Why hadn’t I figured this out before?
As far as I know, this is the only overlap between the Star Wars universe and 6151 Richmond Street in Miami. However, there are a few times when Dorothy (Bea Arthur’s character) shows she’s aware of my other great sci-fi love, Star Trek.
In one episode, Dorothy tells Blanche, who was sitting under a hairdryer, that she looks “like something that came out of the air duct of the starship Enterprise.”
In another, she and Rose have the following exchange after being informed the UFO they saw was really an airplane:
Rose: What are you doing, Dorothy?
Dorothy: Oh, looking at the stars. Pondering the universe.
Rose: I’ve been doing the same thing, thinking how wonderful it would be if there really were aliens. Maybe it’d be just like “Cocoon,” and they’d take us away and we’d never grow old.
Dorothy: See, I don’t know. I like my life. I mean, I’m not president or anything. I’m just a teacher. A substitute teacher. A divorced substitute teacher, who can’t even afford her own place to live. Beam me up!
See? Dorothy knows all about transporters.
The sci-fi connection doesn’t end there. Bea Arthur was also a guest star on one of my favorite episodes of Futurama, playing the mighty Femputer in “Amazon Women in the Mood.”
I’m amused to think about Bea Arthur, a professional actress, in a recording studio, perfecting her delivery for lines like “Have you any idea how it feels to be a fembot living in a manbot’s manputer’s world?” It just shows there was nothing in the comedy world she couldn’t slay, whether it was a substitute teacher or a supercomputer.
Bea Arthur as a Golden Girl and a goddess of sci-fi? That definitely femputes!1
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1 I just remembered Rue McClanahan had a small role in Starship Troopers. Someone please, please, please tell me that Betty White was the diva beneath all the blue paint in The Fifth Element.