“A Bicyclops Built for Two”
Futurama episode
Episode no.	Season two Episode 22
Writer(s)	Eric Kaplan
Director	Susan Dietter
Production no.	2ACV09
Original airdate	March 19, 2000
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"A Bicyclops Built for Two" is episode nine in season two of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on March 13, 2000. Bari Kumar (color stylist) won an Emmy award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation for this episode in 2000. Image File history File links Futurama_213_-_A_Bicyclops_Built_for_Two. ... Eric Kaplan is an American television writer, producer, and story editor. ... Susie Dietter is a television director. ... March 19 is the 78th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (79th in leap years). ... 2000 (MM) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The complete Futurama DVD collection The following is an episode list for the FOX animated television series Futurama. ... Futurama is an Emmy Award-winning American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening (creator of The Simpsons) and David X. Cohen for the Fox Network. ... World map showing North America A satellite composite image of North America. ... March 13 is the 72nd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (73rd in leap years). ... 2000 (MM) was a leap year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... An Emmy Award. ...

Plot

The Professor opens the episode by bringing the crew great news: several years ago he had tried to log onto AOL, and it finally connected. He sends the crew into the internet for fun. While playing Death Factory III, the legend of Death Factory II, Leela meets the only other cyclops in the known universe, but Fry dispatches him before she can find out who he is and where he comes from. The crew is sent on a delivery mission to bring popcorn to Cineplex 14, so Leela can't take the time to find him, but he recorded her screen name and sends her a video mail. Leela abandons the delivery, and heads off to the coordinates provided. Unfortunately, when she jettisoned the cargo, it missed by a margin and hit the sun, creating a popcorn nebula. Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth (born April 9, 2841) is the extremely elderly proprietor of the Planet Express delivery service in the fictional animated television series Futurama. ... Screenshot of AOL.com AOL LLC (formerly America Online, Inc) is an American online service provider, bulletin board system, and media company operated by Time Warner. ... Turanga Leela (referred to as simply Leela) is the primary female character in the animated television series Futurama. ... Polyphemus the Cyclops. ... Philip J. Fry is the protagonist of the animated television series Futurama. ...

The cyclops reveals himself to be Alkazar, sole survivor of the destruction of the planet Cyclopia. He claims that Leela was sent away as a baby when the blind moles of Subterra 3 launched missiles in every direction, hitting forty planets including Cyclopia. Luckily, before the crash, Cyclopia's smartest scientist managed to save a baby that was possibly Leela. Alkazar was employed as a pool cleaner and was spared from the chaos while fishing out a dead opossum. Leela decides that it is her duty to help rebuild the Cyclopian civilization, which primarily includes marrying Alkazar. While Bender loots everything of value, Fry tries to find out "what makes the Forbidden Valley so forbidden", and stumbles right into the dungeon. While he is in the dungeon, Fry tries to convince Leela to dump Alkazar; He was being abusive to her by ordering her around and making a fool out of her in front of his rat and pig friends. Leela had planned to dump Alkazar but she accepted his offer of marriage in order to save her race. This article or section should be merged with Virginia_opossum The word opossum (usually pronounced without the leading O, or with only a very slight schwa) refers either to the Virginia Opossum in particular, or more generally to any of the other marsupials of magnorder Ameridelphia. ...

As the wedding begins, Fry and Bender break into the Forbidden Valley and discover the secret of the planet Cyclopia. Alkazar is actually a shape-shifting alien who is engaged to marry four other women, each of a possibly extinct different species, all on the same day (he could only afford to rent a shapeshifting tuxedo once). He wanted the five women to scrub his five castles, and he used them to make a little money on the side. Leela and the four other brides expose and reject him, and the crew returns to Earth. The Professor tells Leela that in the many decades she'll work for him paying for all the popcorn she destroyed, she'll have plenty of time to look for her true home.

Cultural references

• The title spoofs the song Daisy Bell and its well known line about "A Bicycle Built for Two".
• Parts of this episode are a spoof of Married... with Children, which also starred Katey Sagal, the voice of Leela. Leela dresses, does her hair like and acts like Peggy Bundy, Alkazar acts like Al Bundy and his friends act like the studio audience wooing.
• One of Alkazar's four other would-be brides appears to be a member of the Great Race of Yith, a species of time-travelling body-snatchers from the H.P. Lovecraft story, The Shadow Out of Time.
• When Fry is on the internet playing a videogame reminiscent of 2-D sidescrollers, Fry jumps and shoots some crates and a Donkey Kong look-a-like. When he jumps he makes noises similar to the sounds Mario makes in his 3D videogames.
• A scene where Bender falls into a machine and slips between gears is a references to the Charlie Chaplin film, Modern Times.
• During the video game, Bender is destroyed by being cut into a Slinky, then falling into a lava pit.
• The story about the destruction of Cyclopia and the planet's greatest scientist sending a Cyclopian baby, Leela, to Earth is a reference to the origin of Superman, where before the destruction of his home planet Krypton, master scientist Jor-El sends his only son, Kal-El (Superman) to Earth. Leela, like Superman, is supposedly the last member of her race.
• There are two references to 2001: A Space Odyssey: As Fry enters the internet, Also sprach Zarathustra is played and moments later, he references Dave Bowman's line "My God, it's full of stars!" from the novel by saying "My God, it's full of ads!"
• Writers Ken Keeler and Eric Kaplan are depicted as nerds in the chat room. The nerd Fry beats in the video game is executive producer David X. Cohen.

Daisy Bell is a popular song whose famous lines (Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer do. ... Married… with Children was a long-running American sitcom about a dysfunctional family living in Chicago. ... Katey Sagal (born Catherine Louise Sagal on January 19, 1954)[1] is an American actress, singer, and writer, known for her roles in Futurama, 8 Simple Rules, and Married. ... The Great Race of Yith are fictional aliens in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. ... Howard Phillips Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 – March 15, 1937) was an American author of fantasy, horror and science fiction, noted for combining these three genres within single narratives. ... The Shadow Out of Time (1936) is a short story by H.P. Lovecraft. ... This article is about the video game character named Donkey Kong. ... Mario ), originally called Jumpman, is a popular video game character created by the company Nintendo, and is also the titular hero of numerous successful video games, many of the platforming genre. ... “Charles Chaplin” redirects here. ... Modern Times is a 1936 film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. ... Metal Slinky Rainbow-colored plastic Slinky A Slinky, or Lazy-Spring, is a coil-shaped toy, invented by mechanical engineer Richard James in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. ... Superman is a comic book superhero, originally created by American writer Jerry Siegel and Canadian artist Joe Shuster and published by DC Comics. ... Also sprach Zarathustra, op. ... Keeler at the 2003 Writers Guild Awards, after winning in the animation category. ... Eric Kaplan is an American television writer, producer, and story editor. ... David X. Cohen (born David Samuel Cohen) is a writer for The Simpsons and head writer and executive producer of Futurama. ...

Production notes

• This is the one episode where Bender breaks the law of Hammerspace and completely fills his chest cavity.
• In the episode Love's Labours Lost in Space, Leela says she doesn't care how many eyes a guy has, as long as it's less than five. In this episode, Alkazar later tries to marry a woman with five eyes.

Examples of Hammerspace pictured in a WikiWorld cartoon Hammerspace (also malletspace) is a fan-envisioned extradimensional, instantly accessible storage area in fiction, which is used to explain how animated, comic and game characters can produce objects out of thin air. ... Loves Labours Lost in Space is the 4th episode in Season 1 of Futurama. ...

Goofs

• Near the end of the episode, after the joke from Leela about Alkazar's morphing ability, everyone is laughing - if you look closely enough when Fry is laughing, he appears to have four arms and four hands.

Trivia

• This episode was rated TV-14 D in the United States. The third time for Futurama.
• In the chat room hallway, one of the doors has a Betacrypt 3 code written on it. Once deciphered, it reads "codebreakers chat room".

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A Bicyclops Built For Two