Futurama is an American animated science fiction sitcom created by Matt Groening and developed by Groening and David X. Cohen for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series follows the adventures of a late-20th-century New York City pizza delivery boy, Philip J. Fry, who, after being unwittingly cryogenically frozen for one thousand years, finds employment at Planet Express, an interplanetary delivery company in the retro-futuristic 31st century.
Along with the employees of Planet Express, Futurama includes a large array of characters, including co-workers, media personalities, business owners, extended relatives, townspeople, aliens, and villains. Many of these characters were created for one-time gags, background scenes, or other functions, but later gained expanded roles. Other characters started as background characters, and have been used to personify new roles later on in the series.
The main characters are listed first; all other characters are listed in alphabetical order. Only main, supporting, and recurring characters are listed, with brief descriptions of the main and supporting characters also given.
Overview Character Voiced by Seasons 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Philip J. Fry Billy West colspan="14" Professor Farnsworth colspan="14" Dr. Zoidberg colspan="14" Zapp Brannigan colspan="14" Turanga Leela Katey Sagal colspan="14" Bender John DiMaggio colspan="14" Amy Wong Lauren Tom colspan="4" colspan="10" Hermes Conrad Phil LaMarr colspan="4" colspan="10" Kif Kroker Maurice LaMarche colspan="3" colspan="2" colspan="7" Nibbler Frank Welker colspan="3" colspan="2" Mom Tress MacNeille colspan="6" colspan="2" colspan="4" Scruffy David Herman colspan="2" colspan="2" colspan="4" colspan="2" colspan="4"
Main characters
Philip J. Fry
Philip J. Fry (voiced by Billy West), primarily known by his surname Fry, is the main protagonist of the series. He is a 20th-century pizza delivery boy in New York City who, after getting dumped by his girlfriend and being stuck in a dead-end job, is cryogenically frozen on December 31, 1999, waking up 1000 years later just before the year 3000. After meeting Leela and Bender, the trio find employment at the Planet Express delivery company, owned by Fry's distant descendant Professor Farnsworth. Ironically, Fry becomes the delivery boy for Planet Express after rejecting his predetermined job of being a delivery boy upon waking up in the future. Fry is a goofy, dim-witted, slovenly but well-meaning individual. The series follows his transition from the 20th century to the 31st century.
Billy West used an impression of his own voice at age 25 to create Fry's voice.
Turanga Leela
Turanga Leela (voiced by Katey Sagal) is the female lead of the series. She is a one-eyed mutant who Fry meets after waking up 1000 years in the future. Originally working as a career assignment officer for cryo-preserved people waking up in the future, Leela quits her job after meeting Fry, joining him and Bender at Planet Express where she becomes the delivery ship's captain. She is one of the few characters in the cast to routinely display competence and the ability to command, and routinely saves the rest of the cast from disaster, but suffers extreme self-doubt because she has only one eye and grew up as a bullied orphan. She first believes herself an alien but later is revealed to be a mutant. Leela is also a skilled fighter and an environmentalist. The series also follows the relationship between Fry and Leela, as they start off as friends but later develop feelings for one another.
Bender Bending Rodríguez
Bender Bending Rodríguez (voiced by John DiMaggio), designated in-universe as Bending Unit 22, unit number 1,729, serial number 2716057,1,729 is the smallest number that can be represented as the sum of two cubes in two ways, 1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³, serial number 2716057 = (952³ – 951³) Why is the number 1,729 hidden in Futurama episodes?, Simon Singh, BBC News, 15 October 2013 is a humanoid industrial robot who rounds out the main trio of characters. He fulfills a comic, antihero-type role in Futurama and is described by fellow character Leela as an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler". Fry meets Bender at a suicide booth (which Fry mistakes for a telephone booth) after exploring the city following his escape from the cryogenics facility he was frozen at. After Fry gives Bender a reason to keep living, the two are caught by Leela, who joins them in going to Planet Express. Bender fulfills a variety of odd jobs at the company, including the head chef, and is also Fry's best friend and roommate.
Professor Farnsworth
Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth (voiced by Billy West) is Fry's great (×30) nephew and great (×31) grandson because of time reef paradox. A mad scientist and the proprietor of Planet Express, he alternates between intelligence and amoral senility due to his greatly advanced age, stated to be at least 150 years old on multiple occasions (160 years old as of "A Clone of My Own"). He demonstrates a mastery of any field of science necessary for the series' plots and is suggested to be one of the most brilliant inventors on Earth. However, he falls asleep constantly, and he is implied to have routinely sent his former crews on suicide missions. He wears very thick glasses and has a gift for creating doomsday devices and atomic supermen. He has put at least one parallel universe in peril with his inventions and visited dozens more.
The Professor teaches at Mars University and has worked for Momcorp on several occasions but spends most of his time inventing ridiculous devices and sending the Planet Express delivery crew on suicide missions. What he is a professor of is never explicitly stated. In the episode "Mars University", when asked what he is teaching, he responds: "The same thing I teach every semester, the mathematics of quantum neutrino fields. I made up the title so no student would dare take it"; however, this declaration has not precluded the professor from demonstrating mastery of whatever field of science is convenient for a given episode's plot, as shown in Bender's Big Score when he proclaims, "I can wire anything directly into anything! I am the Professor!", proceeding to link Hermes' disembodied head to the ship's computer. Approximately 100 years before the series' timeline, he taught a young (not yet Professor) Wernstrom, whom Farnsworth regarded as a prized student. After he returned a pop quiz to Wernstrom with a grade of A-minus (for poor penmanship), the two became bitter rivals.
Many episodes' major plot points are introduced by Farnsworth announcing, "Good news, everyone!" or some variation thereof, either to unveil his latest invention or describe the company's latest delivery assignment. On the very few occasions he has actual good news, he often opens with "Bad news, everyone!" After Fry resigns from his job in "Law & Oracle", he states that he only says these phrases to make Fry "feel better about his pointless job." Another is his exclamation, "Sweet zombie Jesus!" He often says "Eh Wha?" when unaware of the situation, or when someone questions a statement he has just made. The Professor often makes mutually contradictory statements just moments apart; this happens especially often when briefing his employees, with the prevailing second statement canceling a much more reassuring first sentence.
The Professor rarely worries about the safety of the crew, viewing them as a means to an end, as evidenced in the first episode, where he is indifferent to what happened to his previous crew and only focuses on getting a new one. Farnsworth's employees later discover that their predecessors died while gathering honey from Space Bees. The Professor issues his new crew the previous crew's career chips from a manila envelope labeled "Contents Of Space Wasp's Stomach".
It is established in the episode "Mother's Day" that the Professor was once Mom's lover and employee. However, they could not maintain their relationship due to Mom's lust for power, including when she decided to weaponize his "Q.T. McWhiskers" toy, prompting them to break up. When Mom takes control of all the world's robots to cause an uprising, her sons Walt, Larry, and Igner attempt to get the Professor to seduce Mom and retrieve the remote for the robots. They get back together briefly, but break up once more when Mom learns the Professor had been initially using her. It is revealed in Bender's Game that the Professor is the biological father of Mom's youngest son Igner — the one whom Mom despises the most.
Many references to the pulp science fiction magazine Weird Tales indicate the Professor may be named in honour of its editor Farnsworth Wright. Another possibility is that he is named after the American inventor and television pioneer Philo Farnsworth who appeared in the Futurama episode "All the Presidents' Heads" as an ancestor of the Professor and Philip J. Fry.
Billy West uses a combination of impressions of Burgess Meredith and Frank Morgan. However, in the "Action Delivery Force" segment of "Reincarnation", the Professor is voiced by David Herman.
Hermes Conrad
Hermes Conrad (voiced by Phil LaMarr) is a workaholic bureaucrat and the accountant at Planet Express. He is from Jamaica and speaks with a heavy accent. He manages the Planet Express delivery business with responsibilities that include paying bills, giving out legal waivers, and notifying next of kin. Hermes is very enthusiastic about the Limbo and was once an Olympic limbo athlete. An accident in the 2980 Olympic Games in which a fan broke his back trying to emulate Hermes left him traumatized, and he could not bring himself to limbo again until decades later when it was needed. The series also alludes to Hermes using cannabis, though he is never seen using it, partially due to prime-time television censorship standards at the time of Futurama's original run.
Hermes frequently admonishes the staff for not working hard enough, and strongly dislikes Zoidberg, often treating him as a "thing" and not a person. Zoidberg is generally oblivious to this, considering Hermes his friend, but upon learning the truth in "The Six Million Dollar Mon", he callously calls out Hermes for his treatment of him. Later episodes show them building an uneasy rapport, with Hermes slowly softening to Zoidberg. He is also known to dislike labor unions, once referring to Labor Day as created by "fat-cat union gangsters", though seconds later he exclaims "Hot damn, a day off!" upon learning that it was that very day, and consulting Glurmo about firing the entire crew and replacing them with Grunka-Lunkas for half the pay. It is a recurring gag that Hermes wants to kill some or all of the members of the Planet Express crew; in "The Farnsworth Parabox", he suggests that Leela shoot the rest of the crew and ponders ejecting the entire crews of both universes into the sun.