Been There

London's Millennium Dome sounded the death-knell of many things. Reviled by the press and largely ignored by the public, this extraordinary folly has ensured that several Modern dreams were left behind in the 20th century. The utopian architectural tradition that runs from Boulée to Buckminster Fuller frequently employed the dome as a symbol of collective life - but we won't hear much more about that for a while. The Modern cult of the Great Exhibition, the World's Fair, a vast jamboree celebrating the future - is this where it all ends, beneath a lowering Turner sky, at the point where the Thames starts to widen into the sea?

Yet, this outsized tent, in which ant-like people queue to enter a giant human body beneath an artificial firmament, should not be allowed to poison the legacy of cartoon science fiction, the genre that is so clearly its inspiration. The Dome is an Archigram drawing animated by Tex Avery; a super-inflated futuristic shell of the kind beloved by animators from Warner Brothers (who would have populated it with cartoon Martians) to Walt Disney (who would probably have wanted to live there). When Walt was old - he died in 1966 - he became obsessed with futurology. He spoke of having himself frozen, and the myth endures that he is indeed in a vault somewhere, cryogenically preserved. His last Big Idea was EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which he planned to build on land around Orlando that he acquired in 1964. His original vision was far more radical than the techno theme park which eventually opened in the early 80s. Disney wanted to build and control a perfect corporate city, in which employees' housing and even the weather would be under his jurisdiction.

You can trace webs of connection between Disney and Richard Rogers; different strands of 60s cartoon futurism. The common source is Buckminster Fuller (Disney was an architecture groupie). One Buckminster Fuller project of 1962 imagines a transparent bubble dome shielding midtown Manhattan, insulating the corporate Rockefeller Center district from post-Armageddon nuclear fallout. In one direction this leads to EPCOT, the corporate Utopia, in another to the parodic, inflationary architectural science fiction of the British group Archigram, and through them to Rogers. The Millennium Dome is the end-product of unrealised projects such as Michael Webb's 1962 Sin Centre and Ron Herron's 1964 Walking Cities. You can go back further, to Rayner Banham and the Independent Group, or the 1956 Whitechapel show 'This Is Tomorrow'.

But this is tomorrow, and it's a bit of a disappointment. British Futurists and Pop artists always seemed to be joking, to be proposing a future that never aspired to be anything but an amusing sketch. Now the sci-fi architecture of the 50s and 60s has been built beside the Thames and, my God, what a disaster. It's not even funny. There's too much prissy signage, too much sponsorship and bossiness for the Millennium Dome to be anything other than infuriating; it feels like London's Gatwick Village airport complex. You can sample the airport queues of the future in Home Planet, a 'zone' sponsored by British Airways. You pass through a series of loading chambers where you wait for your British Spaceways (geddit?) shuttle. You're finally 'loaded', as the attendants put it, and shown a film which ends with pictures of happy shiny people. You're told to give yourself a pat on the back for being human. Is the future really this much of a let-down?

It is according to Matt Groening's Futurama, a compendium of cartoon science fiction as hyperbolic as the Dome, but with rather more irony, which has just hit Britain's airwaves on Sky One. The Millennium Dome may suck, but it's no worse than the theme park on the Moon in Futurama. This is a sealed dome, naturally, and with it the encapsulated space cities that populated so many science fiction scenarios reach their pathetic nadir. It contains Luna Park, a sad end for a famous name. The original, legendary Luna Park was built in 1903 on Coney Island and claimed to transport its visitors directly to the Moon. To enter the park, they had to be transported on the airship Luna IV, a capsule which took them high above New York and into outer space, to land on the Moon's surface. The airship set them down and released them into the theme park, supposedly located in space.

In Futurama, set in the year 3000, the Moon takes about two seconds to reach and when you arrive the first thing you see is a queue. The line to get inside Luna Park is even longer than the one for the Body Zone. The park is a banal retread of every corporate post-Disney theme park, with bizarrely inaccurate information about the conquest of the Moon. Taken for a ride on a slow train, the visitor sees animatronic gophers dancing with animatronic 19th-century whalers who sing, 'we're whalers of the moon, we carry a harpoon, but there ain't no whales, so we tell tall tales, and sing a whaling tune.' There's another evocation of the lost dream of space travel in the form of a meeter-and-greeter dressed as the Man in the Moon from Georges Méliès' 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. Bender, Futurama's alcohol-swilling, cigar-smoking robot, jabs a beer bottle in the character's eye, just like the rocket that pierces the Moon's eye in Méliès' film.

Futurama is a systematic compilation of cartoon science fiction from Méliès onwards. Its hero Fry, a lazy, complacent 20th-century no-hoper, was accidentally cryogenically preserved - just like Walt wanted to be - on New Year's Eve 1999. Waking up in the year 3000, the former pizza delivery boy becomes part of an interplanetary delivery company, Planet Express, with Bender and the cyclopean Leela. They have adventures, sometimes in space, sometimes in New New York. As a follow-up to The Simpsons it has some way to go, but Futurama has distinctive ambitions of its own. It's more richly painted, using state-of-the-art animation techniques to create intricate spatial projections and detailed architectural fantasies in which the history of animation's relationship to architectural drawing, the film set and the theme park is laid bare.

Sci-fi fantasy has been an obsession throughout the decade-plus run of The Simpsons. Springfield's inhabitants have been conned into paying for a spacey Monorail, a Popsicle skyscraper and an escalator to nowhere; their children have hypothesised a conspiracy between 'the saucer people and the reverse vampires'; and, in a Halloween episode, America was taken over by green aliens who assumed the identities of Dole and Clinton in the 1996 Presidential election. But the most telling Simpsons sci-fi moment was another Halloween episode (evoking Edwin A. Abbott's 1884 novel Flatland, though more directly based on an episode of The Twilight Zone) in which Homer slips out of the two-dimensional world of drawn animation into the Third Dimension. 'It's like something out of that twilighty show about that zone', he says before the Dimension spins into a vortex that sucks him in and spews him out, three-dimensional but still yellow, into real-life Los Angeles.

Sci-fi fantasy has become routine by the year 3000. Futurama is set in a world where every future imagined by the 20th century has become true, yet also not very interesting to anyone. When Fry and Bender go apartment-hunting, they reject an M. C. Escher apartment which exists in multiple perspectives - 'why pay for a dimension we wouldn't use?' It's not just the future that is pastiched but art, drawing, and the power to construct alternate realities. There's a love of sci-fi vistas as relished in cartoons from Avery's satirical 50s Futurism to The Jetsons and the graphic world of antiquated sci-fi fantasies like Flash Gordon. This is seen in one Futurama episode in which the crew land on a dry planet where Fry pants his way to a bulbous organic city, like something out of an Arabian Knights fantasy, and drinks a bottle that contains the emperor (the people of this planet being liquid).

Futurama's New New York itself is a depository of sci-fi visions, a montage of imaginary cities from H. G. Wells to William Gibson. There is no ground traffic but hovercraft whizz high above the clean, wide boulevards - no one even knows what garbage is in New New York, until Fry shows them how to litter. People travel in the future's answer to the subway: a glass tube that sucks you in and spits you out at your destination. Buildings are isolated, rounded structures and electronic signs float in the sky. It's all very familiar. Like Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978), Futurama hypothesises a world in which everything has changed except 'intelligent' life, which has the same problems and idiocies. As do robots.

This is a possibility no utopian architect can countenance, and the ironies of Futurama are a graveyard of the cartoon Futurisms which have a curiously central place in Modern cultural history. What runs right through Groening's cartoons is an engagement with America's most revered animator and scariest architectural utopian: Walt Disney. Groening's success has made him a Disney for the left, and a deconstruction of the Disney empire is a motif that recurs frequently in both The Simpsons and Futurama. Fry's cryogenic rebirth and visit to the theme park on the Moon echoes the Simpsons' visit to Itchy-and-Scratchy-Land, where an exhibit tells of Itchy and Scratchy creator Roger Myers Senior, a 'gentle genius' who loved 'almost all the peoples of the world'. The family barely escape with their lives when, Westworld-style, the park's robots run amok.

In 1964 Walt Disney brought his knowledge of theme parks to the design of corporate pavilions for General Electric, Pepsi-Cola, Ford, and the state of Illinois at the New York World's Fair. Robert Moses, director of the fair and shaper of New York, visited Disneyland and was shown around by Walt himself. He saw the animatronic Abraham Lincoln - referenced in The Simpsons - of which Disney was particularly proud. Moses ensured that the 1964 New York World's Fair was a bright shiny vision of a utopian capitalist future along Disney lines, with celebrations of all the wonderful new things for Americans to buy and do - except for a fracas over the paintings on the exterior of Philip Johnson's New York State Pavilion. Andy Warhol's huge Thirteen Most Wanted Men did not please the fair's organisers and was painted over, possibly at the personal behest of Robert Moses (Andy certainly thought so, and proposed putting madly grinning portraits of Moses in their place). Warhol's evocation of the real New York did not exactly emanate utopian optimism - more the dystopian violence of a nation under the sign of the FBI (with its undercover agent, Walt Disney) and the Electric Chair. Given the FBI's direct involvement in Disneyland, at Disney's invitation, Warhol's placing of his Most Wanted... images at the heart of the New York World's Fair, where Walt had such a dominant presence, was an acidic undermining of corporate Utopia.

Walt, Andy, meet Matt. The modest, self-ironising Groening is the unlikely counterpart of these American myth-makers. The closest he gets to a self-portrait in The Simpsons is the nerdish comic-book store proprietor - but he's starting to assert his place in America's cultural pantheon. When, in an episode of The Simpsons, Homer asks what Matt Groening is doing in a museum with Andy Warhol, he is promptly almost 'erased' by a Claes OIdenburg pencil. In Futurama, Groening's cryogenically-preserved head sits in a tank at the Head Museum, along with those of Richard Nixon and Leonard Nimoy. 'We lead lives of quiet dignity', says Nimoy before being fed like a fish. Futurama is the only art I have seen so far which captures the awkwardness, even embarrassment, of suddenly living in a future which the 20th century imagined in such detail. The new century has arrived - as the Dome at Greenwich bears witness - in the tattered silver clothes of the last century's science fiction. As Fry says at a gig by the Beastie Boys' heads, 'Let's party like it's 1999... again!'