5 ‘Scary Door’ Segments on ‘Futurama’ That Were Better Than Most ‘Twilight Zone’ Episodes
You’re looking at a series that’s strange and satirical. It’s a show inside a show inside another millennium. Wipe your mind on the welcome mat, you’re about to enter… The Scary Door.
On the road to creating the greatest science-fiction parody series in the history of television, Matt Groening set loose the single most scientifically literate writers’ room possible on all the tropes and clichés of the genre back when he premiered Futurama on Fox in 1999. Originally conceived as a part-pastiche-part-mockery of all science-fiction media, Futurama covers classic and contemporary visions of the future by viewing them through a simultaneously insightful and stupid lens that lets us laugh at every doomsday prediction ever made with the accompaniment of a foreboding brass section on broadcast television.
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The classic horror anthology series The Twilight Zone is a favorite target of Futurama through the latter show’s in-universe series The Scary Door, and as the animated show so often does to its satire subjects, Futurama regularly surpassed Rod Serling’s self-serious sci-fi stories in terms of pure entertainment value. Here are the best Scary Door segments to make Serling twirl in his head jar, starting with…
The Most Evil Animal
Short, sweet and to the point, this Scary Door episode from “Spanish Fry” wastes no time and leaves no room to misinterpret its powerful, poignant message. Man is easily the most terrifying, dangerous and evil animal — after all, it was man who first invented The Scary Door.
The Humblest of All God’s Creatures
This Scary Door segment from the Futurama movie Bender's Game is a bit of a curveball. Not only is this episode not particularly scary for a Scary Door story, but it seems to be parodying the conclusion of H.G. Wells’ classic science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds instead of an actual Twilight Zone episode. Perhaps that’s because Serling never thought of a tale as epic and inspiring as the time when Earth found salvation from foreign attacks thanks to the meekest of its inhabitants.
The Robot Who Did Too Much
A cautionary tale for the A.I. age if ever there was one, this Scary Door segment warns humanity about the dangers of over-relying on technology to the point where it surpasses us and leaves us complacent and slothful. This powerful portent premiered in the Season Six episode “Benderama” back in 2011, but with more and more college students using ChatGPT to earn their degrees and experience tragic irony for them, it will remain evergreen until 3011.
The Gambler’s Afterlife
Starting with a parody of the Twilight Zone “A Nice Place to Visit,” this Scary Door scene from the Futurama episode “I Dated a Robot” gets right to the punch in record time, leaving it plenty of room to additionally parody the episodes “He’s Alive,” “The Man in the Bottle” and “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” But, of course, this one can’t claim the top spot, because as Bender pointed out, it’s just way too predictable — I knew Eva Braun was a giant fly from the opening narration.
Time Enough at First
The Scary Door saved the best for first in its inaugural appearance during the Season Two Futurama episode “A Head in the Polls.” A direct parody of the single most iconic Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough at Last,” the first-ever Scary Door segment directly improves upon its subject matter by adding two terrifying twists on top of the original show’s paltry little broken glasses climax.
Just as the narrator predicted, this Scary Door episode was, indeed, something much better.
