Futurama can’t stop making fun of crypto and blockchain

More than 25 years after its series premiere, the animated series Futurama, known for its “shut up and take my money” and “not sure if” memes, has gone after non-fungible token (NFT) fans in its latest episode.

In the Futurama episode “The One Amigo,” released on Hulu on July 29, the characters based in the year 3024 struggle to understand the concept of NFTs after selling a series featuring different looks for the robot Bender. The show parodies the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection with the aptly named “Apathetic Fish Society” and explains how one might hypothetically steal an NFT using magical code from an ancient robot civilization.

“You can’t just delete an NFT. There are billions of copies stored all over the universe [...] But only the museum has access to a hashcode on the blockchain that authenticates ownership,” said children in the latest Futurama episode.

Jokes in the episode included the older characters literally pulling their hair out trying to understand NFTs, the differences between an image, non-fungible tokens, and digital art, and dozing off at the very mention of the word “blockchain.” The show aired a similar episode in 2023, poking fun at Bitcoin (BTC) by having people mine the cryptocurrency in a Wild West setting.

Futurama aired in 1999, roughly ten years before the first BTC transaction. It had been off the air for more than ten years before the show’s most recent iteration, starting in 2023. Set in the 31st century, the series rarely, if ever, mentioned crypto or blockchain before its episode on Bitcoin mining.

Digital assets have steadily become part of entertainment and pop culture, with one of the first mentions of Bitcoin appearing in a 2012 episode of The Good Wife. Hollywood movies like Money Plane have also used the technology as a central plot point.