Electric Light Orchestra fans were delighted to see a nod to the group’s iconic spaceship in an episode of Futurama.
The show, made by The Simpsons creator Matt Groening and developed alongside David X. Cohen, has been on the air intermittently since 1999 and is filled with references to pop culture from across the globe. The Planet Express delivery team, which features Philip J. Fry (Billy West), Bender (John DiMaggio) and Leela (Katey Sagal) has been a staple of television for over two decades, despite two cancellations.
A return to the small screen led to the Electric Light Orchestra tribute, spotted briefly in the foreground of season six, episode fifteen, Möbius Dick. The episode serves as an obvious play on the Herman Miller book yet there was time for the show creators to slip in a few nods to music-themed spaceships and logos.
ELO fans were excited to see the ship, which can be seen abandoned and broken, floating through space. Other space-faring band logos like Journey and Boston can also be seen. Despite the episode airing in 2011, fans of the show and the band have been excited to share the sighting ever since.
A post from as long ago as six years ago shared the context of the joke, with one fan theorising it was a knock at the band, which were defunct at the time of the episode’s airing. They wrote: “For context, they are in a spaceship junkyard. The show was basically making a joke about how ELO was dead at the point when this episode came out.”
Another fan joked the ship’s destroyed state is “what happens when you let Bev [Bevan] drive.” The joke appeared to be a knock at Bevan’s attempt at reviving the Electric Light Orchestra without Lynne after the first split in 1986.
One fan joked: “Wow! That certainly came out of the blue! I’m sorry.” Another suggested one famous, music-themed spaceship should have been added into the background as the Planet Express team made their way through space. They wrote: “I remember this scene. Only thing missing was the Moorglade Mover from the cover of Yes’ album Fragile.”
A plethora of references were seen in the episode and fans of both the band and show highlighted a few other cultural nods. “You can also see the ship from 2001: A Space Odyssey there on the left,” one wrote.
Another pointed out the “Boston guitar ship” from their self-titled album can be spotted in the episode.
The spaceship graveyard is a nod to the series of short stories that inspired “2001 A Space Odyssey”. I was surprised to see that Kubrick did not add this scene to the movie because it would have made a more cohesive end to the movie suggesting that we are not the only ones in the universe searching for their origins. This fits in nicely in that ELO is not the only prog group acknowledging their search for a new future in music only to be left as a relic of the past.