The Newest ‘Futurama’ Episode’s NFT Jokes Were Already Old Last Season

The comedy show that’s supposed to be a full millennium ahead of modern society probably shouldn’t be playing catch-up with Twitter over tech jokes.

Remember back in late 2021 when an internet that was eager to get in on the ground floor of the next Bitcoin bubble suddenly exploded with speculation over multi-million-dollar sales of digital art? Back then, tech evangelists with an undisclosed amount of skin in the game promised a world that was mostly ignorant of the capabilities (and, critically, the limitations) of cryptography that Non-Fungible Tokens were the future of art, entertainment, finance, healthcare and every other industry that the tech bros themselves barely understood. 

By the end of 2022, anyone who was paying attention understood that those mind-melting nine-figure price tags that started the NFT craze were all PR stunts, and everyone who wasn’t already caught up in a crypto pump-and-dump collectively decided to stop caring about what some JPEG of a monkey smoking a blunt was “worth.” So, by the time Futurama started its grand return to the zeitgeist with the Hulu revival in July of last year, most fans likely thought of NFTs as the 2020s’ dumber, more wasteful equivalent of the Beanie Baby craze — if they still thought about NFTs at all 

However, in the Season 12 premiere "The One Amigo," which started streaming yesterday, the Futurama writers considered the topic of NFTs to be hot enough that they needed to open the second of four planned seasons on Hulu with a full episode about Bender’s experience creating, selling and stealing NFTs in a storyline so old and outdated that it needs a jar for its head.

In “The One Amigo,” Bender enlists the gaggle of Futurama kids to help him create a series of NFTs out of images of him in different costumes in an obvious parody of the popular Bored Ape NFT series that Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton infamously hawked in a Tonight Show interview that provoked a class-action lawsuit against the late-night host. When a NFT museum buys Bender’s entire collection and turns them into an exhibit, an enraged Bender flees New New York to rediscover his roots in Mexico.

Meanwhile, Professor Farnsworth, Fry, Leela and the rest of the Planet Express team band together to plan a digital art heist to reclaim Bender’s NFTs, all while fan-least-favorite characters Cubert and Dwight interject every couple of minutes to condescendingly explain the mathematical and technological principles at play in the creation and dissemination of NFTs. 

Seriously, like seven total minutes of “The One Amigo” is just the two most annoying characters on the show explaining the extremely uninteresting properties of the digital identifiers that everyone has been sick of hearing about since we still thought that the Futurama revival might have more dark matter left in the tank.

Simply by the nature of an animated series like Futurama, staying on top of topical issues is an uphill battle when the life cycle of an episode, from the pitch to the final product, makes any pop-culture-heavy plot line at risk of aging out of relevance. Picking a topic that was already out of style before it even hit the writers’ room was clearly a mistake given the chilly reception of fans and critics to “The One Amigo,” but the larger problem is that the Futurama writers feel that the show needs to lean heavily on what’s trending to stay afloat. Futurama started as a parody/pastiche of the sci-fi genre that surprised viewers with an occasional killer reference or A-list celebrity guest, but in the Season 12 premiere, the future was tacky, boring and non-fungible.

Unfortunately, Futurama isn’t done dragging the most over-hyped and underwhelming technology of the 2020s into the 31st century — look out for an entire episode about A.I. chatbots later this season.