Bender takes Fry to hide inside the Head Museum saying, "it's free on Tuesdays." December 31, 2999 will be a Tuesday.
This episode is the highest rated pilot episode in the history of the Fox Broadcasting Company.
When Leela is working as an agent for the employment assignment people, her ID is "Agent 1B-DI" as in "one beady eye" - a good description of her visual apparatus.
When Fry travels through an underwater transport tube, he passes the mutated three-eyed fish Blinky that Bart Simpson found in Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish (1990).
In the DVD commentary, Matt Groening notes that beginning any television series is difficult, but he found particular difficulty starting one that took place in the future because of the amount of setup required. As a trade off, they included a lot of Easter eggs in the episode that would pay off in later episodes.