And yet, 8 years later, Matt Groening and David Cohen could assume that fans of The Simpsons would know what it is as a matter of course; the pilot episode of Futurama offers no explanation beyond the word ‘cryogenics’, an icy cartoon effect, and a dial with a timer on it.

I've seen Futurama mentioned negatively as having introduced cryonics to a lot of people in a ridiculous light, and Groening's Simpsons has always indulged in a lot of very obscure references (read the Simpsons Archive's annotated scripts for an episode and note how many you did not notice on a single watch), so merely appearing on his shows doesn't necessarily mean a lot - especially since Futurama goes to considerable lengths to make the cryonics completely understandable to people with zero idea about it, with Fry falling into a glassy supermarket-style freezer*, being flash-frozen (not vitrified), and then a long timelapse montage explaining visually the lapse of time. The concept comes through clear as a bell to anyone who has ever used a freezer, which in the USA is pretty much everyone.

* note, by the way, how they went with a common piece of technology used in every supermarket for many decades, which looks completely different from every dewar ever used by actual cryonics organizations.