Within the “Futurama” episode “Amazon Girls within the Temper” (February 4, 2001), the blustering misogynist Zapp Brannigan (Billy West) takes management of a space-bound restaurant and pilots it via harmful areas of house, merely as a result of it is extra adventurous that method. Naturally, the restaurant is broken throughout its voyage and crash lands on a distant, uncharted planet with the Planet Categorical crew. They uncover on the uncharted planet a race of nine-foot-tall Amazon girls clad in animal pores and skin bikinis and carrying golf equipment. The Amazonians not often see males on their planet and should not precisely certain what males are speculated to be good for.
This premise, in fact, is cribbed from any variety of pornographic male fantasies stretching again not less than to the publication of H. Rider Haggard’s “She” in 1886. There’s a streak of colonialist fiction that dramatized faraway locations (that’s: far-off from Western Europe) as Edenic locales the place girls put on much less clothes and are prepared to have interaction in coitus with European males merely as an thrilling curiosity.
As such, in “Amazon Girls within the Temper,” Fry (West), Kif (Maurice LaMarche), and Zapp are taken prisoner and sentenced to dying for being male. Their type of execution, nevertheless, is “dying by snu-snu,” which is to say they may copulate with an extended string of nine-foot girls till they die. Bender is spared as a result of he has no genitals.
An oral historical past of “Girls within the Temper” was printed by Cracked in 2023, and the episode’s author, Lewis Morton, defined that, sure, he obtained to jot down a bunch of intercourse jokes, however that he was additionally impressed by sure episodes of “Star Trek,” particularly, the episodes whereby a pc guidelines a planet of innocents. Which has occurred greater than as soon as.
Loss of life by snu-snu
twentieth Tv
It must be famous that Zapp Brannigan is a really William Shatner-like character, who possesses a aptitude for histrionics and hefts round a massively inflated ego. He’s already a “Star Trek” reference. Morton admitted {that a} huge a part of “Amazon” was the scene whereby Zapp sang karaoke in a Shatnerian type. He mentioned:
“One factor we needed to place into ‘Amazon Girls within the Temper’ was when Zapp Brannigan did karaoke as William Shatner. Behind the scenes, Billy West and Maurice LaMarche used to do dead-on impressions of those well-known William Shatner voiceover outtakes, so we put a bunch of traces from these outtakes into the script. There is a well-known one the place Shatner’s berating a voiceover director and says, ‘You sicken me.’ The entire huge chunk of him being William Shatner was simply an excuse to place that right into a script. All of that is simply part of our ongoing love of and obsession with ‘Star Trek.'”
The twist partway via “Amazon Girls within the Temper” was the revelation that the Amazonian world was overseen by an clever pc voiced by Bea Arthur. The “Femputer” chosen legal guidelines for the Amazons they usually worshiped her like a goddess. The Femputer was visualized as an enormous wall-sized contraption lined with blinking lights, very a lot the best way a pc appeared in Sixties episodes of “Star Trek.” Morton admitted that the Sixties “Star Trek” computer systems had been a major inspiration for the “Femputer,” and he clearly knew about episodes like “The Return of the Archons” (February 9, 1967) and “The Apple” (October 13, 1967). Each these episodes featured worlds trapped in an early stage of their growth by an omnipotent pc.
‘The Return of the Archons’ and ‘The Apple’
Paramount
In “The Return of the Archons,” Kirk and firm uncover a planet dominated by a dictator named Landru who hypnotizes his topics to be placid and eerily serene. From time to time, they’re allowed a “Pink Hour,” which is form of like The Purge. Kirk later discovers that Landru is a pc that has been conserving his residents in line. The ultra-computer in “The Apple” is known as Vaal, a snake-shaped machine that has been overseeing a neighborhood alien species and ensuring they continue to be in a nonsexual state of childlike innocence. Kirk should destroy Vaal and train the aliens find out how to boink.
To that finish, Morton mentioned:
“One other shout-out to ‘Star Trek’ from this episode is that the planet is run by an enormous pc. There was not less than one episode the place they land on a planet with primitive individuals whose society is run by an enormous pc — or like, the Sixties thought of what a pc was, with it being as huge as a room and there is a bunch of flashing lights on it.”
Morton was pondering of the Landru pc (pictured above). He was particularly impressed, nevertheless, with Bea Arthur. With a decades-long profession, Arthur requested no questions on her foolish dialogue. It was additionally revealed that the Femputer was truly being managed by a robotic (!), resulting in certainly one of Morton’s favourite traces of dialogue:
“[W]e obtained Bea Arthur to play Femputer. She had a voice with a decrease register and she or he had authority, so it was an incredible selection. I assumed the road ‘Have you ever any thought the way it feels to be a fembot dwelling in a manbot’s manputer’s world?’ was unperformable, however she killed it on the primary take.”
