I would think that the technology for cryo freezing people would have been newish by 1999, so there probably aren’t too many people from before then who woke up in 3000. There may have been a few people who froze and unfroze around the same time, so he may not be THE oldest, but I think that he’s the oldest person in the series
You must log in or register to comment.
So when you’re frozen you don’t age. So when Fry goes into the freezer doodle at 25, he also exits at age 25.
For example when Fry, Farnsworth & Bender time travel and loop back around, we wouldn’t give them a negative age. If they spend a year time traveling, we would add a year to their age.
So I think we need to consider the oldest as someone with the most years doing something. However since time travel is involved it’s time spend doing things that they then remember.
So Bender, ignoring for a moment he is a robot, being stuck in Roswell would make him quite old since he remembers it all.
Now let’s talk about Fry specifically. In the season 7 finale, “Meanwhile” Fry plays with the time button, gaining new knowledge every time he pushes the button. Eventually Fry jumps off a building, resetting time once he sees Leela. Fry falls for a long time, but we don’t know how long he falls. Time stops, Fry & Leela live a life, but Farnsworth resets time back to when time first stopped. BUT that means Fry still remembers jumping off the building and ALL the times he pushed the button. As a quick throwaway joke when we resume season 8 we learn 10 years have passed. That means Fry remembers pushing the button to reset time FOR 10 YEARS.
So while Fry may not be the oldest, he is at least 10 years older in terms of memory, which I think is interesting to think about.
When fry went to a self help group for people who were frozen, there was a caveman lamenting seeing his wife in the British museum. Presumably the caveman is older than Fry.
Same episode, but Steve Castle (the 80s business guy) said he froze himself in the 1980s until there was a cure for boneitis
Don’t you worry about blank, let me worry about blank!
Blank? BLANK?! YOU’RE NOT SEEING THE BIG PICTURE!!
As a side note, how’d you know that 80’s business guys name was Steve Castle? I feel like he was only ever referred to as “that guy”?
Yeah, his name isn’t mentioned in the episode, but he was named in the script
His name, as mentioned on the audio commentary and listed in the script, is Steve Castle, but he is only ever called “That Guy” in the episode.
I looked up his name for the comment, i wasn’t sure what his name was and at the time didn’t realize it was as obscure as it is.
Ah, ok, thank you for confirming I didn’t just black out a big chunk of that episode or something, cuz I read Steve Castle in your comment and I was like…who the fuck is that? He had a name??
I presume we aren’t counting the people who are heads in jars? Even if they have shiny new bodies?
Yes the oldest I can recall among them is Richard Nixon
You mean aside from all the founding fathers in jars?
Yesa
Wasn’t there Lincoln in the hall of presidents?
John Adams was in the hall of presidents, and has Nixon beat by more than a few years.
https://www.oldest.org/people/founding-fathers-of-the-united-states/
Your list is oldest at time of death (IRL), not earliest born. Ben Franklin is the earliest born on that list, and also the earliest born head in a jar according to the Infosphere and Fandom wikis.
If forward time travel counts, then yes by a large margin.
I totally forgot about that. That would make him the oldest person in the universe, no?
Unless time is a curve and not a straight line
But is it time travel? He is just frozen, in hibernation so to say.
I think they are referring to when they took the long way to go back in time, by going forward and looping around.
Ah that makes more sense.
If you include his going around the long way in the professor’s time machine and completely looping the time span of the universe in the process, then yes, and he’s certainly the oldest organic entity. He is his natural age plus 1000 years plus two universal lifetimes. (Initially I said one universe lifetime. This is wrong, it was two.) The professor is technically younger than him by nine hundred years and some change, and Bender is established to be young enough that Hermes approved his QC check. Those two being the only others to take the time machine trip with him. Everyone else got left behind at the end of the first universe unless we see otherwise.
Pretty sure this is the correct answer. Bender was born in the future, but (ignoring the paradoxical time travel duplicates from the first movie) waited out the 1000 year time span two separate times (once in Roswell that Ends Well, and again the first movie). Then lived through two entire universe lifespans in the forward time machine in The Late Philip J Fry.
Space God might not have even survived the end of the universe twice like he did.
HOWEVER: If you don’t count the forward time machine stuff, I think it’s probably one of the Nibblonians who are the oldest, since I’m pretty sure they existed before the birth of the universe
Fry is easily the oldest living human depicted in the series, at least if we consider age simply as the difference between that person’s date of birth and now. I believe the Professor is stated to be the biologically oldest person in the world at some point, but given that the show itself jokes that he is technically Fry’s junior I think in the spirit of things that shouldn’t count for much. Various aliens, “god,” and other entities may have the technical or biological capability live longer, but only if they’re able to survive the end of the universe and continue their existence into the next one… Twice.
I think who gets crowned “oldest” depends heavily on how age is defined in the context of a show where time travel is so frequent. Some additional rambling on that point follows, since I wrote my last comment on my phone in haste and using hazy half-remembered details about a series I haven’t watched for years.
Fry was born in August of 1974 and thus at the time of his first freezing at Applied Cryogenics he was 25. When first thawed in the year 3000 he is thus 1025 – at least chronologically albeit not biologically. Context clues in that season of the show (e.g. ComicCon 3010) indicate that the time machine incident takes place in the year 3010 in the original timeline, thus Fry is 1035 from the perspective of his birthdate when he steps into the machine. I had initially forgotten that the trio make two complete loops of the time span of the universe rather than one, also. Even if the trio did not age for any of that intervening time other than a few minutes here and there while they stopped the machine to search for the reverse time machine technology, they did witness the complete cycles of two universes in super-accelerated form through the windshield and also explicitly can’t return to whence they came. So from the perspective of Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth those years have irrevocably passed. Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth now have two entire universe lifespans between the present and their original birthdates, but Fry is already technically the oldest of those three before they even step into the machine.
So from the time of Fry’s birth to that moment when they return in the machine and crush their paradox duplicates, two universe lifespans plus 1035 years have passed. (I’ll leave calculating exactly how long one universe is to someone else, but the machine shows the end of the current universe to be the year “100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.”) Nobody in the show is provably as far dislocated from their original birth/creation date as Fry, so claiming anyone else is would require some assumption or unsourceable claims.
For what it’s worth his Lars incarnation is biologically older than him by 19 years by the events at the end of Bender’s Big score, having spent an additional 12 years living his life in the past and then freezing and returning to the year 3000 (not 3007 which is when the ending takes place) and living 7 more years in the 3000’s timeline before meeting up with the crew during the plot of the movie. He is killed at the end due to being a time paradox clone at the apparent biological age of 59, but prime Fry outlived him by default. Lars died before having two universe lifespans added to his chronological age, also.
In terms of most time actually experienced, Bender is certainly a top contender. Possibly for this reason the Futurama wiki seems to think that he is the oldest character in the show. I think that’s pretty debatable, not least because all of the time paradox Benders are indistinguishable from one another. We also can’t prove how old the space god is, but he/it is clearly conscious and experiencing events, and has been around for a long time. For completeness, Bender is four years old when Fry meets him (manufactured in 2996) and thus 14 by the time of the time machine incident. But his head was previously buried outside of Roswell for ~1055 years, making his experienced lifetime at least 1069 years by that point. (I don’t believe the show specifies what year the crew left from/returned to bookending the events of Roswell That Ends Well. This could be plus another couple of years.) And as said above one of his incarnations – possibly the prime one, possibly not – from “way at the end” of Bender’s Big Score also went back to the year 2000 to tattoo the time code onto Fry’s butt and then apparently took the long way back to 3007 by simply waiting it out in the cave with all the other time paradox Benders. Bender also did the double universe loop with Fry and the Professor, so regardless of what his experienced lifetime is, he’s third in the top three for oldest beings since date of birth/construction, regardless. What is less clear is while he traveled backwards in time repeatedly using the time code in Bender’s Big Score to steal historical artifacts and returned to the show’s present by waiting in the cave, we don’t know how many times he did it. Each trip is easily thousands of years, and while at the end all of the Benders explode due to the time paradox effect except one, it’s only implied and not outright proven whether the prime Bender is the one who survived (i.e. the one who was ordering the others around and did not take all of the trips himself), whether the Bender who survived and the one who traveled back to 2000 to leave the tattoo are the same Bender, or indeed if the robot we think is Bender is actually Flexo pretending/believing he is Bender since that’s also left ambiguous. Either way, Bender’s experienced lifetime is clearly the longest of the Planet Express crew and probably anyone native to Earth, although on that point the Nibblonians may even have him beat.
That’s because as you have observed the Nibblonians are explicitly immortal in the sense that they do not die of old age, but I don’t think when they actually came to be is specified in the show. It’s possible but not demonstrated that they could have escaped the natural end of the universe by eating themselves, but where they go afterwards is never explained and whether or not the ones we see in the show are native to this universe or came from a different one is never defined. Any of them we meet could be thousands, millions, or billions of years old but we don’t have any specific evidence one way or the other.
TL;DR: Fry has the longest provable time span between his birth and the show’s present. Bender has the longest experienced lifetime in the context of us actually having been able to see it. Space god is probably equivalent to the current age of the universe but we’re not sure. Some random Nibblonians may have escaped the last universe and now live in ours, being an indeterminate and possibly very old age, but we can’t prove that either.
There were Neanderthals in the episode “Fun on a Bun” but I don’t recall if their bodies were frozen for eons or if they just lived as an isolated society for ages. Nevertheless, boneitis 80’s guy would still be older than Fry.
I also think that age should also be measured relative to the character’s perspective (or at least the perspective of their body). In essence, cryo freeze for 1000 years = 1000 years of aging, but accelerating 1000 years of time in a matter of 5 minutes from the traveller’s perspective = 5 minutes of age.
They have George Washington’s (and all other ex presidents) head in a jar at the head museum, and they have shown Ghengis Khan to be alive and well.
I’m not even sure Fry is a contender.
I can’t find an appearance of Khan
KHAAAAAAAAN!
Could you be thinking of a materialized hologram of Attila the Hun, instead?
In the words of Ford Prefect, "time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. "
My favourite litmus test for coolness.
Was Fry younger or older than Pauly Shore? Plus, that 80’s business guy is probably older (unless you’re only counting people who are still alive in the series).
He’s probably in the top 5 oldest people, though.
Pauly Shore was born in 1968. Fry was born in 1974 according to the Infosphere.
Fry would likely have had knowledge if Pauly Shore was frozen before him.
My guess is a toss up between the 80s guy and Pauly Shore.
Edit- Since 80s guy died from Boneitis, Pauly Shore is the oldest. (Not counting the heads in the jars).
If you do count the heads, is anyone older than George Washington?
Infosphere and Fandom wiki both say Ben Franklin (born 1706) is the oldest known head in a jar
There are/were still people being thawed out, so i assume there’s older people in cryo tubes. It’d be hilarious if theyd pull Walt Disney out of one
