Okay, I couldn't help myself. I plugged 93 cents at 2.25% annually for 1,000 years, and I got $49,243,435,066.46, which is 4.9 billion, not 4.3 billion. I guess there were some service charges.

Odd that Fry, who was so happy in the pilot to be in the future, now wants to return to his past.

Great voice work by Maurice LaMarche, a.k.a. "The Brain." (he was the Vincent Price-sounding brother).

Good Episode.

The character of "Mom" didn't do much for me. Not very scary.

ANP

Alright, who was the voice of "Mom?
Thanks.

How did Fry's bank survive the alien invasion and return to the stone age shown in the pilot?

The voice of Mom was Tress McNellie, talented vocal artist. Among many other roles, she's been the voice of Dot Warner on "Animaniacs", Babs Bunny on "Tiny Toon Adventures", and Agnes Skinner on "The Simpsons."

I don't think Mom was supposed to be scary. She was a satire on heartless, giant companies that try to project a homily image (think McDonald's).

think walmart

Do you like my ears up? or down?

Actually, 93 cents compounded annually at 2.25% for one thousand years is $4283508449.71, or just a shade under $4.3billion. Kudos to the writers!

I used the CALC.EXE in Windows NT. 1.0225 x^y 1000 * .93

Visa is gone American express is gone. Discover is'nt excepted (some things never change) I wonder how you get stuff you can't pay for. must be some line of credit or somthing. Maybe a advace on each pay day?

One more thing. What about those dormnt account notices from the bank?

Oops! I used 2.5% Let this be a lesson to all of you planning for retirement--always go with the highest return on investment.

I didn't plan on MOM being booger-man-type scary, I was hoping for Monty Burns-type scary.

ANP

What is the deal with Weathermen? They intrupted both of Tuesdays' Futuramas to show the same radar image of a thunderstorm 50 miles away. Anyone affected by the storm would have went to thier basement or lost electricity. Not to mention the blurry map at the bottom and the screen craw waning of it 30 seconds prior. I realize that its important to warn the audence, but enough is enough. This happens every time it rains here. Do they do this in other areas?


The funny thing is that in 1000 years, bank tellers haven't changed much.

No, we get banners at the bottom of the screen indicating the type of warning and the counties affected. Where do you live?

Man, did Fry have a bad bank. Most banks compound at least quarterly, usually monthly.

Compounded monthly, Fry's money would be $5.3 billion.
Compounded quarterly: $5.16 billion. He should have changed banks before he got frozen.

In my area they simply show a little area map and color code it showing the warnings and all...and they run a NWS warning for whatever county...they don't USUALLY interupt the show but they take time during the commercials to interrupt (that ain't a bad thing is it? ;-)).

Great episode. Dr. Zoeiburg or whatever was hilarious.

I live in Hawesville, KY and watch FOX 7 in Evansville. They show the corner map. Actually, at one point, I thought part of the map was a logo on Leeta shirt. IMHO, it would be funny if Zoidberg did the weather, instead of Kerry Dean.

Speaking of TV show references- Leta was the 1st Dax host on DS9 (2018AD to c.2100AD). Leeta acts like Jazia Dax at times.

No, that's Lela. Leeta was the Dabo girl!

It's spelled synopsis, not synopsys.

Sorry about the mistake, I noticed it last night when I was looking up Lefler's Laws in the New Encyclopedia.

Fould 4.3 Billion really be alot of money in 1000 years? If you look at a 1000 years ago a 1 Million would be shloads of money, and today 4.3 Billion is shloads of money, I would think that in the year 3000, 4.3 Billion would be like an upper-middle class yearly income ;-) Obviously the alien invasions that took place between 2000 and 3000 wasn't as wide-spread and catastrophic as we we're lead to believe by the windows in the Freexe-atorium. Maybe the aliens only destroyed the landmarks? ;-)

There's this great science fiction story about a guy who goes into cryogenic suspension and wakes up a thousand years into the future. He checks his bank balance and it's a few billion dollars. Happy, he goes outside and decides to get some clothes that are more in style. He picks up a shirt at a clothing superstore and says, "How much?" "Five hundred thousand, sir," the clerk replies.

Exactly how would the video tapes and the
magnetic stripe on Fry's bank card survive
1000 Years? Magnetic media does deteriorate over
time, and with the war that wnt on (assuming atomic weapons
were involved) the the card and tapes would be
erased.

In Southern California, we don't get much in
the way of lightning storms :|. It's a shame
too, I do miss watching them.

On Fox, back in Pennsylvania, the would simply
roll news of the storm on the bottom of the
screen, including tornado warnings. Most stations
did this, and one would sound a tone (that
was mixed in with the normal tv audio.
Not annoying, but very audiable) to draw
attention to the warning.

Here they have the color-coded wetaher map, which every so often will turn into a radar loop. There's sometimes a tone followed by the text crawl. They only interup if it's really bad, and if there's a tonrado touched down, or belived to be down. They interupt because they have "Pin-Point Doppler" and can tell you when the storm will be in a paticular area or street by a certain time.

They only interupt when it's really, really bad, though.

Here the interupt it every half hour. What bothers me is the predicability of it.

Strangly, they don't seem to do the storm warnings
during commercials. I can remeber one time
a station actualy interupted the warning moving
across the bottom of the screen when a commercial
came on. I $ rea$ll$y ha$ve to$ won$de$r wh$y
the $tation f$elt th$ey h$ad t$o d$o th$at.
Idea$ anyo$ne$?

Who is Strangly, and what does he have to do with either Futurama or Tornado Warnings?

Will they have storm/tornado warnings in the 31st century?

$0.93 cents during a thousand years

Simple, at the end of the first month he would loose it all in service charges and even owe them money. I know most banks don't make someone under 19 pay service charges, but byt he time he would have been 19 then they would begin if the account had not been closed. Either that or they would see how low the amount is and try to contact him and once they could not they would close the account and use service charges as an excuse to keep the money.

Not only this but most banks interest rate is no where near 2%, with most you lucky if you get even .1 % interest, it's tot he point that service charges are > then what you get in interest unless you have a huge amount of money in the bank.

It's much more likley that his next of kin would have gotten what little money was left.

It's silly to try to explain why Fry had any money at all in his account. His account should have been closed 1000 years ago when he was most likely assumed dead. Besides, it's so incredibly improbable that the bank would still be in business after that much time, that none of it matters! What is important, is that it was a great joke. Remember how Fry wat happy with the 93 cents? (They were only 50 cents short of making bail.) After hearing of the interest, Fry's eyes rolled back, he started panting, and foaming at the mouth. That's the joke.

The actual title of this episode is "A Fishful of Dollars" not "A Fistful of dollars".

Also, does the United States still exist in 3000? The episode suggests that U.S. currency is used. The only other explanation is that the Bank converted his money to the current standard currency (also called "dollar"). But, that would have been done long ago, after the U.S. dollar was out of use. Infact, his money should have gone through this process many, many times over the previous 1000 years. When the bank teller says *average* interest, she sure is averaging a lot of factors!

Note from the Moderator: Slightly modified for content
The ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates in Des Moines all compete to annoy the most TV viewers in central Iowa with their weather coverage. Let's say there's some sort of threatening weather outside... heavier than usual dew, for instance. That's all it usually takes for the insanity to begin. A station will first cover the lower left side of the screen with a map of the entire state. Each of the 99 counties will be color-coded indicating the weather that is there. The upper left corner of the screen has the legend of the map showing what each color stands for. It's usually something like "Thunderstorm watch" or "Flood watch" (those are near rivers. Duh!). The lower right corner of the screen has the station's logo and below that is the network's logo. The network makes it's logo translucent so you can see the TV show behind it, although distorted. All the other's are opaque. Then, there is the big blue strip that covers the bottom-most 1/8th of the screen. It has scrolling text explaining the weather and that this station is the best station at making it so that I don't have to be inconvenienced with getting up and glancing out the window to see what the weather is like. This message is accompanied by alerting klaxon-style sound effects that drone out the audio of the TV show that is 25% visible in the upper right corner of the screen. Luckily, the local FOX affiliate doesn't play the local news game with the others. It doesn't have to. Because FOX broadcasts here in UHF (it's not stereo, by the way) the picture starts getting pretty fuzzy when there's any weather at all.

Also, this'll make you have severe gastrointestinal disfunction, there is no UPN here and the FOX station didn't buy any Voyager episodes after season 2. It tears me up inside to know that there are entire seasons of Star Trek I haven't seen. Also, they stopped showing old TNG, TOS, and DS9 to show Judge Judy. Ugh! And, when there were still new DS9 episodes, they were on from 12:00 to 1:00 AM on Friday mornings!!!! I need to move to a real city.

Amy commented on Fry's springing for Lightspeed brand underwear as "ritzy". Why would Amy seem so taken by this? "The Series has Landed" established that Amy Wong, of the Mars Wongs, from serority Kappa Kappa Wong, is very rich. It shouldn't have seemed like a big deal for Fry to buy $30 underwear.

Hey, don't knock Judge Judy. I like her. She's like Dr. Laura, only with actual power over people.

Yes Judy is cool. I finally got to see this one today! And I say again that even though the joke of interest on his account going nuts like that is funny it is just not possible.

A 'normal' savings account is set up so that any interest you earn will be low enough that service charges will be higher then it or at most equal to it. This is especially true if you have a small amount of money as a lot of people would think "heyI'll put $10 in there and leave it for so long I'll forget about it and then I'll get it back out in 20 years and it will have gained a huge amount of interest!".

At that small balance they will make it so that you have an interest rate of less then .5 % , but the service charge would be like $1 - $2 a month.

Now if he had this money in a savings plan such as an RRSP, then maybe this type of thing is possible. I believe the idea of these is that you put money in monthly and it gains interest on top of that at a really good rate until you take it out, but it takes time to take it out as if you had immediate access to it then they could not afford to give high interest etc.

I know I'm over annalysing, but I find what helps to make this 'okay' is that futurama is supossed to be unrealistic. Thats what makes it funny. And that's what makes this episode great.

This is only a test. Please ignore.

yes sir...ignoring message, sir! ;-)

Fry often talks about his PIN number - PIN stands for Personal Identification Number, so he's really saying Personal Indentification Number Number. Mind you, almost every one makes the same mistake.
Is $10.77 an accurate price for a pizza and a soda in the US?

could be. At pizza hut they recently had a deal with the stuffed crust pizza being 9.99 and then a small soda might be that price..it really depends on any specials they have...

There is also the matter of sales tax. Plus let's be honest, some pizza makers are quite cheap. Considering that Fry used to live in late 20th century NYC, his pizza must be amazingly cheap.

About the Personal Identification Number Number: How often do you hear people say Automated Teller Machine Machine, as in "I need to visit the ATM machine"?

I hear it variously as "cash machine, ATM, bank" but mostly people say "I need to get some money" and if it's out of normal bank hours, you assume they mean they need an ATM.

GREAT LINES:

FRY: "I found out that the secret to happiness is not friends, it's things."
BENDER: "I'm a thing."

TUE

On the whole currency thing, I have noticed that in this series the relative values don't seem too removed from current prices and whathaveyou.

I guess they thought that either they'd sort this out by 3000, or (more likely) that people would have to mention currency a lot and gags like
'Tube of life savers? $45000.' would get old fast. And maybe not even be understood by casual viewers.

I'm kinda wondering what Groening & Co have to say on this now.

The dollar could have been revalued during the time Fry was frozen.

Another thing to consider is that the US goverment dosen't exist in 3001. They appear to have a unified world goverment. (But don't all Sci-fi shows have that? Did the Sci-fi writers have a secret meeting to decide what year to have a unified goverment.) Back to the main issue, the World Dollar is about equal to a US Dollar c.1000 years ago (ie now).

Can any econimists/accountants claify the situation. (If there are any economists at nitcentral.)

Yeah, I just realised that the whole thing can't have remained utterly stable since 1999, because when Bender's trying to wake the Professor up on the way back from the old people's planet, he says, 'Stuff costs more nowadays!' Unless he meant it costs more in 3001 than it did in 1965 or something...

"The dollar could have been revalued during the time Fry was frozen. "

There's a problem with that, the money fry had would have been revalued down too.

If $1new is $1000old then Fry would have got merely $4.3million world dollars.

The fact he's not rich in future episodes answers that question.

OK..Mom's thugs kidnap Fry & make him think he's back in the 20th Century. In comes Pam Anderson (what's left of her) to buy a pizza.

First of all, Why doesn't Fry notice that Pam's head is in a glass jar?

Second, Why does he say after Pam buys the pizza..."Just like my PIN number"? Is that a wise thing to say in front of complete strangers?

Third, Why is Pam helping a bunch of thugs to steal another person's money?

Well, the first two are easy. Fry is a complete and utter idiot.

They also give a few seconds of "Fry-vision" where we see his POV and it looks like he's still getting over the drugs. His vision is very blurred. That could explain his confusion over Pam-in-a-Jar.

TUE

I'm surprised to hear that you have service charges on savings accounts. Maybe Fry went to an european-style bank, or an eccentric one, which was trying the novel way of attracting customers by having a savings-account free of charge? Maybe the bank was situated in a prime spot/ had a nice name, so it was bought by a large corporation and rebought through the time, so that's why its still in business?