Futurama has teased an exclusive new clip from upcoming episode “Related to Items You’ve Viewed”, and there looks to be trouble on the horizon for Fry and Bender’s bromance.
In this exclusive clip it is revealed that Bender has quite Planet Express to join Momazon – the Amazon-esque corporation run by Mom, the evil venture capitalist from the original series.
As Bender says, at Momazon he can hang out with robots all the time – “and if a couple hundred get girlfriends, leaving me alone and devastated, so what?”
A loaded statement, if ever there was one. From the sounds of it, Fry and Leela have made things (even more) official. Given that Fry shares an apartment with Bender, this probably isn’t good news for their friendship.
The history of Mom in the Futurama universe is a long and convoluted one. As one of the richest people on Earth, she generally appears as a sweet, matronly figure with huge hair and a long dress. However, the reality is far more alarming: Mom is a greedy sociopath who is not above sending her three sons out to do her dastardly bidding for her (and slapping them when they inevitably botch her plans).
In the series, she owns Momcorp, which (among other things) manufactures robots, robot oil, cellphones, video surveillance cameras and orphanage-grade toilet paper. Doubtless, Momazon will offer more of the same.
Futurama itself has had an eventful journey to the small screen. Originally launched in 1999, it tells the story of Philip J Fry, a pizza delivery boy who gets accidentally cryogenically frozen just before the turn of the millennium.
He then wakes up 1,000 years in the future – that is, in the year 3000 – and the show follows his exploits in futuristic New York with friends Leela and robot Bender.
The new series launched on Disney+ in August after being cancelled by Comedy Central in 2013. It was revived by Hulu in 2022 and features the return of all the main cast: including John DiMaggio as Bender, Billy West as Fry and Katey Sagal as Leela.
Futurama also has a penchant for spoofing popular shows and companies: the series’ previous episode Parasites Regained was a riff on science fiction film Dune, while episode How the West Was 1010001 mocked the concept of Bitcoin and Westerns simultaneously – quite a feat in itself.
