Futurama: Every Time Travel Story Ranked From Worst To Best

Futurama wasn't always just set in the future.

Futurama Meanwhile
Fox

It’s easy to see from little more than the reaction to Futurama’s upcoming revival that the show has earned itself an army of fans, loyal still even after all these years. The show made a name for itself in the world of animation and is still to this day one of the most beloved in the entire genre.

Not only can it boast a whole universe worth of lovable characters, genuine emotional gut punches, and stories few other shows could even fathom, it is one of the smartest TV series around. Thanks to a writers' room full of nerds, Futurama leans heavily on its science-fiction aspect and with great success.

Thanks to being set in the 31st century, Futurama had license to go where no show had gone before, and there were numerous occasions that Fry, Bender, Leela, and the rest of the crew found themselves dealing with time travel.

This came in a variety of different ways, and of course some were far better than others. It’s a dangerous topic to base a story around, and while Futurama often hit the nail on the head, there were other times it left a bit too much to be desired.

9. All The Presidents' Heads

Futurama Meanwhile
Fox

There can be no denying that the quality of Futurama drastically dipped once it moved to Comedy Central. While most of the episodes on this list are strong, All the Presidents' Heads is much closer to the other end of the spectrum.

Inexplicably, the writers just seemed to forget that career chips were a thing in the show's later seasons, allowing Fry to get a night job at the Head Museum to cover the costs of the coffee he needed to stay awake at his night job.

A flimsy pretext at best for the crew to go back in time by licking the heads of several US Presidents, to protect the Farnsworth name that the Professor randomly now seemed to care so much about. This may have at least been a different and unique method of time travel, but it was also by far the stupidest.

The episode centered around a classic story of the ripple effect time traveling can have, how something seemingly so small as Fry moving a candle can result in the USA never winning its independence. Another consequence was that we had to listen to the truly awful English accents of the usually stellar Futurama cast.

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Contributor

This standard nerd combines the looks of Shaggy with the brains of Scooby, has an unhealthy obsession with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and is a firm believer that Alter Bridge are the greatest band in the world.