All the Presidents' Heads

"All the Presidents' Heads"
Futurama episode
Episode no.	Season 6 Episode 23
Directed by	Stephen Sandoval
Written by	Josh Weinstein
Production code	6ACV23
Original air date	July 28, 2011 (2011-07-28)
Episode features
Opening caption	Apply viewing oil now
Opening cartoon	Zoich (2010)

"All the Presidents' Heads" is the twenty-third episode in the sixth season of the American animated television series Futurama, and the 111th episode of the series overall. It originally aired July 28, 2011 on Comedy Central. The episode was written by Josh Weinstein and directed by Stephen Sandoval.

Plot

Fry goes to his night job at the Head Museum where he feeds the preserved heads of the presidents of the United States. He invites the Planet Express crew to the museum for a party, where they become drunk and begin ingesting the preservative fluid inside the jars. Doing so causes them and everyone standing nearby to temporarily travel back in time to the eras each head originally came from. Professor Farnsworth reasons that this is caused by a rare form of powdered and crystalline opal used to make the fluid, which preserves the heads' current state in a temporal bubble. After learning from George Washington's head that one of his own ancestors, David Farnsworth, was one of American history's most nefarious traitors during the American Revolutionary War, the professor, determined to salvage his family's reputation, dumps a vial containing the world's entire powdered opal supply into Washington's jar and licks his head, transporting himself, Fry, Leela and Bender back to colonial-era New York in 1775 for the next twenty-four hours.

The quartet learn from the Continental Congress that David Farnsworth works at Benjamin Franklin's print shop in Philadelphia, where David would forge counterfeit money that will put the country's economy in jeopardy should it enter circulation. Though they do not find David at the shop, they discover a forged Massachusetts halfpenny made of worthless tin and determine he has gone to Paul Revere's silver shop in Boston. They capture David just as Revere begins his ride to alert Lexington of the imminent British attack that would start the American Revolution. However, Fry obliviously takes one of the two lanterns hanging at the Old North Church to incinerate the counterfeit money, causing Revere to incorrectly warn of the British attack "by land" rather than "by sea".

The opal's effects soon dissipate and the quartet are sent back to their proper time period and find that history has been altered – Great Britain has won the Revolutionary War and conquered all of North America, turning it into "West Britannia". In this alternate timeline, David has assassinated Washington and was rewarded with dukedom, making the professor a noble landowner and consort of the Queen of England. Having depleted the world's crystalline opal supply, the professor despairs that there is no way to rectify their mistake until he notices the Andamooka Opal in the queen's crown. After stealing and compressing it, the quartet are able to use David's preserved head on display at the Head Museum to return to the past and restore the timeline. Its changes are soon rectified back to before history was first altered upon their return, but with a single alteration – in place of the Gadsden flag hanging in the museum is a similarly designed flag displaying Bender with a colonial spelling of his catchphrase, "Bite my shiny metal ass".

Cultural references

• The opening sequence features Zoich, a proposed Russian XXII Winter Olympics mascot, which itself was inspired by Futurama's Hypnotoad.
• Among the U.S. presidents who are depicted in this episode are John Adams, Chester A. Arthur, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Grover Cleveland, Bill Clinton, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Millard Fillmore, Gerald Ford, Warren G. Harding, Rutherford B. Hayes, Herbert Hoover, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Lyndon B. Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, Franklin Pierce, James K. Polk, Ronald Reagan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler and George Washington.

Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Walter Mondale, Paul Revere and Henry Kissinger are also depicted.

Reception

Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club gave the episode a B−.

External links

• "All the Presidents' Heads" at the Infosphere, the Futurama Wiki.
• "All the Presidents' Heads" at IMDb