“As a head in a jar, I envy the dead.”

George Foreman, Lucy Liu and Leonard Nimoy I can understand. I’m willing to buy, in the context of a humorous sci-fi cartoon, that we will develop functional head-in-a-jar technology sometime in the next twenty or thirty years.

Richard Nixon? Well, he was still alive when the series was active, so the same logic applies. This just dates the series as a piece of fiction, much like early episodes showing robots using floppy discs or depicting the internet as being hopelessly slathered by flashy banner ads.

But the head-in-a-jar museum also contains George Washington. And Abraham Lincoln. I’m pretty sure Napoleon is in there. What, did we dig these guys up, graft synthetic skin and hair to their half-collapsed skulls, create artificial memories to implant in a new lump of grey matter…? What would possibly be left in, say, 2040 to revive? And even if we could do it, why would we want to? What does the world gain by analyzing the wisdom of fake-Washington’s dismembered zombie head?

What I’m getting at here is that Futurama is silly.