It’s the Thursday before Easter Sunday, and you know what that means!

No, not the anniversary of The Last Supper… it’s Good Fryday’s Eve!

This Holiest of Avocado dot Org’s Numerous Holidays, Good Fryday is the celebration of Philip J. Fry, our favorite animated man-child and star of one of the greatest geek shows ever made, Futurama.

Philip J. Fry, or just “Fry“, as he’s generally known, was named after Homer Philip Groening, the father of series creator Matt Groening (who is also known as the Life in Hell guy, as well as the creator of some weird, crudely-animated shorts featured in The Tracy Ullman Show that never really went anywhere).

Hideous.

Fry begins the series as a hapless 25-year old pizza delivery boy in New York City who inadvertently gets locked in a cryogenic freezer at the crack of midnight on New Years Eve in 1999, and wakes up 1000 years later to a whole new world full of bizarre aliens, cyclops women, and wisecracking, chain-smoking robots.  (That old chestnut, huh?)

One of those robots is Bender Bending Rodriguez, who Fry encounters in his first moments outside in New New York.  Bender is standing in line for a suicide booth, but meeting Fry gives him a new will to live, and the two become fast and lifelong friends.  (This, I would argue, is the real love story in the series.)

Fry tracks down and eventually goes to work as a delivery boy for his distant nephew, Hubert J. Farnsworth, and over the years manages to wear down his cycloptic co-worker (and the first woman he crushed on in the year 3000), Turanga Leela, until she finally settles on falls in love with him.

It’s a bit… um, problematic at best.  (At least Frender is pure.)

Happy Good Fryday!