The Series Has Landed

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Futurama episode
"The Series Has Landed"
Episode no.	2
Prod. code	1ACV02
Airdate	April 4, 1999
Writer(s)	Ken Keeler
Director	Peter Avanzino
Opening subtitle	In Hypno-Vision
Opening cartoon	Porky Pig in Baby Bottleneck

Space Pilot 3000 The Series Has Landed I, Roommate Love's Labours Lost in Space Fear of a Bot Planet A Fishful of Dollars My Three Suns A Big Piece of Garbage Hell Is Other Robots A Flight to Remember Mars University When Aliens Attack Fry and the Slurm Factory
List of all Futurama episodes...

"The Series Has Landed", alternatively titled Episode Two: The Series Has Landed, is the second episode of the first season of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on April 4, 1999. Set on the moon, the title is a moon-landing reference.

1 Plot
2 Characters
3 Future products
4 Foreshadowing
5 Cultural references
6 Continuity

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Settling into their new jobs, Fry, Leela, and Bender are introduced to the other Planet Express employees: Company physician Doctor Zoidberg, intern Amy Wong, and bureaucrat Hermes Conrad. It becomes apparent that the ship needs a captain and Leela is promoted.

On their first mission, a simple delivery to the Moon, Fry undergoes severe culture shock. Rather than being a daring voyage of exploration, lunar travel has become a day trip to an amusement park called Luna Park. The actual documentation of the historical events of Project Apollo are somehow lost by the 31st Century, and instead they are replaced by ridiculous "fungineering" musicals about "whalers on the moon".

Attempting to see the real Moon, Fry hijacks a car from the lunar rover ride, despite Leela's orders not to, and takes it offroad. Meanwhile, Amy loses the keys to the ship, and has to recover them from a video arcade claw game.

Running dangerously low on oxygen, Fry and Leela take refuge on a hydroponic farm. After Bender arrives and seduces the farmer's robot daughters, the three end up on the run, trying to out-distance both the farmer's shotgun, and the lunar terminator.

Fry and Leela take refuge in the Apollo 11 lander (an upper stage cabin, faithfully reproduced and placed by an historical society), and Amy rescues them, as well as Bender, with her newly-developed crane operation skills.

[edit] Characters

Characters which make their first appearances in this episode are:

[edit] Future products

Future products which appear in this episode are:

[edit] Foreshadowing

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

When Fry places a magnet on Bender's head, Bender begins to sing folk songs; he also does this when Amy uses the ship's magnet to pick him up at the end of the episode. This malfunction reoccurs in a few later episodes whenever a magnet touches his head. The explanation for this is that the magnetism screws up his inhibition units.
After Bender's magnet malfunction, it is revealed that he has a secret desire to become a professional folk singer. This later happens in the episode "Bendin' in the Wind", where he gets to sing with Beck.
The giant bugs that Fry and Leela are milking on the Moon appear to be buggalo, which appear later in "Where the Buggalo Roam".

[edit] Cultural references

The title is a reference to Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong's transmission to NASA Mission Control that "The Eagle Has Landed". The Apollo 11 landing site is featured, though with the ascent stage of the Lunar Module reattached to its landing gear, and the US flag (which Fry notes was featured in an MTV advertising campaign) restored to its upright position (it is believed to have been blown down when the ascent stage took off). This is explained in the show with a plaque inside the lander explaining that the site was "restored" by the "Historical Stickler Society".
When Professor Farnsworth tells the crew "Nothing will go wrong" he sounds a lot like one of the scientists at the beginning of Half Life says, just before everything goes wrong.
The Professor has VCR+ on his massive television (on which he shows the new Planet Express commercial. This is a reference to the service created which would allow people with VCRs to record programming by entering a code printed in TV Guide or the television listings in newspapers. The advent of both DVD players and Tivo has all but made this service obsolete. Since it is 1,000 years in the future, the Professor's VCR says "VCR++", a reference to the programming language C++ as well as the method of increasing numbers in loops in C based programming languages.
The park name Lunar Park is a parody of the Coney Island theme park Luna Park.
The security team that throws Bender out of Lunar Park is called Moon Patrol, a reference to the arcade game by the same name.
In the arcade, some of the games in the background include "Gender Neutral Pac-Person", "Dodecapede", and "Mortal Kooperation".
Bender's poking of the Craterface mascot in the eye with a bottle is a parody of the scene from the 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune (The Voyage to the Moon), where a bullet shaped capsule hits the Man in the Moon in the eye. "Craterface" is also a derisive nickname for a teenager suffering from acne.
A ride in the park is called "Whalers of the Sea of Tranquility". The Sea of Tranquility is an area of the Moon's surface on which the landing of the Apollo 11 mission occurred.
The "Destination Moon" ride is named after the film of the same name, as well as the Tintin adventure of the same name. It also contains a subverted scene from The Honeymooners: Ralph tells Alice, "Bang, zoom, straight to the Moon!" as a wish, rather than (as Fry points out) a metaphor for domestic violence.
The rover in the "Destination Moon" ride is a reference to the Lunar Rover.
The insignia on the spacesuits worn by Fry and Leela on the "Destination Moon" ride is strikingly similar to a classic "Lego Space" insignia.
Bender, when talking about the Sexeteria, he shouts "Next year in Jerusalem!" This line is the concluding line in many congregations Yom Kippur services, the Jewish day of atonement. The phrase is to remind people of the coming of the Jewish messiah. Bender, of course, means that they will go to the Sexeteria next year.
This episode contains multiple references to Disney's series of theme parks:

The park slogan, "The Happiest Place Orbiting Earth", is a parody of the Disneyland slogan, the Happiest Place On Earth.
The boulevard in the entrance to the park is called "Moon Street U.S.A.", a reference to the Main Street, U.S.A. area in Disney's Disneyland/Magic Kingdom parks.
In the shot where Bender is confronted by Craterface, you can see a small circular sign on a wall which reads "33 1/2". This is a reference to Club 33 at Disneyland. The entrance to this highly exclusive, private club is located right next door to the Blue Bayou Restaurant in New Orleans Square. Beside the door is an "address" plaque which reads "33".
The "Whalers of the Sea of Tranquility" ride is also a reference to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at various Disney attractions throughout the world.
At the 11:27 mark, during the ride Destination Moon, the lunar lander appears to be an upside down Hidden Mickey.
The ride is also like "It's A Small World."
The "Goofy Gopher Revue" is also a parody of Disney's "Country Bear Jamboree" attraction, with its sponsorship of Monsanto possibly being a reference to the company's sponsorship of multiple Disneyland attractions in the park's earlier years.
The "Destination Moon" ride parodies a similar ride at EPCOT.

The songs Bender sings when he is touched by a magnet are "Blowin' in the Wind" and "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain"
The term "fungineering" is a parody of Walt Disney Imagineering.
The name of one of the robot daughters, Lulu Bell 7, is a parody of the Liberty Bell 7 space capsule.
The chase on the Moon closely resembles chases in The Dukes of Hazzard, including the space alligators and the old farmer stomping on his space helmet, as well as the American Confederacy's Navy Jack.
When Fry says "Cool, dark side of the moon!" the music that plays is an homage to Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon". After Fry says his line about the Dark Side of the Moon, in the background of the music you can hear the strum of the guitar to the first note of the song Breathe In The Air.
The doll that Bender won "from a tourist's pocket" and shows to Amy is a Kewpie Doll.
In the crate that the Planet Express spaceship keys fall into, there are several pink stuffed rabbits with serious overbites. These are Binky dolls - Binky being a character from Matt Groening's comic strip "Life in Hell".

[edit] Continuity

This is the last (and only for Zoidberg) episode where Dr. Zoidberg and Professor Farnsworth regularly appear to have teeth.
Even though there are heads in the 30th Century who were alive when the moon landing occurred (such as Richard Nixon and Leonard Nimoy), the true story about the moon landing is still lost.