I Dated a Robot

Did You Know?

• The "I Dated a Robot!" movie parodies school propaganda films like Reefer Madness and Duck and Cover.
• Bender adopts Archie Bunker's manner of speaking from All in the Family after the propaganda film.
• The website Kidnappster is a direct parody of Napster.

Plot

After a viewing of The Scary Door, Fry decides to tick off every item on his bucket list, and the Planet Express crew goes along with it. He destroys a planet, travels to the edge of the universe, and rides a dinosaur. One remaining fantasy is going on a date with a famous person. Fry and Leela head into the internet to nappster.com, where they download a celebrity's personality. Fry picks Lucy Liu, loading her into a blank robot that then projects her image. The Liu-bot, programmed to be into Fry, starts dating him. The rest of the Planet Express team, worried, shows him a standard middle-school film that warns dating robots will lead to civilization's collapse. Fry pays no attention and keeps kissing his Liu-bot. Bender, annoyed that humans are competing for female robots' attention, takes off with Leela and Zoidberg to shut down Nappster. Inside the building, a broken sign reveals the company's real name is Kidnappster. They break into a back room and find that Nappster has been kidnapping celebrity heads and making illegal copies. Leela grabs the real Lucy Liu's head, and the group flees. The Nappster CFO loads a backup disk of Liu, creating a swarm of Liu-bots with orders to kill. Leela and the others, chased by the robot horde, duck into a movie theater where Fry is watching a film with his Liu-bot. Everyone hides in the projection room. Zoidberg discovers a five-ton bag of popping corn and dumps it onto the robots on the theater floor. The robots eat their way out from under the corn and start shooting popcorn kernels from their mouths at the room. Fry's Liu-bot aims the projector at the other robots; the heat pops the corn, causing the robots to burst. At the real Lucy Liu's request, Fry wipes the memory of his now-damaged robot to protect her image. Bender then hypocritically starts dating Liu's head, which makes Fry furious.