Futurama: "The Honking"

"The Honking." Futurama, Fox-TV. First aired 11 May 2000; repeated 18 March 01 (which we viewed). Episode 32 by through-numbering method, 3.1 by season.episode method[www.fys.ku.dk/~stephan/futu/301.htm]. Susie Keitter, dir. Ken Keeler, script.

Episode begins with "death" of elderly robot, including sight-gag of the robot's internal heart-beat indicator flatlining. Other horror motifs used, including a ghost-haunted castle in a Central European village of robots, plus a robot fortune-telling machine. Main plot has the robot Bender, under a curse, turn into a "Were-Car." A were-car on the moors ran over Bender and, the Gypsy Fortune-Telling machine tells him, "beamed the virus" to him through the cars "demonic headlights." "Each midnight, when" Bender's "clock resets to zero," his "hardware reconfigures into a murderous four-wheeled car": so the fortune-telling machine says, and so we see in a spoof of man to werewolf transformations scenes. Bender's hope is to kill the original were-car so that "in its death-throes" that cursed car will "beam out the virus's uninstall program, thus ridding" Bender "of the curse." The secret lore from which the Gypsy Fortune-Telling machine reads in Curse of the Were-Car for Windows 98. Cf. and contrast 976-EVIL and the works cross-listed there; note well assumption that some of the audience can get a very dense complex of references to films and real-world computers ca. 2001.