When Aliens Attack: The 1999 Debut
The Omicronians arrived on November 7, 1999, in the Futurama episode "When Aliens Attack," with the best invasion motive in television. In the show's 1999 prologue Fry, delivering pizza, spills a beer on a control panel at a Fox station and cuts off the final episode of Single Female Lawyer; in the year 3000, a fleet of saucers arrives over Earth, blasts Monument Beach, and its commander, Lrrr, ruler of the planet Omicron Persei 8, announces that the broadcast has just reached his world, a thousand light years away, and that his people want to know how the show ends. The Planet Express crew stage the missing episode live, Leela in the lead role, Fry writing, and Lrrr departs satisfied, promising to return if the ending disappoints him.
Lrrr, voiced by Maurice LaMarche in the register of a tired executive, is a large green-brown reptilian biped with a spined skull, a heavy jaw and a permanent grievance, and his wife Ndnd, voiced by Tress MacNeille, is the same design in a mood. They rule Omicron Persei 8 as a couple whose marriage is in trouble, and the series returned to them a dozen times over its runs on Fox, Comedy Central and Hulu, always with the same shape of plot: a grand invasion undermined by domestic irritation.
Omicronian Biology, Popplers and the Taste for Humans
Omicronians are carnivores who regard humans as food, and the series' second Lrrr episode, "The Problem with Popplers" (2000), made the appetite reciprocal. The crew lands on an uncharted planet, finds the ground covered in small, breaded, delicious objects, and brings them home; Popplers become Earth's most popular snack, sold in their billions by a chain called Fishy Joe's, until Lrrr's fleet arrives to explain that the crew had found an Omicronian nursery and that Earth has eaten a generation of his young. The species reproduces by laying larvae on distant planets to ripen, and the episode's negotiation, in which Lrrr demands to eat one human, Leela, and is fed a substitute, is one of the show's most quoted.
Beyond that, Omicronian biology is a running joke about scale. Lrrr is enormous, sheds, has a midlife crisis in the 2010 episode "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences," in which he leaves Ndnd and moves in with the crew, and once tries to become a human in a bid for attention; his people are seen mostly as an armada of identical saucers and as a court at which Lrrr is always slightly embarrassed. They are Futurama's stock invaders, and the show uses them the way The Simpsons uses Kang and Kodos: as a way to make the invasion plot a domestic one.
The Other Aliens of Futurama
Futurama's future is thick with species, and the Omicronians are only the loudest. Dr. Zoidberg is a Decapodian, a lobster-like physician from Decapod 10 whose knowledge of human anatomy is guesswork; Kif Kroker, the long-suffering aide to Zapp Brannigan, is an Amphibiosan, a slender green amphibian from Amphibios 9 who reproduces by becoming pregnant himself; Nibbler, Leela's pet, is a Nibblonian, one of the oldest and most intelligent beings in the universe disguised as a lapdog that eats whole cows; Morbo, the newsreader, is a green-skinned invader from an unnamed world who reads the headlines while promising the end of humanity; the Slurm worms of Wormulon secrete the galaxy's most popular soft drink; the Neutrals of the Neutral Planet have no opinions; and the Brain Spawn, flying brains that make anyone nearby stupid, are the series' nearest thing to a cosmic threat.
The show was created by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen and premiered on March 28, 1999, and it treated its aliens as citizens rather than visitors. New New York in 3000 has a head museum, a robot mafia and an alien population that commutes, and the joke of most of its species is that they have been assimilated into a bureaucracy as tired as the one they left; Lrrr's invasions fail not because Earth resists but because Earth has a form for them. It is the first-contact story after the contact, a thousand years into the paperwork.
Omicronians, Leaking Broadcasts and the Real SETI Question
The invasion premise is a real problem in astronomy played backwards. Television and radio signals do leave the Earth, at the speed of light, in an expanding shell now roughly a century across, and the idea that a distant civilisation might learn of us from I Love Lucy has been a staple of both science fiction and SETI discussion since the 1950s; Contact (1997) has the aliens return Hitler's 1936 Olympic broadcast, the first television signal strong enough to leave the atmosphere. The catch, which Futurama ignores for the sake of the joke, is power: broadcast signals spread and weaken with distance, and by a few light years they are fainter than the background noise, so that an Omicronian would need a receiver the size of a small moon to enjoy Single Female Lawyer at a thousand light years. The SETI search article covers what real listening involves and the Wow! signal is the one candidate that ever arrived from the other direction.
Omicron Persei is real, a hot binary system in Perseus at about a thousand light years, and the show picked it for the arithmetic: 1999 plus a thousand equals the year the series is set. A star that hot and short-lived is not where the habitable exoplanets are being found, and if there is an eighth planet there it is unlikely to have a television. Lrrr's people descend from the reptilian invaders of the pulps, the Reptilians of the conspiracy literature with the menace replaced by marital fatigue, and the Drake equation, which estimates how many civilisations might be broadcasting at all, is the only serious attempt to say how many Lrrrs are out there watching.
Frequently asked questions
Why did Lrrr invade Earth in Futurama?
To see the end of a television show. In 1999 Fry spilled beer on a console and knocked the last episode of Single Female Lawyer off the air; a thousand years later the broadcast reached Omicron Persei 8, a thousand light years away, and Lrrr, who had been watching, brought his fleet to demand the ending. The crew staged a new episode, and Earth was spared when Lrrr found it satisfactory.
What are Popplers?
Omicronian babies. In a 2000 episode the Planet Express crew finds a planet covered in delicious fried-looking nuggets, sells them across Earth as Popplers, and discovers when Lrrr arrives that they were the larval young of his species. He demands to eat a human in return, chooses Leela, and is talked out of it by a chain of substitutions the episode treats as diplomacy.
Is Omicron Persei a real star?
Yes. Omicron Persei, also called Atik, is a hot binary star in the constellation Perseus roughly a thousand light years from Earth, which is why the show chose it: a broadcast from 1999 would arrive there around 3000, the year Futurama is set. No planets have been found there, and a star that hot and young is a poor candidate for any.