The Futurama Holiday Spectacular

"The Futurama Holiday Spectacular", originally titled "Holiday Val-U-Pak", is the one hundred and first episode of Futurama, the thirteenth of the sixth production season and the seventh broadcast season. It is the third seasonal episode so far, though parts of Bender's Big Score exhibit seasonal themes. It aired 21 November 2010 on Comedy Central, and guest starred Al Gore as himself and Coolio as Kwanzaa-bot.

Openings
Everyone of the three segments begin with a message from the episode's sponsor, Gunderson's Nuts.

Act I: X-mas
It's X-mas Day again, and the Planet Express crew are preparing for the imminent attack from Santa Claus. Fry begins to feel depressed that X-mas just isn't like the way he used to celebrate Christmas, but he can't quite understand what is missing. Suddenly, Santa bursts in through the fireplace and answers his question, in song: what they are missing is an old-fashioned Pine Tree. He then kills Scruffy and leaves. The crew realize that Santa was right, and they need to bring Pine Trees back from extinction. They go to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to find some pine seeds. The crew are taken in by the Norwegian Seed Guard who give them a handful of seeds. However, the Pine seeds that they take were contaminated with germs from the nearby Germ Warfare Repository, but they do not take this into consideration. Fry plants the seeds in the dirt near the Planet Express Headquarters. By X-mas next year, it has grown into a small tree. Dick Cheney's head sees it, and, as his Vice-President commands Richard Nixon's head to steal the tree. Nixon replants the tree at the Whitehouse and they an annual tree lighting. However, as soon as the tree is lit, it grows into a gigantic Pine Tree. The Norwegian Guard admits that it may have been the germs, and the tree begins to fire its pine cones off of itself and into the soil with an explosion. A tree grows from everyone of those cones, and eventually, the entire planet Earth is covered in coniferous forests. The crew is optomistic about the positive environmental impact at first, but then the Professor and Al Gore's head discover that the oxygen level in the atmosphere is dangerously high at eighty percent. Bender Bending Rodriguez lights a cigar and the entire atmosphere of Earth burns up, killing billions. In space, Santa Claus flies by in his sleigh, as if the whole thing was planned by him to kill everybody. He then pleasantly tells us to stay tuned for the next segment.

Act II: Robanukah
It's the end of the X-mas break, and the Planet Express Crew is about to destroy the gifts that they forgot to deliver. Bender begins to complain that only the human holidays are celebrated by them, but a robot holiday, like Robanukah (a day made up by him to get out of work), isn't. He manages to convince them, in song, to let him celebrate Robanukah by not doing work, and watching two Fembots named Ruth and Esther wrestle in Petroleum Oil. However, Bender discovers that he only has enough oil for Ruth and Esther to wrestle for four and a half weeks, when Robanukah is supposed to last for six and a half weeks. When he goes to buy more at a Mombil gas station, Sal's Friend informs them that the Earth has ran dry of Petroleum Oil. Since Ruth and Esther don't wrestle without oil, Bender makes the Professor install a huge drill to the front of the Ship and drill a tunnel deep into the Earth to find some a small amount. Along the way, they meet an Albino Humping Worm, which humps the ship. They manage to escape that and drill even deeper. As the ship continues to fall apart, and the heat rises, the crew gets more and more annoyed at being forced to risk their lives just for Bender. Bender gets mad at their disrespect for the robot tradition, but then, part of the ship caves in and crushes all of the crew except for Bender. The ship ends up destroyed, and jammed in the tunnel, more than two hundred kilometres underground. Five hundred million years later, Bender is still in the ship. He has been relaxing in the side of it that wasn't destroyed. Bender begins to miss the others, but then realizes that over the millions of years, the crew turned into Petroleum Oil. He collects some and drills back to the surface with his head, where all of New New York has turned into desert, except for the Planet Express Building. He walks in to give the Fembots his oil, but is surprised to find out that the oil that was supposed to last for four and a half weeks had lasted five hundred million years, and that Ruth and Esther were wrestling all this time. Bender proclaims it a Robanukah miracle.

Act III: Kwanzaa
The crew all visit the Conrad Aparment for a Kwanzaa party, with many of the African-American supporting characters, including Barbados Slim and Ethan "Bubblegum" Tate. At the dinner table, Dr. John A. Zoidberg wishes that someone could tell them more about Kwanzaa's ancient traditions. To answer him, Kwanzaa-bot bursts in through the wall like the and explains, in rap, the seven principles of Kwanzaa. Before he leaves, he reminds LaBarbara that the seven candles of Kwanzaa needs to be made of Beeswax. LaBarbara makes Hermes Conrad and his co-workers to go out in the middle of the night to find some. At Petunia's Self-Serve Bee Farm, one of the few bee farms open on Kwanzaa, Petunia's bee's have been suffering from, due to the Bee Parasites that have attached themselves to the bees. Since they have no beeswax, they resort to another option: finding wax from the Space Bees that almost killed Fry and Leela last time. They fly to the bee's Space Hive, equip Bender with a Trans-Bumblator and cautiously enter. inside, they discover that the bees there are also suffering from the same parasites. The Queen Bee explains to them that the parasites have been making her children fight with each other, and create chaos in the hive. Although they got enough wax, Hermes thinks that the right thing to do would be to help the Queen restore order by explaining the principles of Kwanzaa. They are successful, and the bees go back to working together. However, now that the bees are back to normal, they go back to attacking the Planet Express Crew. Kwanzaa-bot reappears to help them, but is then killed by the bees. The crew end up covered in wax and slowly burning to death as the bees use them as candles.

Closing
A curtain comes down and Al Gore's head informs the audience that the crew will be back with new episodes next year, with him as Captain Lance Starman. Amy Wong comes in wearing a Gunderson's Nuts costume, for one last piece of advertisement.

Trivia

 * This is the first episode to feature the name of the series in its title.
 * This is the first non-canon episode to not feature the What-If Machine.

Continuity

 * Hermes' home is revisited. The Conrad home has been seen twice before, once in "The Route of All Evil" and once in Bender's Big Score.
 * The giant Space Bees are seen again, previously having been introduced in "The Sting".
 * Dwight can be seen reading a Captain Yesterday comic, referencing "Less than Hero".
 * The way the cake house is destroyed during the Santa song is reminiscent to the way the house where Enos Fry dies is destroyed in "Roswell that Ends Well".
 * In the shot where pine trees are springing all around Earth, we can see our planet is turning in the wrong direction, acknowledging the events of "That Darn Katz!".

Goofs

 * When Kwanzaa-bot was rapping, the beat played throughout the whole song, even when they stopped playing the instruments.

Characters

 * Al Gore
 * Amy
 * Barbados Slim
 * Bender
 * Captain Yesterday
 * Bubblegum
 * Debut: Dick Cheney's head
 * Dwight
 * Petunia
 * Professor Farnsworth
 * Fry
 * Hermes
 * H. G. Blob
 * Hyper-Chicken
 * Kwanzaa-bot
 * LaBarbara
 * Norwegian Seed Guard
 * Leela
 * Nixon
 * Robot Santa Claus
 * Queen Bee
 * Sal's friend
 * Santa Claus' aides
 * Santa Claus' reindeers
 * Scruffy
 * Tinny Tim
 * Zoidberg