“Lick that head! Lick that head!” – Planet Express Crew
Whose idea was it to keep all of the American presidents in the same room? Not a lot gets done when there’s only one president around, but a room full of their jarred heads can’t be at all productive! W
hen Fry goes to his night job supervising history’s most persuasive men at the Head Museum, he gets talked into letting the heads off their shelves and invites the Planet Express to party with them. The party is a hit, but it quickly escalates when Zoidberg decides to drink the head juice from one of the president’s jars.
The unique mixture of opalescence causes a reaction in the juice that forms a time bubble around all the presidents’ heads, allowing whoever licks them to travel back in time to the era when that president was alive. After learning from George Washington that his ancestor was a counterfeiter and traitor, Professor Farnsworth takes a concentrated amount of the temporal substance, which causes him, Fry, Leela and Bender to travel back to colonial America in order to restore the Farnsworth family name.
First they head to Philadelphia, where they learn that there’s a reason why New Jersey is the joke state. Oh, and that Ben Franklin was the only man capable of printing counterfeit bills. The crew embarks to Philly to ask Ben about the counterfeits, only to discover that the “s” looks like “f” at this point in the history of print, and that Mr. Franklin’s apprentice, Farnsworth, has disappeared, leaving nothing but a fake poo-penny. Tracking him to Boston, Ben Franklin takes the Professor and company to see Paul Revere, whose smithy is being used by the old, err, colonial Farnsworth for even more counterfeits. It’s clear that the Professor got his smarts from somewhere else down his genetic line.
While disposing of the counterfeit currency that would have been used to somehow spoil America’s fight for independence, Fry makes a grave mistake – it’s a time travel episode, you didn’t expect him not to, did you? Instead of killing someone important or impregnating his own family tree or any other number of potential paradoxes, Fry pulls a Sarah Palin and changes the story of Paul Revere. In order to burn the fake money, Fry takes one of the lanterns from the church that would warn Paul Revere when the British were coming, thereby immortalizing his story until some bonehead from the future goes and changes history.
I’m not going to pretend that I have any idea what the British Empire would have looked like in the 30th century, so I’ll have to go with Futurama’s take on the state of the, well, States.
The “altered” story of Paul Revere is the laughing stock of the present… future… whatever. Paul Revere is still an American hero, but not to his own people, representing the now-lost culture as a population of bumbling, uneducated, insert English colloquialisms here. Order is restored by the end, of course, but that’s not really the point of the episode.
The historical satire takes a while to really shine in this episode, but the critical attitude ends up being comparable to last week’s “Yo Leela Leela” by the end. The show hasn’t quite reached South Park-worthy levels of cultural criticism, but Futurama certainly knows how to pick their moments for social commentary.
Some stats and info about Futurama, “All the Presidents’ Heads”
TV SHOW – Futurama
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 6, Episode 23
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – FOX/Comedy Central
GENRE – Comedy, Animated Shows, Science Fiction
CREATED BY – David X. Cohen, Matt Groening
This review was originally published on TV Geek Army.