats as son)
- Yancy Fry, Fry's older brother
- Philip J. Fry II, Fry's nephew, named in Fry's memory, Farnsworth's great-great...-grandfather and also Fry's great-grandson. In the alternate past created in Bender's Big Score, it is shown that Yancy still named his son after Phillip, despite him never vanishing.
- Yancy Fry, Sr. and Mrs. Fry, parents (Yancy Fry, Sr. is also technically Fry's son)
- Mildred Fry, paternal grandmother and one-time lover
- Enos Fry, believed by Fry to be his paternal grandfather until the events of "Roswell That Ends Well".
[edit] Love life
[edit] Amy Wong
Fry and Amy Wong had a short relationship in the episode "Put Your Head on My Shoulder". After spending time together, Fry and Amy recognize their commonalities (how they feel the same way about "junk, and stuff") which leads to a relationship. However, Fry quickly feels as though Amy is not giving him enough space, and decides to break it off. Unfortunately, before he can tell her, Dr. Zoidberg crashes Amy's hovercar, resulting in Fry's head having to be severed from his body and transplanted onto Amy's shoulder. In the later episode "Time Keeps on Slippin'", when Fry is attempting to remember what he did to make Leela marry him, it is suggested that perhaps he is a fantastic lover, which Amy quietly denies and Fry willingly concedes "I don't know what I'm doing". It is confirmed during "Parasites Lost" as well as the same episode that the relationship was sexual in nature.
[edit] Turanga Leela
Fry met Leela shortly after being defrosted when she was working as a career counselor at the cryogenics lab. Afraid of getting a career chip, which would doom him once again to a life as a delivery boy, implanted in his hand by Leela, he ran from her, but eventually befriended her after she abandoned her job as career counselor and joined Planet Express with Fry. Later on, Fry turned his attentions to Leela, and in subsequent seasons began his quest to impress her. Fry maintains an interest in Leela throughout the series, and he is frequently rejected by her. The idea of a romantic connection between Fry and Leela is explored more in the later episodes of the series.
In the episode "Parasites Lost", Fry and Leela are in an actual relationship, when parasites from an egg salad sandwich he ate inhabit his body and make him stronger, smarter, and more caring than he was before, and winning her heart with his newly developed skills with the Holophonor, which is incredibly difficult to master. Wanting to know if Leela's attraction to him was due to him or the parasites' effect on his body, he expels the parasites from himself, then talks to Leela to see if she loved him for who he really is. This effort fails when during his awkward conversation, he mentions events from during his relationship with Amy.
At one point, specifically "Time Keeps on Slippin'", Fry actually managed to marry Leela only to be followed by a speedy divorce. Due to the "time-skips" that take place in this episode, neither Fry nor Leela knew exactly what caused them to end up married until the end, where Fry looks out the window of the ship to see that he moved the stars themselves to give Leela a love letter in the sky. This message is destroyed by a black hole during an attempt to halt the time-skips before Leela gets a chance to see it. Fry decides not to tell Leela what happened. It is likely they divorced after Leela realized she was married to Fry and didn't want to be.
In the later parts of the series, most notably during the last two seasons, there are hints that Leela and Fry were beginning to fall for each other. While he traveled through time to 1999 in "The Why of Fry", Fry was present at the time of his past self's freezing, there to attempt to prevent it. However, Nibbler brings Fry to realize that the future is worth saving, for Leela's sake, and Fry froze himself. Nibbler in this scene says, "She must be the Other,"; however, this aspect of the plot was not explored prior to the cancellation of Futurama's initial run. In return, Nibbler helped Fry get together with Leela by giving him a flower, which Fry then gave to Leela after she had a bad date.
The clearest example of Fry and Leela's budding-yet-subtle romance is in the episode "The Sting", when Fry is accidentally "killed" after being impaled on a space-bee's stinger. The "death" of Fry, which she believes herself responsible for (and was, as she was the one who insisted on going on the mission), sends Leela spiraling into sorrow-induced insanity. However, it turned out that Leela was in a coma, and the events she perceived after being stung were simply a horrible dream. Fry, who only needed a replacement spleen, had stayed by her bedside the entire time, trying to keep Leela's mind together by continually talking to her for two weeks. Their survival indicates that they both received timely medical care. In the same episode, Fry finally manages to muster up the courage to admit his love for Leela in an attempt to wake her up.
In the episode "The Farnsworth Parabox", Fry continues to ask Leela out, but Leela makes up crazy excuses not to go (such as meeting the President or having sweaty boot rash). Later, as part of the main plot, the main cast of Futurama travels to a parallel universe. This was named "Universe 1" by the Alternate Planet Express. The alternate universe is basically the same as the normal Futurama universe (A.K.A. "Universe A") except that all coin flips are opposite in the two worlds. In the other universe, Leela and Fry are shocked to discover that their counterparts are happily married. Apparently, both Leelas at one point flipped a coin to decide whether or not to go on a date with Fry; while Leela A got tails and made up an excuse involving ghosts, Leela-1 went out with Fry-1, which led to a year-long relationship and eventual marriage. One year later after their first date, Fry-1 proposed to Leela-1 with a diamond scrunchie (a year after Leela-A's excuse, Fry-A got beat up at a Neil Diamond concert by a guy named Scrunchie). At the end of the episode, after returning to Universe A, Leela apparently goes out with Fry, though no long relationship seems to develop.
In "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings", Fry continues to improve his Holophonor skills in order to get Leela to love him since, as stated before, Holophonor proved successful in "Parasites Lost". Unable to do so with his original hands, he takes the advice of Bender to make a deal with The Robot Devil to exchange them for new and better robotic hands via transplants from a "random" donor, that were selected from a "Wheel Of Fortune" style board, only to find the "random" donor to be the Robot Devil himself. With his new hands, Fry ironically gets the good end of the deal: his skill in the Holophonor improves tremendously, allowing him to go on to public recitals, having his musical works sold with great fanfare, and winning Leela's heart once again. Inevitably, Fry was commissioned by Hedonism-Bot to write and perform a full opera. Fry agrees, but only if the opera is about Leela herself. Fry writes his opera; but on the day of the performance, Leela was accidentally deafened by Bender, due to the plottings of the Robot Devil. She goes anyway, hoping Fry won't notice. The first half of the opera is performed with great success; but Leela, unable to fully enjoy it due to her deafness, makes a hurried deal with the Robot Devil during the intermission to get robotic ears in exchange for 'her hand'. During the second half of the opera, angered by his portrayal in the opera, the Robot Devil demands that Fry return his hands. Fry initially refuses, until the Robot Devil threatens to claim Leela's hand in marriage. Fry relents, getting his old hands back, and is thus unable to perform the remainder of the opera. While the rest of the audience leaves in disappointment, only Leela remains, she asks Fry to continue and to see 'how it ends'. In a touching conclusion to the end of the season, and the initial run of the series itself before 2007, Fry manages to adequately play the instrument while producing a crude image of Fry and Leela kissing and walking off hand-in-hand.
In the 2007 movie, Bender's Big Score, their relationship seems not to have developed in the two years since. However, since she states that "[Lars] is the only man [she] will ever love", and since Lars is an alternate, more mature version of Fry, one can assume that she still has feelings for Fry and would be with him if he was more mature.
[edit] Lucy Liu-bot
After having a crush on Lucy Liu for as long as he has known, Fry decides to download a copy of Liu onto a blank robot, over the protests of the other characters. Eventually, the group discovers that the heads of many famous people, including Liu, are being held by Nappster, actually 'Kid'nappster, according to an altered sign. The process, which the heads do not want to be a part of, is very painful. The employees of Kidnappster send a team of rampaging Liu-bots to eliminate the group. In the resulting battle, Fry's Liu-bot sacrifices herself to defeat the other bots and the real Liu asks Fry to turn her off. Despite the group's opinion that robots and humans shouldn't mix, the real Liu and Bender fall in love.
[edit] Michelle
Michelle is Fry's girlfriend from the 20th century, who dumped Fry on New Year's Eve 1999 ("Space Pilot 3000").
After Fry was frozen, Michelle realized he was the man she really loved; so she froze herself in depression, not knowing Fry had been frozen. Like everyone else in Fry's life, she knew only that he was missing and presumed dead. No one had searched because his parents felt it was a waste of taxpayers' money. Therefore, when she was revived in the year 3000, Michelle was joyously and unexpectedly reunited with Fry. When he was fired from Planet Express, he ended up with Leela's old job at the cryogenics lab in a mixup involving career chips. He unfroze Michelle and they continued dating. Unfortunately, Michelle started to complain about the 31st century being too "weird", and the couple froze themselves, intending to re-emerge from cryonic suspension in the year 4000; instead, their tube was dumped in Los Angeles before the re-screening of an old Pauly Shore film. The tube Fry and Michelle were in was believed to contain Pauly Shore, who had been unfrozen early by Fry, and when they were thawed, only a few days had passed. They entered a few more arguments and then broke up conclusively in "The Cryonic Woman". However, she may still believe that his skills in bed are so-so at best, as hinted in the episode "The Sting".
In 2007's Futurama: Bender's Big Score, Michelle makes a brief appearance when Bender bursts in to her house/apartment (hunting for Fry) and finds her and her new boyfriend, Constantine. She seems only to be with him because of his good looks, and thinks his name is dumb. She was also briefly shown in the cryogenic lab as Fry freezes himself once again, where he breaks off a chunk of ice covering her hair.
She was voiced by Kath Soucie in "Space Pilot 3000" and Sarah Silverman in "The Cryonic Woman", and "Bender's Big Score".
[edit] Others
Fry also fell in love with a Southern-belle-type mermaid named Umbriel, but fled when he discovered the disadvantages of her piscine lower-body ("The Deep South").
Perhaps his most distressing romantic escapade, however, was backstage at the Miss Universe pageant, when he made out with "the radiator woman from the radiator planet", only to be informed afterwards that it was actually just a radiator in "Lesser of Two Evils", after which he asks the question "Is there a burn ward within 10 feet of here?". At his "funeral" in "The Sting", the radiator reveals with a disappointed hiss that he did not satisfy it. However, the funeral actually took place in Leela's coma dream, and is therefore not canon.
He once had a nearly fatal "snu-snu" marathon-type punishment in "Amazon Women in the Mood", which left him with a broken pelvis.
In "Love's Labours Lost in Space", Fry managed to score a date with an unnamed woman from the 21st century at a bar, even paying Bender to 'vacate' their apartment for the night.
Fry carried on a short-lived affair with Morgan Proctor, the bureaucrat that had replaced Hermes Conrad at Planet Express for a brief time, though the affair ended when Morgan removed Bender's personality in "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back".
In a particularly disturbing twist, Fry ended up going back in time, killing his grandfather and having a one-night stand with his own grandmother, who was then a waitress in her mid-20s, thus becoming his own grandfather, and hence losing his Delta Brainwave ("Roswell That Ends Well").
In "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?", Zoidberg visits his home planet Decapod 10 to mate. Fry helps Zoidberg to get together with a female named Edna that Zoidberg knew previously in order to mate with her. After Edna finds out it was Fry who told Zoidberg to say the things he said to woo her, she becomes infatuated with Fry, going so far as to invite him to her apartment and attempting to seduce him, à la Cyrano de Bergerac. When Zoidberg finds out, he challenges Fry to "clawplach", a ritual fight to the death. While fighting, the mating frenzy begins and Edna leaves with the king, along with everyone else. After finding out that Decapodians die after mating, Fry and Zoidberg became friends again, despite Fry having lost his arm to Zoidberg's claw.
Many of the women that he had sexual relations with, including the radiator appear at his "funeral" in "The Sting".
In the upcoming direct-to-video movie, The Beast with a Billion Backs, Fry becomes romantically involved with a new girlfriend named Colleen. Unfortunately for him, he is only one out of FIVE boyfriends that she has at the same time. He also becomes romantically involved with Yivo, a planet-sized tentacled alien from another universe, against his will.
[edit] Notable Events
[edit] Achievements
Over the course of the series, Fry managed to accomplish a wide range of achievements.
| Season | Episode | Achievement |
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"The Series Has Landed" | Rediscovered the location of the original 1969 moon landing site after it was lost for centuries. |
| "A Fishful of Dollars" | Was briefly extremely wealthy after earning 1000 years of 2.25% interest accrued on a bank account balance of 93 cents, amounting to $4.3 billion ($4,283,508,449.71 was actually the exact amount. When tested this turns out to be the correct amount he would have after 1,000 years). | |
| Was the sole owner of the Earth's last known can of anchovies (brand name "Angry Norwegian"), before putting them on a pizza and sharing it with the Planet Express staff who didn't particularly like it (with the exception of Zoidberg). | ||
| "My Three Suns" | Briefly Emperor Fry "the Solid" of the planet Trisol, which lies in the darkest depths of the "Forbidden Zone" in the "Galaxy of Terror". | |
| "A Big Piece of Garbage" | Along with Leela and Bender, attempted to save New New York City from a giant ball of 20th century garbage. After the first mission failed, he used his 20th century garbage making skills, which guided the citizens of New New York to create and launch a second garbage ball, deflecting the first one. | |
| "Mars University" | Proud of being a college dropout, he was shocked to discover that by 31st century standards, he was no smarter than a high-school dropout. He therefore briefly attended Mars University before dropping out at a higher level. | |
| "When Aliens Attack" | Saved Earth from invaders from the planet Omicron Persei 8 when he remembered enough of a 1000 year old TV show ("Single Female Lawyer," a spoof/satire of Ally McBeal) to write, direct and produce a believable ending to the series finale that he himself knocked off the air in 1999. His plan was successful, but the Omicronians decided not to give them the recipe for an immortality potion due to poor acting skills on the part of the cast. During the early stages of the conflict, Fry, under the command of Zapp Brannigan, helped to destroy the Hubble Telescope, which Zapp had mistaken for the Omicronians' mothership. | |
| Fry and the Slurm Factory | Won a contest to tour the Slurm factory, then discovered the secret to Slurm à la Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but to prevent it from being outlawed decided to keep it a secret. | |
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"How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back" | Briefly an Executive Delivery Boy of Planet Express. |
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"The Luck of the Fryrish" | Performed the septuple headspin, with the help of a seven-leaf clover. |
| "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" | Defeats the Brainspawn by imprisoning the Master Brain in a badly-written book "full of plot-holes and spelling errors", tricking it into leaving Earth "for no raison". He is able to do this due to his lack of the Delta Brainwave. | |
| "Time Keeps on Slippin''" | Learns to pilot the Planet Express ship, with help from Leela. | |
| "Future Stock" | Briefly a Vice President of Planet Express (PlanEx), and manages to block a company merger with Mom. | |
| "Roswell That Ends Well" | Travels through time. Does the "nasty in the pasty" thus becoming his own biological grandfather and the only being in the universe to lack the Delta Brainwave. | |
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"Less Than Hero" | Briefly a superhero, known as "Captain Yesterday". |
| "The Why of Fry" | Uses a "Quantum Interphase" bomb to send the Brainspawn and their "InfoSphere", a giant memory bank "twice the size of three ordinary memory banks", to another dimension from which there is no escape, once again defeating the Brainspawn. In the process of doing so, he travels back in time and pushes himself into the cryogenic tube. | |
| "Three Hundred Big Boys" | Briefly had super speed after drinking 100 cups of coffee in a short period of time allowing him to save the lives of the main characters and various minor characters from a fire that broke out in a museum. | |
| "Spanish Fry" | Discovers Bigfoot. Also remedies the marital problems of the king and queen of the planet Omicron Persei VIII | |
| "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings" | Became a successful Holophonor player for the second time and wrote an opera about Leela after winning the Robot Devil's hands in a "deal with the devil". Loses hands before finishing the performance, thus ruining his career. |
[edit] Injuries suffered
In the series, Fry is injured fairly often, but usually recovers by the end of the episode. Most of these injuries are accidental; however, a few are deliberate. The fact that he recovers indicates that he gets immediate medical care.
| Episode | Injury | Cause | Treatment |
| Fry and the Slurm Factory | Rendered completely sterile | F-ray aimed at his crotch | Live sperm is seen in Fry's body in the episode Parasites Lost. The DVD commentary hypothesises that the parasitic worms in that episode "unsterilized" him. |
| Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love? | Severed right arm | Cut off by Dr. Zoidberg during Clawplach | Reattached by Zoidberg, albeit on the wrong side of the body at first. |
| Severed legs | Cut off by Zoidberg during the surgery | None shown | |
| Decapitated | Cut off by Zoidberg during the surgery | None shown | |
| "Put Your Head on My Shoulder" | Decapitated | Car crash | Head attached to Amy's body while his was repaired. Later put back on his body. |
| "The Deep South" | Punctured Small Intestine | Was hooked by Bender's fishing line (off screen) | N/A |
| "Amazon Women in the Mood" | Crushed pelvis | "Snu-snu" marathon | Pelvic body cast |
| "Parasites Lost" | Impaled | A lead pipe propelled by an exploding plasma fusion boiler | Pipe removed and body repaired by parasitic worms |
| Severe damage to brain, including hand-eye coordination lobe | A microscopic robot of himself sliced Fry's brain with a rapier while inside his body | None shown | |
| "The Luck of the Fryrish" | Lost hair | Electric shock from touching live power lines with a rake then being struck by lightning | Hair replaced by hair robot |
| "I Dated a Robot" | Severed hands | Bitten off by a Tyrannosaurus | Replaced at "Handcrafters" |
| "The Sting" | Impaled | Stung by a space bee | Spleen transplant |
| "Spanish Fry" | Severed nose | Harvested as an aphrodisiac | Reattached with Leela's "emergency face-laser" |
| "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings" | Severed hands | Swapped hands with the Robot Devil | Swapped back with the Robot Devil |
| Bender's Big Score | 60% of his rectum gone | Nibbler heat-blasted the tattoo of Bender with the time code off his butt, with 40% of his rectum saved | None (explained that 40% was all that was needed) |
| Death (Alternate self, aka "Lars") | Sacrificed self with self-destructing alternate Bender | N/A |
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Fry was frozen for 1000 years in "Space Pilot 3000" and another 7.95 years in Bender's Big Score.
- ^ Fry is his own grandfather due to the events of "Roswell That Ends Well"
- ^ clone of Hubert
- ^ Joel Keller (2006-06-15). Billy West: The TV Squad Interview. TV Squad.com. Retrieved on 2007-06-09.
[edit] External links
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