An Early Draft Of Futurama’s Pilot Placed Fry At An Organ Auction
Much has been made of the 1989 pilot for “The Simpsons,” which told the bittersweet story of how the dog Santa’s Little Helper joined the family, but it’s clear that “Futurama” delivered an even stronger first impression ten years later. “Space Pilot 3000,” which begins with pizza delivery guy Fry falling into a cryogenic chamber and waking up a thousand years later, introduces us to a new futuristic world that has a lot of cool technology, sure, but is definitely not a utopia. There are suicide booths on every corner, angry drunken talking robots, and no shortage of delivery jobs that still don’t pay as much as they should. Fry still finds a better life in the fourth millennium, but it’s a major adjustment.
In one of the early drafts for the pilot, Fry’s adjustment to this new world (and this new cast of characters) was made even harder, because the circumstances that led him to join the Planet Express crew were far more chaotic. According to co-creator David X. Cohen in the commentary track for the first episode, the original plan for Fry when he first woke up in the future was for him to be “immediately dragged to an auction where he was bought by the professor [Farnsworth] for spare organs.”
It’s one hell of a dark joke to start the series on, although we know from the aired suicide booth sequence that darkness wasn’t a huge problem for them. Ultimately, the organ auction was cut because there was simply too much in the pilot script to fit into a single thirty-minute episode. “Were very over-ambitious at the beginning,” Cohen explained, “and we had probably about two hours of material for the pilot and realized we could not possibly use it.”