The Lrrr Joke One Futurama Writer Has Spent A Decade Trying To Get Into The Show
Lrrr, the ruler of the planet Omicron Persei VIII, first appeared on "Futurama" in the season 1 episode "When Aliens Attack" (November 7, 1999) and was voiced by the inimitable Maurice LaMarche. Lrrr, a vicious and violent conqueror, had become obsessed with 1990s-era Earth TV, as it had taken a thousand years for those TV signals to reach his planet. As far as Lrrr was concerned, "Friends" reruns were brand new. (Sample dialogue: "Why does Ross, the largest Friend, not simply eat the other five?") Lrrr was also closely following a series called "Single Female Lawyer," which was the "Futurama" version of "Ally McBeal." It seems the season finale of "Single Female Lawyer" was knocked off the air a millennium ago, and Lrrr has come to Earth — with a massive fleet of warships — to discover how the episode ends. It will be up to the show's clownish heroes to "swede" a season finale on the fly.
Lrrr has appeared in 13 episodes of "Futurama" to date and was featured in all four of the "Futurama" movies. He has even enjoyed episodes of his own, as when he and his wife Ndnd (Tress MacNeille) briefly split up. "Lrrr" is pronounced "lur," while "Ndnd" is pronounced "unda-unda." The vowel-less spellings of their names clearly started as a winking joke among the writers, trying to give their characters unpronounceable names.
During a "Futurama" panel at Los Angeles Comic Con in 2022, the panelist reminisced by showing a clip from a 2013 "Futurama" panel, filmed right after the show's third cancelation. On the 2013 panel, producer and writer Patric Verrone noted that the new episodes of "Futurama" would allow him to make a joke about Lrrr and Ndnd that he had never done before. Notably, he wanted to correct the pronunciation.
Lrrr and Ndnd
Verrone explained:
"There was a joke I always wanted to do that we never got to, which was having Lrrr call Ndnd 'Unda Unda' and having her say, 'You're mispronouncing it. It's pronounced 'Nid Nid.' [pause for scattered, unenthused laughter] Now I know why we didn't do that joke."
How would you pronounce Ndnd? "Unda-unda," or "nid-nid?" My eyeballs want to read it as "En-dinned."
Naturally, back in the room at the 2022 Los Angeles panel, the moderator thought to ask Verrone if he was going to be allowed to make the joke in the (then-upcoming) 2023 Hulu "Futurama" revival. Was Verrone going to be allowed to make his lackluster, not-very-crowd-pleasing joke at least a full decade after it was conceived? Verrone cleared up the tense matter that three to four people had been waiting a decade to hear:
"Well, I cannot reveal anything about the upcoming season, but ... No."
The other writers on the panel — notably Jeanette Lim — then mentioned that they were still in the middle of writing new episodes, however, so the possibility of the Ndnd joke still existed. Verrone did say that Lrrr, Ndnd, Maurice LaMarche, and Tress MacNeille were all back on the show, so why not?
Lrrr and Ndnd appeared in the episode "Rage Against the Vaccine" (September 4, 2023), which spoofed the world's trials experienced during COVID-19 lockdowns, using a new virus called Explovid-23. Its only symptoms are explosive anger and a tendency to believe conspiracy theories. We'll likely see them again.