Good news, everyone. Perhaps the single greatest advance in Simpsons fandom recently was the February 2016 introduction of Frinkiac, a clever and immensely useful website that allows users to sort through hundreds of episodes in search of particular quotes or moments and then turn those excerpts into GIFs and memes that can be easily shared on social media. The team behind Frinkiac, including Paul Kehrer, Sean Schulte, and Allie Young, could have stopped there, but their popular Simpsons search engine inspired a lot of fan requests for similar sites for other shows. Now, the team announces its latest project: Morbotron, a site that works exactly like Frinkiac, but is based on Matt Groening’s other animated series, Futurama. The results speak for themselves.
Named in honor of Morbo, the irritable, large-brained, green-skinned alien and TV news anchor, Morbotron works exactly like Frinkiac, except it draws from a pool of 861,414 individual Futurama frames, taken from 124 episodes and four straight-to-DVD movies. Some nerdy details about how this all works are available here. The team has gotten this search engine up and running while making improvements and updates to Frinkiac as well. (The Simpsons Movie is now fair game there, for instance.) Anyone familiar with the previous site should experience no learning curve whatsoever in mastering this one. The developers appear to have pursued this additional project both as a gift to Frinkiac fans and as a way of testing their own abilities. “Since later seasons of Futurama are available in 1080p,” Kehrer writes, “we also wanted to make sure we could provide that quality to our users.”
And if someone just wants to know how often Bender used the word “meatbag,” well, Morbotron can handle that, too.