Futurama Round Wheels: “The Prince and the Product” Explained

Futurama Round Wheels and the toy commercials, explained

This episode is, in a word, surreal. Futurama has dabbled in the unexpected before, but never in quite so confusing a way. “The Prince and the Product” begins like any normal episode, with Professor Farnsworth appearing to announce the week’s delivery, and then follows a very strange trajectory. It plays out as a Saturday-morning cartoon, complete with commercial breaks aimed at selling toys to children.

The simplest way to understand it is as a frame with three stories inside it. The frame, which the rest of this piece calls the main plot, is a delivery to the King of Space. The three commercial stories are a wind-up toy tale called Windos, a car tale called Round Wheels, and a bathtub tale called Rubber Ducks. The commercials are not random. Each one retells the central ideas of the main plot with the crew as toys.

A short note on where it sits: this is the ninth episode of the eleventh season, which streamed on Hulu. It is a one-off in structure, and it does not need much knowledge of the earlier seasons.

The main plot: a macaroni portrait and a prince

The main plot involves delivering a package to the King of Space, voiced by David Herman, which is a good opportunity for Fry to grovel. The package is a macaroni portrait of the King’s late wife, the Queen. While Fry and Leela hang it, the Prince of Space, voiced by Phil LaMarr, appears. He takes over from an injured Fry and wins Leela’s heart in the process. Early-onset sciatica will do that.

Fry is distraught when he sees that Leela has fallen for the Prince, and the first commercial break begins. Afterward, the King forbids the Prince to marry a space commoner. Fry is relieved at first, but when he sees how sad Leela is, he fights the King’s rejection. In his anger, he boils the Queen’s portrait. The King is furious enough to challenge Fry to a duel.

The duel is a joust. Leela takes Fry’s place as champion because she is the better fighter. She kills the King, and then discovers the King had the Prince act as his champion, so she actually killed her love. Fry is fine. The Prince is dead and Leela cries, and the final commercial begins.

When the episode returns, Fry tries to comfort her, and Leela reveals she was never in love. It was a spell. A magic spell? No, the Professor appears on a screen for no reason to declare that it was a science spell. The episode ends with Bender as the ship, which quickly crashes into Earth.

Windos: the wind-up toy that dies

Windos are wind-up toys with a finite spring life. The mini-story centers on Fry, whose spring is winding down for good. Fry is weirdly fine with dying, but Bender is not, and tries religion for help. It does not help. They go to the mountains to see a guru, but the trip wears out Fry’s spring and he dies.

Bender performs spring-to-spring resuscitation and revives Fry, but kills himself. Fry, sad, goes to the guru, who tells him about reincarnation. Unlike religion and its heaven, reincarnation turns out to be true, and Bender returns in the form of a plane, which then crashes and burns. He will be back, kids.

Round Wheels: wheels sold separately

The second commercial is for a toy called Round Wheels, and wheels are sold separately. Everyone but Zoidberg goes to make a delivery, and the sad crab car watches from a distance. Later the news reports a mysterious online video linked to deaths of locals, following a phone call. Amy happily answers a call from 666-666-6666 and is promptly killed. Fry and Leela are next.

When Bender gets the call, the Professor and Hermes follow him in hopes of catching the killer. The Professor does not make it, but Hermes’ limbo skills help him discover that the murderer is Zoidberg. Being left out all the time has made him murderous, and he has been taking parts of everyone and making them part of himself. In classic Zoidberg fashion, he botches it and foils his own plan. The homunculus car crashes into a wall, but Amy had the good sense to buy the warranty, and all ends well.

Rubber Ducks: the edge of the water

The final commercial begins with a warning to never put live ducks in a child’s bathtub, because it is a whole thing. Back from a delivery, Fry and Amy argue about the edge of the water, and the Professor proposes an expedition to see if the edge exists. After some travel, the ducks, who are the Professor, Fry, Amy and Zoidberg, find land and a new breed of beings: Eggulons, egg-shaped people who can wobble but will not fall down. Kind of.

Leela, Bender, Hermes and Scruffy watch the ducks approach their shore. Leela is attracted to Fry at once, and he returns her affection, but the mixing of species creates friction. It is war, or peace-fighting, and there are casualties. The Eggulons can fall down. Leela and Fry both die, proclaiming that their love will live on. It kind of does: Leela’s egg self hatches into a baby duck self, and Fry’s duck self lays a baby egg self.

The four stories and what each one is about

Observation: two scenes of the main plot end in tears, two commercials end in crashes, and the last main scene ends in a crash too.

Futurama “The Prince and the Product” review: what it means

Two words sum up the first reaction, and the second is “what”: what on earth did the audience just watch? “The Prince and the Product” has solid jokes, and the different versions of the crew as toys are a pleasure, along with callbacks to classic Futurama scenes. Overall, though, it is a complete mystery of an episode. It vaguely resembles the “What If” episodes, except that those had a clear construct for their separate mini-stories, like The Simpsons Halloween episodes. Here, nothing explains why the toy commercial stories happen, and the main storyline is silly.

Taken as a surrealist adventure, it can be enjoyed on those terms. The jokes are winners. Bender’s search for comfort, in which heaven proves a disappointment while reincarnation is worth considering, is a great dig at organized religion, at least the kinds that do not already teach reincarnation. Round Wheels not including wheels is a joke any parent can appreciate. Even the flat-Earth undertone of the Rubber Ducks tale is funny, as is the culture clash that ends in all-out war.

If one theme runs through the collection, it is love and death. In the main story, Leela falls madly in love with someone she barely knows, and Fry shows his love by defending her honor, even if it may cost him the relationship. The Prince’s death allows the two to resume their time-tested romance. In Windos, Bender’s love for his friend makes him fear death and then give his life instead of watching Fry die, and Fry’s love for Bender drives him to finish the journey to the guru and find a meaning in loss. Round Wheels shows unrequited love turning bitter and toxic. Zoidberg longs for a platonic bond with his coworkers, they spurn him, and he forces them to join him as one monstrous vehicle. The soul is presented as something that lasts as long as a part of the person remains, though Zoidberg’s parts are not enough, and once the hood is destroyed the crab is dead. Rubber Ducks closes the loop with the classic star-crossed lovers.

The sight gags are worth the watch. The callback to the scene where Fry first wakes up in the “World of Windos” is a nice touch with a skewed perspective. The way the Planet Express building and ship are presented in each toy world shows real care. One puzzle remains: a cat and a dog appear at the start of each commercial story, and nothing in the main plot explains them.

A reviewer who normally dislikes surrealism can still find this a win. It is hard to make a decent point with a dream, and Barbie recently managed it, and Futurama manages it too. The verdict: a weird, funny, thoughtful hour, and a fine episode, none the less.

Sources

• Futurama, Wikipedia — revival seasons, cast and episode details