Fry and the Slurm Factory

"Fry and the Slurm Factory" is the thirteenth episode of Futurama and the last episode of the first production season, and the fourth episode of the second broadcast season. It aired 14 November, 1999 on FOX. It guest stars Pamela Anderson as Dixie. Fry is obsessed with Slurm, and when a competition comes out for him to see the Slurm Factory, he cannot resist. However, at the Slurm Factory, the Planet Express crew discovers the horrible truth about Slurm.

Act I: "Whimmy wham wham wozzle... let's party!"
Fry, drinking a lot of cans of Slurm, and Bender are watching All My Circuits, when a commercial for Slurm comes on. The commercial advertises a new contest; the grand prize is a chance to party with Slurms MacKenzie at the Slurm Factory on Wormulon. Then one of Fry's teeth falls out and he discards it in a pile of his other teeth.

Act II: "I've never seen anyone so addicted to Slurm."
Fry starts guzzling Slurm like crazy looking for the winning bottle cap, hoping to win the contest, but to no avail. Bender doesn't feel so well, running a fever of 900 degrees. After Zoidberg fails to find anything, the Professor takes the opportunity to test his new invention, the F-Ray. The Professor's device allows the crew to see inside Bender and find the problem, Amy's watch. While the Professor takes his environmental suit to the decontaminators, he leaves the F-Ray with Fry and Bender "to be kept out of the wrong hands." They immediately start using it to see inside of things, including Fry and the beautiful "Fembot". At the 711 Fry gets an idea and they start to use the ray to search for the Slurm can with the winning bottle cap. They look inside hundreds of cans throughout the city. Back at Planet Express, where Leela and the Professor are playing 3-D Scrabble, Fry and Bender decide to give up. After declaring his disgust with Slurm, Fry immediately goes to the refrigerator and takes out some Slurm. He begins drinking but quickly start choking on the winning bottle cap lodged in his throat.

Act III: "Something's rotten on planet Wormulon!"
Fry and all of his friends arrive on Wormulon, and are greeted by Glurmo, who will lead them on the tour, and Slurms MacKenzie. Glurmo takes them inside the factory to a garden with Slurm cans plants, where they encounter the Grunka Lunkas, little people mixing the ingredients and singing across the Slurm river. Everyone gets on a boat and they see a mysterious door at the middle of the tour, which leads them to begin asking questions about the secret ingredient of Slurm. Fry notices the river they are navigating in is made of Slurm so he wants to drink it, he falls in and Leela jumps in to save him; Bender jumps as well, just to fit in. Sucked down the drain, they wind up lost in an underground part of the factory with the Slurm of the river pouring into a sewer. Fry tastes Slurm from the river, only to discover it's not Slurm at all, and they begin nosing around inside a tunnel where they see two doors marked "Real Factory" and "Fake Factory", which is the factory they had come from. Fry finally sees Slurm cans in a conveyor belt and immediately drinks it, but stops when they discover the disgusting secret - Slurm is a fluid squirted out by a giant worm: the Slurm Queen! Meanwhile Zoidberg, Amy, Hermes and the Professor finish the tour at the gift shop, and Glurmo notices that the others are missing so he decides to look for them, suspecting they had found the "Real Factory".

Act IV: "That's the secret ingredient of Slurm? Ewwwwww!"
Despite knowing the secret, Fry continues drinking Slurm and Leela knocks the can out of his hand, which makes the Slurm Queen see them. They try to escape, only to run in a circle and wind up back in the room with the Slurm Queen, where Glurmo captures them. The Slurm Queen wants them destroyed so they can't tell anybody about the secret ingredient. Bender is to be made into Slurm cans, Leela is to be dipped into a vat of Royal Slurm, transforming her into a new Slurm Queen. Fry is allowed to go free after being force-fed a taste of concentrated Super-Slurm, which is so addictive he can't stop eating it, even to save his friends. Still eating, Fry doesn't know whether to continue or to save his friends. He drags the vat over until he can release Leela. She saves Bender, and then dumps the Super-Slurm down a sewer grate, to Fry's horror, so much so he tries to bite his arms off to fit through the grate. They make their escape, and run into Slurms MacKenzie, who wants to escape with them, saying he is tired of partying all the time. When the Slurm Queen finds them, Slurms sacrifices himself to allow the crew to escape with the babes he had partied with for 40 years. It ends with them all drinking Slurm and partying on the ship.

Reception
On 12 June 2009, three days after the announcement of the second run, the episode was named #3 on 's list of top 25 Futurama episodes.

Lyrics

 * Grunka Lunka Songs

Trivia

 * According to audio commentary, Glurmo's name was originally to have been "Slurmy Slonka" - furthering the references to Willy Wonka.
 * Mixing Hydrogen molecules, with oxygen atoms to create water, as the Grunka Lunkas supposedly do during Slurm production, would actually cause a massive fire and blow up the tanks. Whether this was a hint to observant viewers of the upcoming plot twist or actually a goof is unknown.
 * Perhaps the hydrogen atoms are passed through a semipermiable membrane, one which only allows protons to pass through, and the remaining energy, which would be seen as combustion if the reaction was triggered as such, would now be transferred to the electron, both creating the pure water and electricity at the same time, with no explosion neccessary.
 * During the scene where Leela and the Professor, are playing 3D Scrabble, the Professor's current letters are F, U, U, T, A, M, and R (one A short of FUTURAMA due to 7-letter rack limit) in that order.
 * Also the words on the other boards are One, Eye, Matt, Area, Prop, Only, Donut, One, and Emu.

Continuity

 * Professor Farnsworth threatens to get both Fry and Gunther neutered.
 * Fry's sperm production, damaged when Bender used the F-Ray on him, is healed.
 * Fry's sperm production, damaged when Bender used the F-Ray on him, is healed.
 * Fry's sperm production, damaged when Bender used the F-Ray on him, is healed.

Allusions

 * The episode's plot is a parody of both ' and '.
 * The Factory, the Grunka Lunkas, and Glurmo are references to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
 * The Slurm Queen's plan of using Leela to market New Slurm is a reference to.
 * Slurms MacKenzie is a reference to, a former  advertising mascot.
 * The Soylent Cola is the first of many references to Soylent Green in the show.
 * 3D Scrabble, the game played by Leela and Professor Farnsworth, is a reference to Star Trek's 3D Chess.
 * The translation mentions "the elusive yak-face". Yak face is a rare Star Wars figure of not released in the USA. Mint figures have sold for thousands of dollars. It was added because David X. Cohen owns one.
 * When the Professor uses the F-Ray on Bender, his brain is shown to be powered by (a common CPU from the 1980s used in the Apple II, Nintendo Famicom/NES, and Commodore 64 computers).
 * In the gift shop, the shirt Zoidberg wears says Slurm in Hebrew, adding to the Jewish persona of Zoidberg.
 * One of the more popular souvenirs from Israel is a t-shirt with the Coca-Cola logo in Hebrew.

Goofs

 * Fry says he can't swim, but he is treading water, once Leela jumps in to save him.
 * Fry, Leela and Bender went down the drain in the Slurm river, yet when they open the door to the fake factory, it is revealed they are level with the river.
 * The river may have been on a slope, making it so that after going down a drain on a high part of a river, one is level with a low part.
 * The Slurm Queen says that milk comes from a cow's behind, but we learn in "A Fishful of Dollars" that cows are extinct. Milk came from cows, but no longer comes from them.
 * Milk does not come from a cow's behind, at least in our time, and neither does honey come from a bee's behind. However, the Queen could have been purposefully lying to make Slurm seem less disgusting to the crew.
 * The machine which was to recycle Bender to make Slurm cans has no back panel when it is first shown, the cave wall behind it can be seen inside the opening. It is dark inside the machine every other time it is seen.
 * At the very end of the episode, Bender drinks a can of Slurm and says, "Hey, that's not that bad", yet in other episodes ("The 30% Iron Chef" for example) we learn that taste isn't one of Bender's 8 senses.
 * Bender has been able to taste lots of drinks, so he may just not be able to taste solid food.
 * In some shots, the hole in Bender's body disappears.

Alien Language Sightings
Time: 01:19

Location: Rules of the contest

Language: AL1

Translation: The following species are ineligible: space wasps, space beavers, any other animal with the word 'space' in front of it, space chickens, and the elusive yak-face.

Time: 03:25

Location: Eye Chart

Language: AL1

Translation: n o s q u i n t i n g f o u r e y e s

Characters

 * Amy
 * Debut: Trixie
 * Bender
 * Boxy Robot
 * Calculon
 * Debut: Dixie
 * Monique
 * Fry
 * Debut: Glurmo
 * Debut: Grunka Lunkas
 * Debut: Hermaphrobot
 * Hermes
 * Leela
 * Prof. Farnsworth
 * Debut: Slurms MacKenzie
 * Debut: Slurm Master
 * Debut: Slurm Queen
 * Zoidberg

Episode Credits

 * Writer
 * Lewis Morton
 * Director
 * Ron Hughart
 * Voice Actors
 * Billy West
 * Katey Sagal
 * John DiMaggio
 * Tress MacNeille
 * Dave Herman
 * Maurice LaMarche
 * Phil LaMarr
 * Lauren Tom
 * Special Guest
 * Pamela Anderson
 * DVD Commentatary
 * David X. Cohen
 * John DiMaggio
 * Lewis Morton
 * Matt Groening
 * Rich Moore
 * Ron Hughart