Turanga Leela | |
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Futurama character | |
First appearance | "Space Pilot 3000" |
Last appearance | "Simpsorama" (The Simpsons episode) |
Voiced by | Katey Sagal |
Information | |
Full name | Turanga Leela |
Nickname(s) | Leela |
Species | Mutant Human |
Gender | Female |
Occupation | Captain of the Planet Express spaceship |
Family | Turanga Morris (father) Turanga Munda (mother) Yancy Fry, Sr. (father-in-law) Mrs. Fry (mother-in-law) Yancy Fry, Jr. (brother-in-law) Yancy Fry, Jr.'s wife (sister-in-law) Philip J. Fry II (nephew) Prof. Hubert J. Farnsworth (distant nephew) Munda's mother (grandmother) Munda's grandmother (great-grandmother) Mildred Fry (grandmother-in-law) Mr. and Mrs. Gleisner (maternal grandparents-in-law) |
Significant other(s) | Philip J. Fry (husband) |
Children | Kif's Offspring |
Origin | New New York City, New New York, Earth |
Turanga Leela, known simply as Leela (born July 29, 2975), is a main character from the animated television series Futurama. Leela is ship captain, pilot, and head of all aviation services on board the Planet Express Ship. Throughout the series, she has an on-again, off-again relationship with and marries Philip J. Fry, the central character in the series. The character, voiced by Katey Sagal, is named after the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen. She is one of the few characters in the cast to routinely display competence and the ability to command, and routinely saves the rest of the cast from disaster, but suffers extreme self-doubt because she has only one eye and grew up as a bullied orphan. She first believes herself an alien but later is revealed to be the least-mutated sewer mutant in the history of 31st-century Earth. Her family (particularly her parents' accent and "outcast" status) parodies aspects of pollution and undesirability associated with industrial New Jersey when compared with New York City.
Turanga Leela was born to Morris and Munda, two mutants who live in the sewer deep under New New York City. When Leela was still an infant, her parents gave her up to the Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium with a note scribbled with mysterious symbols to make an impression that Leela was an alien, so that she would have a better life than a typical mutant. For the first three seasons of the series Leela does not give up hope of meeting another member of her race of one-eyed aliens. In the episode "A Bicyclops Built for Two", Leela meets Alcazar, a cyclops who convinces her that he and she are the last two members of their extinct race, only to discover that he is a shapeshifting impostor. Leela's parents' plan of concealing her origins works well until an industrial accident caused by environmentally irresponsible Bender brings Leela and her friends into the New New York City's sewer system where for the first time Leela meets her parents and discovers that she is not a cyclopean alien, but is actually a sewer mutant.