Futurama Leela
Known simply as Leela, is a imaginary character in the animated television series Futurama, voiced by Katey Sagal. Leela is captain of the Planet Express Ship and is the primary love interest of one of the series' main male protagonists, Philip J. Fry.
She is originally believed to be a cyclopean alien. Leela's and Fry's correlation is a main scheme line that runs throughout the series. Fry continually look for her approval, though she turns him down for dates consistently due to his silliness, yet she has been quoted as saying that she loves his boyish charm. She sees him as a true friend and does not want anything less of him, but it constantly appears as if she is hiding (and denying herself) deeper feelings for him. Leela's single eye hampers her deepness insight and is sometimes broken for comic effect, for instance, in the episode The Problem with Popplers it is suggested that she actually is crashing into billboards every time in the opening credits.
She gathers her parents, Morris and Munda, two sewer-dwelling mutants, for the first time in the episode "Leela's Home world".[2] Her parents gave her up to an orphanage with a note indicating that she was an alien, so that she would have a better life than a typical mutant. Leela is the only person from her species that lives on earth. She took up kick boxing and other similar sports to make up for the lack of friends. Whether she attended college is unknown. He convinced her to quit and she was then offered a job, along with Fry and Bender, on the Planet Express delivery crew where she impressed Professor Farnsworth enough for him to make her captain. She still has problems with men and often gets jealous of Amy's popularity among the opposite sex. She has a soft spot for Fry but is uncertain of whatever thing additional than that, due to Fry's clumsy advances. Contrary to what the other reviewer says, I don't think Futurama sacrificed humor in favor of emotion in this episode. True, the laughs aren't major, but there are some. This is an episode where Bender stuffs a whale carcass down in a sewer. That and a weird pop culture reference (the mutants make a balloon out of Bart Simpson and Jon Arbuckle floats) make this episode interesting. But more than that, it's sweet and touching. Leela succeed an award from the orphanage for being successful in life, but returning to the orphanage seems to remind Leela of the pain of never knowing her parents, and she cries later that night. The mutants bring Fry, Leela and Bender into the sewer and attempt to punish them for Bender's misdeeds, but Leela's parents get the other mutants to banish them from the sewer instead. She ultimately learns the truth. I'm still not sure if that was the best thing to do- it takes away from the mystery of why Leela doesn't mutate when she lands in the sewer water or why these two strange mutants have pictures of her in their home. Then again, a lot of fans might have figured it out anyway, so maybe there was no reason to try to keep it a surprise. Either way, with a touching ending (with a good use of song, as we also saw a little later in Jurassic Bark), this episode is solid.
