Futurama Season 7 Preview: The Bots And The Bees And A Farewell To Arms

Matt Groening's Futurama is back in less than a week. The seventh season of the Emmy winning animated program, same as the sixth, will be split into separate 13-episode runs with '7A' beginning on Wednesday night and then '7B' airing sometime in (early) 2013. Comedy Central started advertising for the first run not too long ago and adopted the popular Futurama 'Not Sure If' meme as the primary marketing strategy. There are now a bunch more of those promos on the Comedy Central YouTube page but the network has also released preview clips for the two-part premiere.

Season 7 opens with back-to-back episodes called "The Bots and the Bees" and "A Farewell to Arms" and in the first, Bender and Bev (the office soda machine) have unprotected robot sex which results in a bastard son. Somebody's been watching too much Game of Thrones. Bender's new boy, appropriately named Ben, is a chip off the old block except when it comes to following in his dad's profession. They may be able to rob several different places together (people, liquor stores, banks) but they will never bend as father and son. That's what you get when your mom is a vending machine. Here's the clip called 'Bender's Bastard.'

Following "TBatB" is Futurama's spoof of the Mayan 2012 doomsday prophecy called “A Farewell to Arms.” Of course, with the show being set in the future, this time the ancient prophecy predicts that the end of the world will occur in 3012. In the clip, 'The World Is Ending Again,' we see the beginning of the extinction event which has taken the form of a catastrophic sun-spot cycle! And don't count on Coward Man to save the day.

"I was crazy before it was cool." Futurama returns Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET for a special one-hour premiere on Comedy Central. It stars Billy West, Katey Sagal and John DiMaggio. It was created by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen.