Turanga Leela isFuturama’s beloved purple-haired Cyclops. Serving as the captain of the Planet Express Ship, Leela is known for her no-nonsense personality, but she’s gotten a few good one-liners throughout the show’s run.
While Leela has often been the straight man to Fry and Bender, there have been times she’s just as zany as the rest of the Planet Express crew. Leela’s also had her share of emotional moments, from her on-and-off love story with Fry to her reunion with her long-lost parents. Because of this, some of Leela’s more dramatic lines have certainly left quite an impression on audiences, too.
10"Bean Bay Beans. They’re the beaniest!"
In the world ofFuturama, blernsball,a jazzed-up version of baseball, has supplanted the original national pastime. “A Leela of Her Own” sees Leela become the sport’s first female player. Unfortunately, due to her lack of depth perception, Leela’s not the best player and she was only hired as a novelty act.
During her brief fifteen minutes of fame, Leela is hired as a spokesperson, for Bean Bay Beans. Appearing in their commercials, she offers the slogan, using her trademark deadpan, “Bean Bay Beans. They’re The Beaniest!” She even covers the Spanish-language promotion, “Come los Bean Bay frijoles, los frijoles de los reyes!,” meaning “Eat the Bean Bay beans, the beans of kings!” Occasionally, Leela even gets to wear a bean costume.
9"There’s no place like… I wanna be a witch."
In “Anthology of Interest II,” after wishing to find her “true home,” Leela gets knocked out and dreams that she’s traveled to the wonderful land of Oz. Mimickingthe original, oft-told story, Leela and her friends must travel down Martin Luther King Boulevard to reach the Professor to get their wishes granted.Mom is the Wicked Witchof the West who captures Leela along the way. This time, however, it turns out she just wants a daughter. Unfortunately, Bender accidentally spills liquid on her, destroying her.
Even after reaching the Professor, Leela then decides to become the new Wicked Witch. Her magic shoes grant the wish with a simple “There’s no place like…I wanna be a witch!” Leela soon sports a pointed hat and turns everyone into a frog. Her reign of terror is cut short when water falls on her, but she soon wakes up in New New York.
8"Negative, Sailor Moon."
Pop culture can have a lasting power. Even in the world ofFuturama, celebrities of the 21st Century rub elbows with contemporary stars like the Hypnotoad. Granted, it’s usually because their heads have been frozen, but even shows and movies can still be popular in the 31st Century.
In “Mobius Dick” Leela becomes obsessed with a white space whale, much like inMoby Dick. At one point, when Amy tells her to release the harpoon, Leela scoffs with, “Negative, Sailor Moon. We’re going for a sleigh ride.” Apparently,the classic shojo animeis still popular in the distant future, as viewers even see a cosplayer in “Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences.” This also may have been intended to foreshadow the anime parody seen in “Reincarnation,” where Amy actually dressed up like aSailor Moonparody.
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7"There was a bear."
In “31st Century Fox,” Bender gets involved when a hunting club stages a fox hunt using a robotic vulpine. He convinces Fry and Leela to go along with him, but Fry asks if they can stop for ice cream on the way back. Leela immediately adds on, asking if they can also get ice cream on their way there, too.
The crew is seen with ice cream cones when they reach the club. When they have to jump a gate, Leela offers to hold Fry and Bender’s cones for them. When Leela crosses the gate, her face is smeared with Fry and Bender’s ice cream. Leela covers for herself with a simple “There was a bear.” After getting the fox, Fry reminds Bender about the “way-back ice cream,” which ends in Bender giving him and Leela for more frozen treats.
6"Yo, Holmes! We’re looking for a microwave oven."
People often make over-generalizations of the past, and the world ofFuturamais no different. In “Roswell That Ends Well,” the Planet Express crew get stuck in 1947 New Mexico. Leela and the Professor go out into town in disguise to go buy a microwave, not realizing they aren’t commercially popular during the era.
Leela decides to mimic Fry, who was frozen at the end of the 1990s, and confronts a 1940s sales representative with “Yo, Holmes! We’re looking for a microwave oven.” Granted, the Professor wasn’t much better, dressing up in a zoot suit. Ironically, Leela would later become fond of calling people “Holmes” in later episodes, addressing Zapp Brannigan as such in “Neutopia.”
5"For God’s sakes, somebody teach me a lesson!"
In “Yo Leela Leela,” Leela visits the children at the orphanage where she grew up. After failing to tell them a good story, Leela redeems herself with tales of a place called Rumbledy-Hump, filled with friendly, colorful creatures. The stories prove popular enough to turn into a hit television show. However, it soon comes to light that Leela based everything on a real group of aliens.
Leela expects the universe to punish her for her transgressions, much like in her stories, but everything works out fine. The aliens can finally afford luxuries like electricity, and the kids are all adopted by a network executive. Confused, Leela screams to the heavens, “For God’s sakes, somebody teach me a lesson!” She then proceeds a scream “No” as the orphans gather around her and chant how much they love her.
4"One of us is gonna have one eye."
Leela’s one eye often made her feel like an outcast among other humans, even among the other children at the Orphanarium. At a reunion in “The Cyber House Rules,” Leela meets up with Adlai, another orphan who she always harbored a crush on, despite also teasing her. Having grown up to become a plastic surgeon, he is able to give Leela two eyes and the two start dating.
Leela convinces Adlai that they could adopt a child, and considers a girl with an ear growing out of her forehead. Adlai shows his true colors when he offers to perform plastic surgery on the girl. Infuriated, Leela demands he restores her back to normal. When Adlai refuses, Leela tells him point-blank, “Listen, buddy. By the end of the day, one of us is gonna have one eye.”
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3"It’s like some kind of weird Leela museum. And I’m the Leela."
Having grown up as an orphan, Leela spent most of the early episodes unaware of who her parents were or what her home planet was like. In “Leela’s Homeworld,” the series finally answers the driving question over Leela’s origins. After Leela, Fry, and Bender get captured by sewer mutants, the trio comes across a home filled with old photos of Leela. A horrified Leela even comments that “It’s like some kind of weird Leela museum. And I’m the Leela.” Leela soon begins to fear that the sewer mutants murdered her parents and have some obsession with her.
Eventually, it comes to light that Leela was never an alien, or even an orphan, to begin with, but the daughter of loving sewer mutants who sent her to the surface to give her a better life. Leela was never really even abandoned, as her parents have been secretly watching over her during her whole life. This means that Leela’s real home was Earth all along.
2"Please don’t stop playing, Fry. I Wanna hear how it ends."
“The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” wasthe final episodeduringFuturama’s Fox run. Fry wants to impress Leela by mastering the holophoner, an instrument that produces holograms, after it worked in “Parasites Lost,” with the help of parasitic worms. This time, however, Fry makes a deal with the Robot Devil, allowing him to put on an opera all about Leela.
When the deal backfires on the Robot Devil, he gets revenge by tricking Leela into a marriage plot, after which he’ll imprison her in hell. Fry is forced to give up his talent to save her, ruining the show. The offended audience walks out, leaving only Leela, who offers the story’s final lines, “Please don’t stop playing, Fry. I wanna hear how it ends.” On his own, Fry then proceeds to conjure up a childlike image of him and Leela holding hands and walking off into the distance.
1"I would marry you even if you weren’t the last man on Earth." / “I Do.”
“Meanwhile” serves as the series finale forFuturama’s Comedy Central run. In the story, Fry decides to finally propose to Leela. Unfortunately, Fry gets caught in a time loop where he’s constantly falling to near-death thanks to the Professor’s latest invention: the Time Button. Eventually, after the Time Button breaks, Fry and Leela get stuck in frozen time together. Despite this, Leela agrees to marry Fry, telling him, “I would marry you even if you weren’t the last man on Earth,” inverting the popular insult.
The two put together a makeshift wedding, complete with Leela’s mutant parents. It shows they even managed to grow old together, having been married for decades in frozen time. The Professor is revealed to have survived after all and offers to take them back before he even created the Time Button. Fry and Leela agree to do it all over again. Leela ends the story with two simple words, “I do.” This effectively gaveFuturamaits “happy ending,” while stillallowing for new stories.
