All Futurama Opening Quotes | Hacker News Reader

All Futurama Opening Quotes

theabbie.github.io

212 pointsmelector95 comments

People who like these could do worse than take a look at Ubik by Philip K Dick [0]. Each chapter starts with an advert expounding the virtues of the wonder substance Ubik, which can be used as beer, shaving foam, kitchen cleaner, coffee, hairspray, antiperspirant and others. Each ad has a great little caveat: "Safe when taken as directed", "Avoid prolonged use", "Entirely safe when used as directed", "Safe when used in a conscientious programme of bodily hygiene", "Do not exceed recommended dosage", "Do not exceed recommended portion at any one meal" etc etc

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik

Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

It made my heart happy that this comment was so quickly made.

At the time I watched SNL whenever I remembered, but not regularly enough. However this one commercial spoof has stuck out with me, and I see it referenced all the time. Almost as if it was constantly reused. So how did this one-time event (well, plus reruns and now internet memes) stick in our collective conscience?

Same with Douglass Adams -- I ran across it due to "Adams" being at the beginning of the alphabet, but it also seems that most geeks have consumed it also.

HFB had meme-like qualities even back then, to the point where it was referenced in a completely different skit (Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer).

I think it has to do with the increasingly dire warnings for what is marketed as a children's toy, culminating in the one about not taunting it with deliberately unstated, therefore presumably very grave, consequences for taunting it. The humor is in what is left unsaid, where your imagination takes over.

These are more clever than I remember, and I'm amazed at how many I don't remember at all.

Favorite so far: "Not The Episode With The Dead Dog"

Watched that episode with the dead dog once. Almost cried. Never watched it again.

Multiple Futurama episodes got tears out of me. I think it's a normal and natural thing to be touched by a piece of media to the point of tears. I've watched them again in fact.

Once per season they had the tear-jerker episode.

"Luck of the Fryish" has always been a favorite of mine. Not quite as tear-jerking as Jurassic Bark, but still a little sad with a somewhat somber ending.

Of the tear-jerker episodes, I really like "The Late Phillip J Fry". Most people tend to take it into account in the series continuity.

It’s really weird that people seem more emotionally affected to the episode about the dog than the ones about Frys family...

People frequently show more affection in movies to animals than to humans. The Walking Dead spent years graphically and brutally killing humans both dead and undead and no one flinched. Then one episode the starving protagonists killed a pack of feral dogs for food and suddenly there were tears shed.

Luck of the Fryish... if that's the one with the Simple Minds song, it definitely affected me!

Don't you forget about me...

Yep! It's the one where Fry remembers the seven-leaf-clover. I thought the scene with Yancy naming his son Phillip since his brother went missing was one of the best scenes in the series.

That's my favorite episode, personally!

Just hearing the song that closed that episode makes me want to cry.

That's why I love Futurama – it respects intelligence of its audience. Rewatching all seasons every couple of years only showed that the show grows with you.

I won't watch that episode. I think the opening quote was apt.

I'm not sure that the episode with the dead dog opening quote _is_ the episode with the dead dog (a spoiler), maybe was a previous one and because it was somewhat controversial this is a joke about it.

Can anyone confirm?

The two possible jokes works but are different, for me a pun of a previous episode is so much funny.

I mean to say - I won't watch the episode with the dead dog. So they fact they recognize that and added as meta info later was interesting.

It seems that it's from "Stench and Stenchibility", from the last season of the show... so, much later than "Jurassic Bark".

Thanks! It's a great meta-joke then.

How I loved Futurama! Much like with the Simpsons, it will helpfully provide a quote for anything, and its hyper focus on scifi and adventure made it more interesting to me.

Though I'm a fan of the first "age", before the movie(s) and cancellation. I heard bad things about the later seasons, and don't want to taint my memories of the show by watching them.

The average may have trended down, but the variance went up, and some of the best episodes are in the later seasons.

I'd suggest looking at episode ratings or something and cherry-picking. It definitely was not some sort of total tanking or anything.

In fact, I'd call it the only case I've ever seen of trying to "bring the band back together" that largely succeeded. Not 100%, no, but they did much better than average.

That said, when the show ended for the last time, I was satisfied.

I rewatched the whole thing last year. It’s one of the few shows that I can really rewatch the whole thing start to finish. I like the series more as it goes on.

IMDB ratings seem to agree with your sentiment (7ish out of 10 opposed to the 8ish of earlier seasons). But watching through the series start to finish I didn’t notice any drop in how much enjoyment I derived from the show. I definitely don’t think it will taint your memory.

And as another sibling post said, the send-off episode always tugs at my heart.

I’d recommend finishing the series if you enjoyed the earlier seasons.

Will do! Thanks everyone, you and the rest of the commenters, for changing my mind :)

Through multiple watches, I've come to really like Bender's Big Score and The Beast with a Billion Backs. They are very different than the normal 22 minute episodes, but they have a lot of depth that you don't normally get in regular episodes.

The later seasons have few worthwhile episodes, notably:

* S6 - EP7 - The Late Philip J. Fry * S7 - EP26 - Meanwhile (Series Finale)

That said, I agree with you, most of my favorite episodes are from the first four seasons.

Oh yes, The Late Philip J. Fry is about the forward time machine, what a masterpiece! Probably my favorite episode in the whole series.

There was also an amazing song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE1drY3A418

Original that it parodies for those not familiar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvYvtRmgA4o

As someone who watched them first in college about.... 7 years ago, I thought all the seasons were consistently good. There's really not many episodes I'll skip if shuffling.

Futurama gave me the kind of unfortunate habit of starting with the German equivalent of "Good news, everyone..." when telling users about something bad.

People who did not know Futurama found it puzzling, but it was just so funny I could not resist.

Also, I think the "second age" of Futurama was as good as the first one. I loved the series finale.

The final was just amazingly beautiful, I'd recommend you watch it anyways :)

Loved the first four seasons, but the rest were still Futurama. If you really enjoy it, you’ll enjoy all of it.

In college, we actually did the "Drink when you see the robot" game with that episode on a fairly regular basis.

They intentionally made a ton of scenes with Bender entering/exiting frame such that anyone seriously following the rule would be hammered before the episode was over.

That's awesome

For the crossover Simpsons episode:

“A show out of ideas teams up with a show out of episodes”.

Pure gold. Even if the newer Simpsons episodes are (imho) grade-A garbage, it’s strangely comforting that the writers are self-aware and self-deprecating enough to come up and stick with this.

There was also a caption at the end of that episode: https://www.theinfosphere.org/List_of_title_captions#Special...

Episode 76 is "0100100001101001". I had to check. It's ascii for "Hi".

I guess "Nobody doesn't like molten boron" was before the opening quote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghD5SHuR9mk

All the quotes are in pictures with the alt text being only the number of the episode. Online accessibility at its best.

And why do tell us, should somebody who is donating their time making something silly, jump through some hoops to live up to your standards?

Please send the web master a list of every alt text before you try and make it someone else's problem or complain about it.

The commenter, as I understand it, is blind so they can't contribute alt text because they can't see the image in the first place.

Not defending the tone or comments but it's important context

> In Comments: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Considering the nickname of the person you replied to, this user does expect to be banned at some point.

Think you could say the op was against this rule as well

You are pissed at me and it is part of the reason why I did it. I can duplicate the effort of the webmaster, send the alt texts, and maybe they will be cool and incorporate them in the post for the next reader. Or maybe they will say: "yeah, bro" and will promptly forget about me and my complains. On the other side, someone will be pissed at me because they feel guilt for something that they have nothing to do with. Yet, next time when they post a picture, they will try to avoid feeling bad by adding a simple picture description in their post. I will pay for this with a few down votes, but sometimes we have to take responsibility for our not so bright sides.

You are giving yourself way too much importance. Rest assured that the rest of the world does not share that sentiment.

This is not the way to get people on board with accessibility. Open a PR and fix the issue or come up with ways to make accessibility an easier branch to reach or more common knowledge.

It is a bit funny that you are complaining from the style of my complaining. Not offering a better way to do it brings the discussion to my level, which is a bit sad.

Anyways, the reason that such situations piss me so much is because of the sucker punch that they feel like. You click on something that is text, it can't be anything but text, yet someone has converted it to a picture to make it pop up easier in social media which by the way excludes me from the fun that I expected to share.

I see from your profile that you are blind, so you're likely missing some context here. The "Opening Quotes" are more aptly described as title cards that appear at the end of each opening. Generally, the title cards are the Futurama logo with short gag-lines, although it's not entirely text as there are often visual elements as well. The images are video screengrabs of each title card, rather than something the author created.

Yep, someone else mentioned it as well. On the other side, the author has bothered to enumerate each and every one of the pictures with a caption, just the text is totally useless from a11y perspective.

I sent an email to Abhishek because the repository their website is in seems to be closed source. I've offered to send a patch via email if they can forward me the code.

My email is listed on my profile if you'd like to collaborate.

Edit: Abhishek has agreed to share the source for modification.

Thanks! I'd be glad to join.

Edit: However, I can't find your email. Not sure why, but in your profile there is only some quote and "Can be reached on Freenode". Is the email kodah \at freenode.net?

It does suck that you can't read them, but they haven't converted them to pictures. Instead they're screenshots of the opening screens which have commonly have slight differences in presentation. As a person who can see I quite liked seeing how the title card text evolved as the show progressed.

But yea, it does suck that there is no accessible alt text.

https://www.theinfosphere.org/List_of_title_captions here is a list with just the text

The original episodes do not caption the text either. It's not like anything is lost by living up to that standard here.

Since it's hosted on GitHub, the blog is available as a git repo [0]. I'd check with the author to see if he'd accept a PR and then it's possible to contribute alts you desire.

[0]: https://github.com/theabbie/theabbie.github.io/blob/master/b...

I'm currently behind a corporate firewall which blocks Imgur. Not being very familiar with Futurama, I thought the entire joke was that the quote for episode 1 was "Episode 1", the quote for episode 2 was "Episode 2", and so on.

Something I’ve been wondering is how to most clearly encode both a title and subtitle in an alt attribute. Does it matter how I separate “Futurama” and “Proudly Made on Earth”? e.g. with just a space vs. semicolon, middle dot, lone hyphen, line break, etc.

The joy of Hackernews is that there is always someone to complain.

All the pictures are of the same frame of the TV turn-on animation. I wonder if someone did this by hand or wrote a script to detect the start of the animation and capture the image a specific number of frames after that timestamp.

> The show that watches back

Well, that was prescient, given how smart TVs send screen content data back to the manufacturers these days.

My understanding is that the Episode 111 quote is the only instance of "not sure if" on the show, and it was in reference to the Internet meme, not the other way around.

So that one is probably my favorite.

Yes, I remember the meme was already a thing when that episode came out.

You seem malnourished. Are you suffering from internal parasites?

"Uhh, is there a human doctor around?"

"Young lady, I am an expert on humans. Now pick a mouth, open it, and say [Zoidberg Noises]."

"Ahem, [bad attempt at copying zoidberg noises]"

"WHAT?! My mother was a saint. Now GET OUT!"

“Please rise for the futurama theme song” - Ep 41

I recently learned this song is mostly sampled, I had no idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoq5-bLYM5Q

Wow, what an amazing breakdown video visualization. I see there are a bunch of these, for e.g. Daft Punk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QwOpRh-IfI, Britney Spears https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXXUodk-pVo, Fatboy Slim https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaaQyVRndMA&list=PLmsQco5tyS...

How have they reverse engineered these?

Not sure exactly how it was done in this case, but the first sample (the "amen break" - you can look it up) is one of the most sampled tracks ever. There are documentaries about it.

I imagine that many people who work with samples and production and deconstructing would develop an ear for it.

Similar for rapper's delight too I imagine.

This is awesome, thanks for the interesting rabbit hole!

Now I want the same thing for Bob's Burgers, the store next door and the pest control truck. Last I checked it gets posted on the episode discussion thread on reddit but something like this would be really cool.

I had no idea there was a running gag like this on Bob's Burgers. Time for a re-watch!

I always found the Scary Door intros pretty great as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5oGJTUpbpA

I know it's a parody of Outer Limits and the Twilight Zone, but it always made me think of the "Lost room" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830361/)

I still to this day refer to Twilight Zone as Scary Door. All of my friends and family knows what I mean whether they’ve ever watched Futurama or not, surprisingly.

There is also a list of opening cartoons: https://www.theinfosphere.org/List_of_opening_cartoons

I used to be able to know these captions by heart, and knew the episode by caption alone. Can't do that anymore.

And here is a list with some additional trivia: https://www.theinfosphere.org/List_of_title_captions

I think this is the first webpage I've seen that doesn't load at all without AMP. Pretty concerning that developers are going down this route.

Futurama is great! I wish it would have gotten more popular but I guess most masterpieces aren’t appreciated on their time.

I can confidently say that some of best tv writing I have seen is from Futurama. Totally recommend it to anyone who hasn’t seen it.

I watched the first four seasons. I should rewatch the show including the later ones.

Has anyone figured out what episode 72 actually says?

Whilst another commenter has answered this you may enjoy this list of "Alienese" appearances and the translations https://theinfosphere.org/List_of_alien_language_sightings#S...

   12345607890A31B2C4D,07E1F93G306H37i039Gj!

   thanks for watching, futurama slave army!

Thanks for watching, Futurama slave army!

https://alienese.moxievillelabs.com/

Here's a translator

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/enfuturama/images/d/da/740...

Speaking of Futurama, those who like both it and Harry Potter might enjoy this short story, the only Futurama/HP crossover story I've ever come across [1].

[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/Futurama-and-Harry-Potter-Crossov...

I wonder why episode 96 has the message 100. Is the numbering off?

There were four direct-to-DVD movies between the Fox era and the Comedy Central era. I suppose they are counting those as four episodes (even though they were later cut up for broadcasting into a full season of over a dozen episodes).

I don't see any information regarding it, but I'm guessing this was a weekend project implementing similar ML as the skip intro button on Plex, Netflix, etc

another one including text:

https://theinfosphere.org/List_of_title_captions

...and including the unincluded:

https://theinfosphere.org/Unused_Title_Captions

imo the best episode (outside of the sad ones) is A Bicyclops Built for Two (S02E13), the gags are the best here and storyline is great too. second best is The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings (S04E18).

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