Futurama Censors Threw A Fit Over A 'Millimeter' Of Cleavage

In the "Futurama" episode "Time Keeps on Slippin'" (May 6, 2001), the Professor (Billy West) tasks Leela (Katey Sagal), Bender (John DiMaggio), and Fry (Billy West) to fly into a distant space cloud and retrieve several chronitons — marble-size time particles — and bring them back to Earth for an experiment. The Professor has grown five mutant infants in his lab and needs the chronitons to accelerate their growth and turn them into adults within a matter of seconds. The Professor's mutants are meant to serve as the members of a high-octane, superpowered basketball team constructed to take on the Harlem Globetrotters. 

When the chronitons were removed from their space cloud, however, it accidentally left a small rip in the space-time continuum. Time began behaving erratically across the universe, skipping forward a few minutes, then a few hours, then a few weeks. 

The skips allowed the writers of "Futurama" to squeeze in a few clever gags. Hermes (Phil LaMarr), the company accountant, declares at one point that, despite having no knowledge of physics, might know how to stop the skips. A skip immediately occurs, and Hermes is playing steel drums while all the other characters march in a naked conga line behind him. Hermes laments, "I don't know how this was supposed to work." 

It seems that the censors at Fox weren't fond of the naked conga line. Notably, there is a close-up of Amy (Lauren Tom), and her arm is positioned in such a way as to obscure her chest. On the DVD commentary track for "Slippin'," "Futurama" co-creator David X. Cohen recalled that the show's animators had to re-draw the scene to cover a very slight amount of Amy's cleavage. Never mind that the previous shot had four naked butts in it.

So it seems that butts are okay, but breasts are not. The Fox censors sent Cohen a note, demanding that Amy's nudity be made slightly less nude. Cohen said: 

"Okay, look at this, look at that. Did you see that conga line? We had a great censor note on that. We had to adjust Amy's arm — or possibly Leela's in the previous shot — to a little higher to cover a little more of their cleavage. However, there was no objection to the seven buttocks in the line there completely unconcealed. We had to just adjust to cover an extra one millimeter of chest area." 

"Futurama" was hardly a modest show. Indeed, in the episode "Xmas Story," the Professor notes that in the 31st century, humanity had outgrown the prudish, 20th-century notions of modesty. He says this before throwing off his robe and basking nude in the snow. Throughout "Futurama," the characters are often seen showering together in the locker room, sitting naked in a hot tub together, or merely lounging about in the buff playing 3-D Scrabble. 

They introduced "death by snu-snu," and there is also an Adam & Eve episode, called "In-a-Gadda-Da-Leela," wherein Leela and Zapp Brannigan (West) are nude for a prolonged portion of the episode. The censors seemed okay with shared nudity, especially when it was plentiful in a group setting. But a close-up of a cartoon breast was too much for some people, and Amy's arm had to be adjusted. No, there is no "director's cut" of the episode with the millimeter of cleavage restored. 

As for the aforementioned Harlem Globetrotters game — because I know you're wondering — the Globetrotters won. Of course, they did.