The recent announcement that Hulu is reviving cult animated favorite Futurama after nearly a decade has fans remembering their favorite moments from the show’s seven seasons, 140 episodes, four movies, two networks, and various video games and specials. But none of these is as notorious as the final two minutes of the 2002 episode, “Jurassic Bark.”
Futurama centers around the adventures of pizza delivery boy Phillip J. Fry, cryogenically frozen and revived in the 31st century. The episode spends most of its time on the story of Fry’s best friend/roommate, the robot Bender J. Rodriguez, who develops feelings of insecurity and jealousy when Fry finds the fossilized remains of his dog, named Seymour Asses, and seeks to have it revived.
While the writing is sharp and the voice performances of Billy West as Fry and John DiMaggio as Bender are excellent, it’s the end of the episode that breaks the viewer’s heart as we discover (spoiler for a 20 year-old episode) that contrary to Fry’s belief that Seymour forgot about him and lived a long happy life, his dog actually spent the next twelve years of its life waiting outside of Panucci’s Pizza for Fry to return.
The episode was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2003 for Outstanding Animated Program, but lost out to creator Matt Groening’s other series, The Simpsons, and its episode “Three Gays of the Condo.”
But that isn’t the end of Seymour’s story. In the straight-to-DVD film, Bender’s Big Score, we get a happier ending for Seymour, as a clone of Fry arrives in the year 2000 to rescue him. While not a universally critically acclaimed, the movie gave long-time fans a happy ending for one of the series’ most famously tragic characters.
