Zapp Brannigan's Signature Wardrobe On Futurama Was Originally Less Revealing

"Futurama" is filled with loathsome but hilarious characters. Bender the robot (John DiMaggio) wants to kill all humans, but his felonious antics are always a highlight of the show. Professor Farnsworth (Billy West) is a mad scientist who dreams of doomsday devices and atomic monsters, but his mad genius makes him almost as funny as Bender.

Then there's starship captain Zapp Brannigan (also Billy West), a wannabe lech who lacks the charm one needs. He's captain of the Nimbus, a ship in the DOOP (Democratic Order of Planets), with beleaguered alien second-in-command Kif Kroker (Maurice LaMarche). Kif is Zapp's Spock, but an abused assistant instead of a trusted advisor.

Zapp, Kif, and their crewmen wear red DOOP uniforms, with gold stylings and miniskirts. In "Zapp Gets Canceled," Leela, Fry, and Bender take over the Nimbus and start wearing those same uniforms.

In "The Art of Futurama," series director Bill Morrison revealed his original Zapp design was a bit different than the final one: "I worked on Zapp Brannigan a lot, and when I saw the color version, I fell over laughing. I had imagined he was wearing tights, but they decided to just give him bare legs and turn his tunic into a miniskirt. Hilarious!"

The bare legs do fit how showboating and sex-obsessed Zapp is. He's worn plenty of other revealing outfits too. His white military formalwear also has a mini-skirt. In his debut episode, "Love's Labours Lost In Space," he tries (and fails) to seduce Leela while wearing a barely-there robe. (She has pity sex with him instead.) When he orders Kif to "inform the men" of his conquest, he's naked and concealing only his crotch with a bedsheet.

The joke behind Zapp Brannigan should be clear by now: he's Captain James T. Kirk, but if Kirk had the personality of his actor William Shatner. (Shatner later appeared on "Futurama" as himself, in "Where No Fan Has Gone Before," after some convincing from Billy West.)

Zapp's uniform also feels like part of the "Star Trek" parody. For all the progressiveness of the original series, it still had a strict gender divide in the Starfleet uniforms. Men wore pants, women wore one-piece uniforms with short skirts. Later series did away with this; in the "Deep Space Nine" episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" where the main characters go back to the 23rd century, Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) notes that "women wore less" in the old days, as she shows up wearing less.

In "Futurama," all officers of the DOOP, even the men, wear a skirt as short as Uhura's, underlining the absurdity of the revealing uniforms. The show's "Star Trek" parodies don't end with Zapp, either.

"The Problem With Popplers" is titled after "The Trouble With Tribbles," as both are about little aliens causing big problems. "Godfellas" features Bender meeting God (or rather, the remains of a space probe that collided with God), which is a very "Star Trek" style plot. "Futurama" and "Star Trek" even share some writers.

"Star Trek" is the defining science-fiction TV series of the 20th century, and a sci-fi parody show like "Futurama" would be incomplete without homaging it.

"The Art of Futurama" is available in print and from digital retailers.