The proprietor of the Planet Express delivery service for which the main characters work, the extremely elderly Professor Farnsworth is the great-great-great-etc. nephew and only living relative of Philip J. Fry, one of the series' central protagonists.

Character history

The Professor teaches at Mars University and worked for Momcorp, but he currently spends his time inventing ridiculous devices and coming up with equally suicidal missions for his crew. While at Momcorp, he fell in love with the CEO, Mom, only to leave her and Momcorp when she decided to weaponize his "Q.T. McWhiskers" toy, an anthropomorphic cat toy that shot rainbows from its eyes. What he's a professor of goes unexplained as he demonstrates mastery of whatever field of science is plot convenient at the time. This reaches its apex in Bender's Big Score, where he shouts "I can wire anything directly into anything! I'm the professor!"

The Professor is characterized by his catch-phrase "Good news, everyone!" frequently followed by very bad news: often one of his semi-suicidal missions. On the very few occasions he has good news he opens with "Bad news, everyone!" then before the good news sinks in, he gives a "Good news" comment. Another is his exclamation of surprise, "Sweet zombie Jesus!" (although this phrase is sometimes censored in syndication). Though not a catchphrase in general, he often says "Wha?" when unaware of the situation, or when someone questions a statement he has just made, showing his senility. He also often completely contradicts himself, as in the time when he told his crew they were to gather "Honey. Ordinary honey." When Leela says that it doesn't sound dangerous, he replies with "This is no ordinary honey!" The Professor also has a tendency to enunciate his /wh/ sounds, and frequently hypercorrects his /w/ sounds to sound like /wh/ as well, e.g. "Whell, let's get started."

The Professor is one of the oldest human beings living on earth (excluding those who have been cryogenically frozen or are kept alive as heads in jars), a title he acquired after the events of the episode "A Clone of My Own", in which it was revealed that upon turning 160, all humans are collected by the "Sunset Robot Squad" and sent to live out the rest of their days in isolation aboard the gigantic "Near Death Star" (a pun on the Death Star). After his crew rescues him, Farnsworth returns to Planet Express to resume the life he originally had before being removed by the Sunset Robot Squad. In "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles" his age is stated to be 161, and after swimming in the fountain of ageing, reports that he is "Even older! Huzzah!". Cubert Farnsworth took control over Planet Express claiming the Professor had himself declared legally dead for tax evasion reasons. The Professor denies this allegation, claiming "you take one nap in a ditch at the park and they start declaring you this and that!"

The Professor rarely worries about the safety of the crew, viewing them as a means to an end, as evidenced in the first episode. After remarking that he was looking for a new crew for his intergalactic space ship, he was asked "What happened to your old crew?". His response was "Oh, those poor sons-of-b-but that's not important! What is important is that I need a new crew!". Farnsworth's last crew died while gathering honey from Space Bees, and that at least one crew before them met a similar grisly end (The Sting), their old career chips were found in the stomach of a Space Wasp (Space Pilot 3000).

He quite frequently sends his crew on dangerous missions even when he has the foreknowledge that they will probably not make it back alive. His missions are typically those other delivery companies won't take, such as delivering subpoenas to mob-controlled worlds or casual deliveries to virus-infested planets. Even the commercial that he had produced for his company makes several remarks to this effect, including "When other companies aren't crazy or foolhardy enough..." and "Our crew is replaceable, your package isn't..." the former showing the crewman running through a minefield and the latter showing him being carried away by a giant bird. During another episode, when the crew and his ship are sent off to war, he immediately tries to hire another crew. When his old crew returns, he is clearly surprised they survived, remarking "Oh God you're alive! I mean, thank God you're alive." then remarks to the applicants "Come back in three days, a week at most." indicating just how low he thinks their chances of survival are. Even his family relationship to Fry doesn't do much (if anything) to reduce his ardour for particularly difficult and deadly delivery missions. The only exception to this seems to be the mission his old crew died on. He warns his crew not to go, and apparently, also warned his old crew not to go. When asked about the nature of his delivery "business," he once clarified that he viewed his company more as "a source of cheap labour, like a family."

The Professor claims to have created Planet Express to fund his experiments, though the company is frequently on the verge of bankruptcy. This is highlighted in "Future Stock", where Hermes shows a pie chart of their income, the larger portion of it (approximately 65%) showing an $8 bank error in their favour. This is mostly due to the incompetence of Fry, Bender, and Leela who have few reservations about abandoning their deliveries if they are distracted by personal problems, endangered by various space hazards, or simply bored. In Futurama: The Game, which may not be considered canon, the Professor laments that the crew never remembers to charge anyone for the deliveries (which would arguably be Hermes' job, not the delivery crew). Despite what would seem to be a setback, the Professor is still very capable of funding his experiments as well as paying for the inevitable repairs after the experiments go awry. The Professor states and/or implies in both "A Clone of My Own" and "Anthology of Interest I" that he has a vast fortune saved up, though his senility and occasional insanity casts some doubt on his actual financial situation. It is reasonable to believe that he is at least wealthy enough to need not Planet Express, considering his long career working directly under the richest woman on Earth, his vast collection of doomsday devices and deadly pets, and his many scientific achievements, including being essentially the father of all modern robots, an accomplishment that implies extensive and continuous royalties.

He also has a genetic disease called "wandering bladder".

Achievements

Production

See also

• Billy West, voice of Ren and Stimpy, Futurama, on the rough start that shaped his life

References