Philip J. Fry

Philip J. Fry is the protagonist of the animated television series Futurama and is voiced by Billy West. He is usually referred to by his family name, "Fry."

Fry is a 20th century pizza delivery boy who awakes to life at the dawn of the 31st century after being cryopreserved since the first few seconds of the year 2000. According to the Volume 1 Futurama DVD, he was born on August 9,1974, in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, being 25 at the time of the first episode.

Billy West, mentioning jovially that he bases Fry on himself, also jokes that he fell in love with Katey Sagal, the voice actor of Turanga Leela, while working on the Futurama voices.

The name "Philip" was given to Fry by Matt Groening as an homage to the then recently murdered Phil Hartman, for whom the role of Zapp Brannigan was created. The "J" is akin to the "J" in Bullwinkle J. Moose, and Homer J. Simpson, in tribute to Jay Ward, creator of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. His last name Fry is a reference to John Hughes's character Cameron Frye from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Philip J. Fry is an fictional example of an extratemporal character. His disappointments and incomprehension of the future and his joy at what the other characters find mundane in their native time are central elements of the show.

Character
A great source of humor in Futurama is Fry's lack of intelligence and unabashedly pathetic lifestyle. He lives with his best friend, Bender, rarely thinks more than five minutes into the future, frequently injures himself, and according to Leela, does the worst W C Fields impression that she's ever heard. Despite being somewhat unintelligent he has occasionally shown clever thinking in more demanding situations. He enjoys watching TV shows that follow the form "the world's blankiest blank" and singing "Walking on Sunshine," though the only lyrics he appears to actually know are "I'm walking on sunshine", so he hums the rest.

Fry is childlike and unpretentious for the most part. Although he is largely self-absorbed, he almost always does the right thing when confronted with the consequences of his actions. He sacrifices for his friends and (usually) has a good heart. His overall appearance contains his red hair that's styled into having two tufts of his hair spiked up in front, and his two cowlicks on the ball of his head, a white t-shirt covered by an unzipped red jacket, blue jeans, and black shoes. Matt Groening mentions in a commentary that this outfit is based on James Dean's outfit in Rebel Without a Cause.

In the episode "Roswell That Ends Well", Fry travels to 1947 and becomes his own grandfather. Much to Fry's disbelief, Enos, the man Fry thought was his grandfather, unconsciously indicated himself to be a closeted homosexual. Fry ended up killing Enos by accident, and, having incorrectly concluded that the now-deceased man's girlfriend could not possibly be his grandmother, proceeded to have sex with and impregnate her, thus becoming his own grandfather (much to his absolute horror), as well as the father of his very own father Yancy Sr. When reminded of this by the Nibblonians, he proudly notes that he "did do the nasty in the pasty". Because of this "past nastification", as Nibbler puts it, he has a genetic anomaly that causes him to lack the "delta brainwave", a normally-essential component of intelligent thought. He instead possesses a hodgepodge of other brainwaves that act as a poor substitute. This helps him save the universe twice from a malicious race of disembodied brains, dubbed the "Brainspawn" ("The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" and "The Why of Fry"), as the Brainspawn's primary weapon, the intellect-draining "Stupefaction Ray", interferes with the delta wave. Basically, although he is pretty stupid, he can't be rendered less intelligent.

Fry is the deciding factor in the galactic conflict between the Nibblonians and the evil Brainspawn. In fact, the Nibblonians were responsible for Fry being frozen: their sages foretold that he would be needed to defeat the Brainspawn in the 31st century, but he would naturally have died long before then, thus they had to freeze him ("The Why of Fry").

Childhood
Named by his father for Phillips-head screwdrivers, he was the second and youngest child of his parents; with one older brother, Yancy Fry. His mother ceded picking his name to his father, because she had picked what they had for dinner the previous day. When his father placed a mobile featuring a spaceship and planets in his crib (because he could not find one featuring nuclear weapons), his lifelong fascination with outer space began.

Fry lived in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, based on the fact that he, Leela, and Bender left the ruins of the New York City Subway at the Newkirk Avenue Station while searching for Fry's old neighborhood in "Luck of the Fryish."

During his childhood, Fry was particularly active. He took part in breakdancing and basketball, during which he found a seven-leaf clover that gave him the luck to beat his brother at both. He later locked the clover away in the family's bomb shelter in the cover of a Breakfast Club soundtrack in the "Ronco Record Vault", with the combination "3", only to have the safe blown open by Yancy in search of a record to play at his wedding. Also, Bender knew how to open Ronco vaults.

Teenage years
As a teenager, Fry was a typical underachiever. During his time as a teenager, he is rumored to have spent his entire school time playing video games. He particularly liked playing Space Invaders while listening to his Rush mix tapes and drinking Shasta - so much so that his eyes bled from overexposure, although this may not qualify as canon, as it is shown during the Anthology of Interest II episode.

He has also had at least three heart attacks, implied to be caused by drinking excessive amounts of cola (over 100 cans per week, as mentioned in "Fry and the Slurm Factory"). Presumably, he would have stopped at this point, but his drinking habits suggest he merely moved up to beer and Slurm.

In an alternate reality shown by Professor Farnsworth's "what-if machine" (after Fry asked what life would be like if it were more like a video game), Fry's experience became useful when he was called upon to help General Colin Pac-Man (a play on the name of Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State) defend Earth from actual space invaders, a group of classic video game characters (such as Donkey Kong) from the planet "Nintendu 64" who wanted quarters with which to do their laundry. Despite having played video games for the majority of his life, he admits to doing poorly on Space Invaders when faced with the last ship, exclaiming "I could never get the last one, my brother always got it for me!".

Aside from his obsession with video games, he is an accomplished college dropout, dropping out after less than 3 weeks from Coney Island Community College, which appeared to be a fairground ride. In the future, however, this is only the equivalent of a high school dropout. In "The Cryonic Woman", he claims that his parents kept him out of public school, deeming it a waste of taxpayers' money.

Adult life
He had a very dirty life-style. He makes references to "mushrooms" growing on his bathmat or in his shower. "A Big Piece of Garbage" also shows more on his dirty lifestyle, although late in the series he begins to act in a cleanlier fashion, even to the extent of taking showers ("The 30% Iron Chef").

By 1999, Fry was dating a girl named Michelle and working as a delivery boy for Panucci's Pizza. On December 31, 1999, after being dumped by his girlfriend (who was shown in a car with another man and telling Fry that she had left his stuff on the sidewalk) he was delivering a pizza to a cryogenics lab when he realized that it was a prank order for "I.C. Wiener". He was leaning back in a chair while drinking a can of beer at the lab when the clock struck midnight, and just at that moment Fry fell backwards into an open cryonic capsule that closed upon him and froze him (in the episode "The Why of Fry", it is revealed that Nibbler gave Fry the choice to push himself in to later fulfil his destiny to one day in the future save the universe). He remained frozen for 1000 years, during which time New York City was destroyed and rebuilt twice. He was defrosted on December 31, 2999, sometime during the day. (He did not defrost early; if the capsule interpreted "1,000 years" to refer to the average length of a year in the Gregorian calendar, Fry should have defrosted a few seconds after noon.) Needless to say, upon reawakening, he found himself in a world very different from the one he left at the turn of the 21st century.

Trying to adjust to the 31st century, Fry gains the friendship of a cyclopic woman, Turanga Leela, and a bending robot named Bender. Together, they find Fry's closest living relative, the ancient Professor Hubert Farnsworth, who agrees to employ the three of them in his delivery business, Planet Express.

Now a fish-out-of-water, Fry often tries to recapture his past. He came into a large sum of money through a millennium's worth of interest accrued in a bank account (which had 93 cents in it before he was frozen) and furnished an apartment in a style befitting his twentieth-century lifestyle. He discovered the preserved corpse of his dog in "Jurassic Bark", and sought to clone him until Fry discovered that the dog had lived for almost a decade after Fry was frozen (it was revealed in a flashback that the dog in fact spent the rest of his life waiting for Fry to come back).

Although Fry seems to have aged, his personality still resembles that of a child of very low intelligence, and is often portrayed as being very slow to pick up on events that are happening, as well as common sense. However, he is very knowledgeable about certain subjects, such as video games, television (particularly Star Trek), movies, and scary stories. He also appears to know some basics in science (in My Three Suns, he appeared to know that he wouldn't get drunk, as he was solid). Fry was also very oblivious to the fact that Michelle was cheating on him. In Space Pilot 3000, he told Bender that he was "beginning to suspect that she was cheating on him". In The Cryonic Woman, Fry shows Bender a picture of Michelle and "that ski instructor she was just friends with", a picture in which Fry is barely visible.

Bender
Fry initially meets Bender in the first episode of the series, where the two are waiting to use a suicide booth. Fry mistakenly believes the booth to be a phone booth, and the impatient Bender pushes them both in, hoping to go for a "twofer" (two-for-one). After Fry foiled Bender's attempt, the two formed a strong bond. As Bender puts it, "Of all the friends I've had, [Fry's] the first" ("I, Roommate"). It has been stated in a few episodes that Bender views Fry as a pet.

In "I, Roommate", after being forced out of living in the Planet Express office, Fry moves in with Bender, only to find that his apartment is as small as a closet. They then decide to rent another apartment together. However, because of the interference from Bender's antenna, the apartment's TV (with TVs from other apartments in the same block) couldn't get any reception, and for the sake of friendship, Bender cuts off his antenna so that the TV will get reception. However, they soon decide to leave that apartment and move back into Bender's previous apartment, only to discover that the apartment's 'closet' is actually the size of a typical living room, with plenty of space for Fry to comfortably live in.

Bender and Fry, while being a rather odd couple, have a strong relationship, and have sacrificed things for each other over the years of their friendship, such as fame, money, and even their own lives. Their friendship is tested when the fossilized remains of Seymour, Fry's old dog, are unearthed, and Fry spends time worrying about him instead of spending time with Bender ("Jurassic Bark"). Bender eventually feels sympathetic for the loss of Fry's dog, and even willingly jumps into hot lava just to save his dog (after throwing him into the lava in the first place). Their friendship was also tested in "The Honking", when Bender is transformed into a were-car, doomed to kill his closest friend; however, Were-car Bender first attacks Leela, leading to jealousy on Fry's part. The situation returned to normal when Were-car Bender, offered his choice of victim by the original Were-car, proves slightly more eager to kill Fry than Leela, to Fry's great delight.

Seymour
Seymour was Fry's loyal and faithful dog. In 1997 while on a prank delivery, he finds an abandoned dog on the streets and names him Seymour (the prank name was Seymour Asses, possibly a reference to the prank calls Bart makes to Moe's Tavern in The Simpsons). After feeding the dog pizza, Seymour follows Fry who then decides to keep him. By 1998 he had taught Seymour to sing Walking on Sunshine, clean up and wait for him after a delivery. Before Fry was frozen, Seymour attempted to prevent Fry leaving on his fateful New Year's Eve prank delivery.

He discovered Seymour's preserved corpse in "Jurassic Bark", and was eager to bring him back to life with the Professor's help, until he realized the dog lived twelve years after his disappearance. Thinking Seymour had lived a full life without him, Fry abandoned the project. In a poignant flashback we see that Seymour, like Hachikō or Odysseus' dog Argos, waited out his entire life for his master to come home, never leaving that spot or giving up hope.

Family
Fry's family tree is a bit convoluted, due in part to the reuse of common names, but mostly because Fry went back in time and became his own grandfather (3ACV19).
 * Professor Farnsworth, Fry's many-times-great-nephew and at the same time many-times-grandson.
 * Cubert Farnsworth, Hubert Farnsworth's clone/son (biological clone, treats as son)
 * Yancy Fry, Jr., Fry's older brother and grandson
 * Philip J. Fry II, Fry's Nephew, named in Fry's memory, also Fry's Great-Grandson
 * Yancy Fry, Sr. and Mrs. Fry, parents (Yancy Fry, Sr. is also technically Fry's son)
 * Mildred Fry, paternal grandmother and one-time lover
 * Enos Fry - believed by Fry to be his paternal grandfather until the events of " Roswell That Ends Well"

Amy Wong
Fry and Amy Wong have a short relationship in the episode "Put Your Head on My Shoulders". After spending time together Fry and Amy recognize their commonalities (they feel the same way about "junk, and stuff") that lead to a relationship. However, Fry quickly feels as though Amy is not giving him enough space, and decides to break it off. Unfortunately, before he can tell her, Dr. Zoidberg crashes Amy's hovercar, resulting in Fry's head having to be severed from his body and transplanted onto Amy's shoulder. In the later episode "Time Keeps on Slippin'" when Fry is attempting to remember what he did to make Leela marry him, it is suggested that perhaps he is a fantastic lover, which Amy quietly denies and Fry willingly concedes ("I don't know what I'm doing.").

Turanga Leela
Fry met Leela shortly after being defrosted when she was working as a career counselor at the cryogenics lab. Afraid of getting a career chip (which would doom him once again to a life as a delivery boy) implanted in his hand by Leela, he ran from her, but eventually befriended her after she abandoned her job as career counselor and joined Planet Express with Fry. Later on, Fry turned his attentions to Leela, and in subsequent seasons began his quest to impress her. Fry maintains an interest in Leela throughout the series, and he is frequently rejected by her. The idea of a romantic connection between Fry and Leela is explored more in the later episodes of the series.

Towards the end of the series there are hints that Leela and Fry were beginning to fall for each other. The clearest example of this is in the episode "The Sting", when Fry is accidentally "killed" after being impaled on a space-bee's stinger. The "death" of Fry, which she believes herself responsible for,(and is) sends Leela spiraling into sorrow-induced insanity. However, it turned out that Leela was in a coma, and the events she perceived after being stung were simply a horrible dream. Fry, who only needed a replacement spleen, had stayed by her bedside the entire time, trying to keep Leela's mind together by continually talking to her for two weeks.

While traveling through time, Fry was present at the time of his past self's freezing, there to attempt to prevent it. However, Nibbler brings Fry to realize that the future is worth living, for Leela's sake, and Fry froze himself (Nibbler in this scene says, "She must be the Other," however this aspect of the plot was not explored prior to the cancellation of Futurama's initial run.) In return, Nibbler helped Fry get together with Leela by giving him a flower, which Fry then gave to Leela after she had a bad date ("The Why Of Fry").

In the episode "Parasites Lost", Fry and Leela are in an actual relationship, when parasites from an egg salad sandwich he ate inhabit his body and make him stronger, smarter, and more caring than he was before. Wanting to know if Leela's attraction to him was due to him or the parasites' effect on his body, he expels the parasites from him, then talks to Leela to see if she loved him for who he really is. This effort fails when during his awkward conversation, mentions events from during his relationship with Amy.

At one point (specifically "Time Keeps on Slippin'"), Fry actually managed to marry Leela only to be followed by a speedy divorce. Due to the "time-jumps" that take place in this episode, neither Fry nor Leela knew exactly what caused them to end up married until the end, where Fry looks out the window of the ship to see that he moved the stars themselves to give Leela a love letter in the sky. This message is destroyed during an attempt to halt the time-skips before Leela gets a chance to see it properly. Fry decides not to tell Leela what had gone on.

In the episode "The Farnsworth Parabox," the main cast of Futurama travels to a parallel universe. This was named "Universe 1" by the Alternate Planet Express, although alternate universe Fry's original suggestion was the Fighting Mongooses. The alternate universe is basically the same as the normal Futurama universe ("Universe A") except that all coin flips are opposite in the two worlds. In that episode, Leela and Fry are shocked to discover that their counterparts are happily married. Apparently, both Leelas at one point flipped a coin to decide whether or not to go on a date with Fry; while Leela A got tails and made up an excuse involving ghosts, Leela 1 went out with Fry 1, which led to a year-long relationship and eventual marriage. One year later after their first date, Fry 1 gave Leela 1 a diamond scrunchie, while a year after Leela A's excuse, Fry A got beat up at a Neil Diamond Concert by a guy named Scrunchie. At the end of the episode, after returning to Universe A, Leela apparently goes out with Fry, though no long relationship seems to develop.

In "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings", the last episode for season 4 (and the last episode of the series as of yet), Fry tries to improve his Holophonor skills in order to get Leela to love him (the Holophonor having been proven successful in "Parasites Lost"). Unable to do so with his original hands, he takes the advice of Bender to make a deal with The Robot Devil to exchange them for new and better robotic hands via transplants from a 'random' donor (selected from a Wheel Of Fortune type of board), only to find the 'random' donor to be the Robot Devil himself. With his new hands, Fry's skill in the Holophonor improves exponentially, allowing him to go on to public recitals and having his musical works sold with great fanfare. Inevitably, Fry was commissioned by Hedonism Bot to write and perform a full opera. Fry agrees, but only if the opera is about Leela herself. Fry writes his opera, but on the day of the performance, Leela was accidentally deafened by Bender, due to the plottings of the Robot Devil. She goes anyway, hoping Fry won't notice. The first half of the opera is performed with great success, but Leela, unable to fully enjoy it due to her deafness, makes a hurried deal with the Robot Devil during the intermission to get robotic ears in exchange for 'her hand'. During the second half of the opera, angered by his portrayal in the opera, the Robot Devil demands Fry to return his hands. Fry initially refuses, until the Robot Devil threatens to claim Leela's hand in marriage. Fry relents, getting his old hands back, and thus unable to perform the remainder of the opera. While the rest of the audience leaves in disgust, only Leela remains, and in a touching conclusion to the episode/season, she asks Fry to continue and to see 'how it ends'.

Lucy Liu-bot
After having a crush on Lucy Liu for as long as he has known, Fry decides to download a copy of Liu onto a blank robot, over the protests of the other characters. Eventually, the group discovers that the heads of many famous people, including Liu, are being held by Nappster (actually 'Kid'nappster, according to an altered sign). The process, which the heads do not want to be a part of, is very painful. The employees of Kidnappster send a team of rampaging Liu bots to eliminate the group. In the resulting battle, Liu-bot sacrifices herself to defeat the other bots and the real Liu asks Fry to turn her off. Despite the group's opinion that robots and humans shouldn't mix, the real Liu and Bender fall in love.

Michelle
Michelle is Fry's girlfriend from the 20th century, who dumped Fry on New Year's Eve 1999.

After Fry was frozen, Michelle realized he was the man she really loved, so she froze herself in depression (not knowing Fry had been frozen; like everyone else in Fry's life, she knew only that he was missing and presumed dead). No one had searched because his parents felt it was a waste of taxpayers' money. Therefore, when she was revived in the year 3000, Michelle was joyously and unexpectedly reunited with Fry. When he was fired from Planet Express, he ended up with Leela's old job at the cryogenics lab (in a mixup involving career chips), he unfroze Michelle and they continued dating. Unfortunately, Michelle started to complain about the 31st century being too "weird", and the couple froze themselves, intending to re-emerge from cryonic suspension in the year 4000; instead, their tube was dumped in Los Angeles before the re-screening of an old Pauly Shore film (the tube Fry and Michelle were in was believed to contain Pauly Shore, who had been unfrozen early by Fry), and when they were thawed, only a few days had passed. They entered a few more arguments and then broke up conclusively ("The Cryonic Woman").

Others
Fry also fell in love with a Southern-belle-type mermaid named Umbriel, but fled when he discovered the disadvantages of her piscine lower-half ("The Deep South").

Perhaps his most distressing romantic escapade, however, was backstage at the Miss Universe pageant, when he made out with "the radiator woman from the radiator planet", only to be informed afterwards that it was actually just a radiator ("Lesser of Two Evils"), after which he asks the question; "Is there a burn ward within 10 feet of here?". At his funeral in "The Sting", the radiator reveals with a disappointed hiss that he did not satisfy it.

He once had a nearly fatal "snu-snu" marathon ("Amazon Women in the Mood").

In "Love's Labours Lost in Space", Fry managed to score a date with an unnamed woman from the 21st century at the The Hip Joint, even paying Bender to 'vacate' their apartment for the night, giving him money to "go see a saucy puppet show."

Fry carried on a short-lived affair with Morgan Proctor, the bureaucrat that had replaced Hermes Conrad at Planet Express for a brief time, though the affair ended when Morgan removed Bender's personality. ("How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back").

In a particularly disturbing twist, Fry ended up going back in time, killing his grandfather and having a one-night stand with his own grandmother (then a 30 something waitress), thus becoming his own grandfather, and hence being infinitely in-bred.

In "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?", Zoidberg visits his home planet (Decapod 10) to mate, Fry helps Zoidberg to get together with a female (Edna) Zoidberg knew previously in order to mate with her. After Edna finds out it was Fry who told Zoidberg to say the things he said to woo her, she becomes infatuated with Fry, going so far as to invite him to her apartment and attempting to seduce him, a la Cyrano de Bergerac. When Zoidberg finds out, he challenges Fry to clawplach, a ritual fight to the death. While fighting, the mating frenzy begins and Edna leaves with the king, along with everyone else. After finding out that Decapodians die after mating, Fry and Zoidberg became friends again, despite Fry having lost his arm to Zoidberg's claw.

Many of the women that he had sexual relations with (and the radiator) appear at his "funeral" in "The Sting".

Achievements
Over the course of the series, Fry managed to accomplish a wide range of achievements.

Injuries suffered
In the series, Fry is injured fairly often, but usually recovers by the end of the episode.