Hosted by Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone was an anthology program, delving into a new cast in a new situation every episode, typically with a shocking twist at the end, and the show quickly became one of the most iconic sci-fi series of the 20th century and had an undeniable impact on both horror and sci-fi for decades to come. Many elements of the show can be found in Futurama, which even devoted entire chunks of episodes toward crafting pitch-perfect Twilight Zone parodies with its in-universe show, The Scary Door.
Across seven seasons, Futurama included six "episodes" of The Scary Door. For instance, Season 2's "A Head in the Polls" features a parody of "Time Enough At Last," a Twilight Zone episode that focuses on the meek Henry Bemis, who just wants to be left alone to read his books. When he's the only survivor of a nuclear apocalypse, he thinks he's found an unlikely paradise -- only for his glasses to break, leaving him truly alone.
The Scary Door sets up a similar series of events -- only for the Henry character to note he can still at least read the large print books. This results in his eyes falling out of his head. When he notes that it's a good thing he can read Braille, his hands fall off -- before his tongue falls out and then his entire head falls off.
Meanwhile, Season 3's "I Dated a Robot" has Clyde Smith, a gambler who finds himself in the afterlife. Winning in the casino, he assumes he's gone to heaven, only to keep winning, so he realizes he's been sent to hell. Starting as a parody of "A Nice Place to Visit," the short quickly devolves into increasingly absurd references to different episodes of The Twilight Zone, including the gremlin on the wing of an airplane from "Nightmare At 20,000 Feet" and the reveal that a character has been briefly turned into Hitler from "The Man in the Bottle."
Season 6's "Benderama" then makes a parody of The Twilight Zone episode "The Brain Center at Whipple's," which focuses on robots replacing workers, including the man who wanted them in the first place. In The Scary Door though, the scientist who designed the machines -- cursed with constant laziness -- ends up having the robot suffer from tragic irony.
Other sci-fi concepts are also parodied using The Scary Door, such as the short in Season 5's "Bender's Game," which sees aliens attack Earth only to be defeated by a surprising natural life-form on the planet. The short is a direct parody of the sci-fi novel War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, where it's microscopic viruses that kill the aliens. In The Scary Door though, it's "the humblest of all God's creatures -- the Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Season 4's "Spanish Fry" even features a Scary Door installment that simply parodies the tone and content of a Twilight Zone episode. In the short, a scientist combines the DNA of every "evil" animal in the world and fuses them into a single creature -- which turns out to be a man. Season 6's "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences" also has a man try to warn the people of Washington D.C. that aliens are out there, only for it to be revealed he's one of the aliens.
These mini-episodes are often abrupt and hilarious takes of the kind of twists The Twilight Zone was full of, and they speak to the clear love for the show that the creators of Futurama had. In many ways, the strange sci-fi concepts, surprising twists and philosophical musings in The Twilight Zone were brought to modern audiences in Futurama, giving the parodies an additional layer of relevance.