The Futurama Halloween Episode

Jay’s Month of Halloween, Day 3- Futurama “The Honking”

We all know how Matt Groening’s The Simpsons comes out with a Halloween special every year. Did you know that there was a Halloween special for Groening’s other hit show, Futurama? Titled “The Honking”, it aired first week of November, 2000, and it was awesome!

While staying at a castle he inherited from his deactivated Uncle Vladimir, Bender gets run over by a were-car! He then gets cursed as a were-car himself and starts making roadkill out of everyone! The only way to stop the curse is to hunt down the original were-car and destroy it!

Classic Horror Meets Sci-Fi

This episode contained a lot of the hallmarks of classic horror films. The initial setting’s in a Gothic castle in Eastern Europe. It’s appropriately scary with a cemetery, spiders, and robot ghosts. The real draw, though, was the were-car. I don’t know how the curse actually lets Bender turn into a car, but I didn’t really care. It’s like watching a Transformer!

Since Futurama’s a sci-fi show, the horror tropes got a nice adaptation to fit it. The curse is explained as a virus transmitted from robot to robot, but that wasn’t the cool part. I though the cool part was how Farnsworth explained how the robot ghosts existed. Programming leaked into an old modem and infected the castle; of course.

I may not be a big fan of The Simpsons outside of the Halloween episodes, but I’ve been a fan of Futurama for years. It’s still one of the funniest sci-fi shows ever made, and I binged it on Netflix before it got taken off. Here’s to Halloween, and to the memory of Bender and Futurama.

Click here to see the FANDOM Article I did for Halloween last year.

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