card to her, but Leela dismisses it and tells him that she will always remember their time together. Bender can be seen under the bridge they stand on, burying the bodies of the dead duplicates. Production "The Late Philip J. Fry" was written by Lewis Morton and directed by Peter Avanzino. The table reading for this episode took place on October 21, 2009. From June 16 to June 23, as part of its "Countdown to Futurama" event, Comedy Central Insider, Comedy Central's news outlet, released various preview materials for the episode, including a storyboard of the time machine and character designs for the aged Planet Express crew. Comedy Central also released a preview clip of the episode online on July 23, featuring Fry's tardiness to the initial lunch date with Leela. Cultural references The episode takes its main inspiration from the Poul Anderson short story Flight to Forever. The short story shares largely the same plot as the episode where two men get stuck in a time machine that only moves forward. The episode contains many other cultural references, particularly to time-travel related fiction, including Planet of the Apes, The Terminator, H.G. Wells' famous novel The Time Machine, Anderson's Tau Zero, and Olaf Stapledon's classic future-history novel Last and First Men. Depictions of the past also include several callbacks to events in previous Futurama episodes. Farnsworth takes advantage of the time travel to kill Adolf Hitler, a classic temporal paradox, but misses and kills Eleanor Roosevelt instead. When the Professor asks the year ten million soldier about the machine revolt, the soldier's response, "We built them to make our lives easier, but they rebelled," is taken from the intro text to Battlestar Galactica. The sound of the time machine is that of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Original Series. A parody of the 1969 Zager & Evans song "In the Year 2525" accompanies the scenes of Fry, the Professor, and Bender traveling through the various eras of the future. The episode has also been interpreted as a light homage to Douglas Adams' series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, particularly a scene in which Fry, Bender, and the Professor "casually drink beer and watch the end of the universe". Broadcast and reception "The Late Philip J. Fry" originally aired on July 29, 2010 on Comedy Central. In its original American broadcast, "The Late Philip J. Fry" drew 100,000 more