WORDS: PAT MCGREAL

Futurama is a thing that will not die. By all rights, it should have enjoyed a long and natural life alongside its Springfield cousin, The Simpsons. Yet, after several seasons of lurching uncertainty, it was led to the block and axed like one of Henry VIII’s wives. So much for original, smart and funny television. But Futurama would not stay buried. Fantastically, it has clawed its way out of the grave, it has risen again, it has been literally reanimated in the form of four new feature-length DVDs. How did this remarkable resurrection happen? TRIPWIRE had to find out…

On a day in late April, I show up at Matt Groening’s production offices in Santa Monica. Moments later, David X. Cohen appears, a hyperspace wraith. Minutes after that, Matt comes shuffling in. He announces he’s tired, he was up ‘till four on the internet.

During the course of our talk, there’s a lot of laughter. This makes for good interview but lousy transcription. I start by asking David to give us some personal background, figuring that readers might be less familiar with him than Matt…

DXC: My name is David X. Cohen. The X is fraudulent, my real middle initial is S. I want to get that off my chest right away. [Matt giggles] The Writer’s Guild won’t allow two people to have the same name. Someone else already had taken my real name so I took the X. It seemed kind of futuristic and went with Futurama.

TW: What about your academic accomplishments?

DXC: I have an Undergraduate Degree from Harvard in Physics and a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

TW: Wow. Matt? Academic accomplishments?

MG: Well, I finished high school. [Laughter] David and I met at The Simpsons. He’s one of the funniest writers. He wrote some of the most well-remembered classic episodes. He wrote the 3D episode with Homer falling into the third dimension and wrote one of my favorite episodes where the skeleton of an angel is discovered in Springfield.

DXC: It could happen.

MG: He’s really funny, really smart and we both shared a love of science fiction so we started talking. We both loved good science fiction and bad science fiction. [Laughs]

DXC: Eando Binder.

MG: And I knew that if we had that shared enthusiasm for really schlocky science fiction as well as the good stuff, then we could probably be good partners and it worked out.

TW: You began developing Futurama in ’97?

DXC: I’m pretty positive it was ’97, ‘cause we started working in the office in ’98 and I remember thinking it was about a year since we had started talking about it.

TW: I’m wondering, Matt…The Simpsons had been around for eight years or so at that point. Why was that the right time to begin work on a second series?

MG: Well, there’d been a lot of interest in doing another show. So I thought ‘OK, I’ll try it. What the hell, let’s work twice as hard!’ [Laughs]

TW: But why hadn’t you begun developing a second show sooner?

MG: The nature of animation is that it will fill all of your time. No matter whether you’re doing a short two-minute cartoon for the internet, you can fill your entire waking hours doing that and the same thing with any other animated project. It doesn’t get any easier, it doesn’t get any less complicated. The art of animation is sustained attention to details. It starts with the writing and goes through to the very end. It’s a huge collaborative process. Like I said, it doesn’t get easier. I’m actually talking myself out of doing it ever again. [Laughs]

TW: So it was a matter of deciding to take on this extra load of stress…

MG: Well, the idea of doing a show set in the future and taking all the things that David and I loved about science fiction and doing it in a funny form…there’s been very little humour in science fiction that’s really funny. Usually it’s kind of heav- handed and corny. And,
you know, we loved Hitchhiker’s Guide and… what else?

DXC: There’re not a lot of role models…

TW: Doctor Who…

MG: Doctor Who, yes.

DXC: One of the things that made it possible to do Futurama is that TV and movie science fiction had become a part of popular culture. We had a generation of people who were very familiar with Star Wars and Star Trek as a starting point. Then you can make fun of it. Before it becomes part of the popular culture, it’s much harder to do a comedy version of it because people don’t know what the serious version is.

MG: The two probably needless obstacles we set up for ourselves were…I had a concern that almost all science fiction in movies and television posits basically a military future. It’s crews taking orders from good-hearted superior officers. And I thought: “Let’s get away from the military motif.” Also, I was afraid that if I just put a family in the future, I personally would be accused of…

DXC: Putting rockets on the Simpson house.

MG: Yeah. Making it a Simpsons in the future. So I thought: “Okay, let’s go someplace completely different.” That’s why it was a workplace comedy. The Simpsons is a universe of children and middle-aged parents and nobody in between. If you look at Futurama, it’s basically young adults…

DXC: And young monsters.

MG: Yeah. [Laughs] And sexy mutants.

TW: And the idea that it was going to be sci-fi was right there from the beginning?

DXC: Well, Matt had the basic concept before I came aboard. [He] was actually kicking it around in his head for a couple years before that.

TW: How long?

MG: A few years. It seemed like: Why don’t we do a series set in the far future and then give the audience someone to relate to, somebody from our time, and have the person wake up a thousand years from now? That is a classic science fiction idea and it was done very amusingly by Woody Allen in Sleeper.

DXC: Probably the best example of sci-fi comedy predating Futurama.

MG: So we read a lot of science fiction. Upstairs is the library. A decade ago it was real easy to buy the classics of science fiction from used bookstores…cheap!

DXC: It still is. You can go on Amazon and buy them, the hard covers, for a penny plus $3.99 shipping.

MG: Really?

DXC: I often do that ‘cause it’s cheaper than the paperback and you can get a nice hardcover.

MG: For a penny?

DXC: One penny plus $3.99 shipping.

MG: God, the future is fabulous! [Laughs]

TW: So you approached David? You had the concept of somebody waking up from a thousand years’ sleep…

MG: We talked about it and together we created this universe with the idea that it would be big enough that we could fit in all of the great classic literary science fiction motifs. And that has been our goal from the beginning. We decided that we would — like all epic science fiction — lay in secrets and characters that would reveal that they were not who we thought they were and so on and so forth. And we’ve been true to that. I mean, in addition to it being a comedy that takes place in the future, it actually does honour the conventions of science fiction with a consistent time line and secrets, even to this day, yet to be revealed.

TW: Consistency in its time travel…

DXC: Ahem! [Coughs]

MG: We had a rule about time travel for the first few seasons…

DXC: Yep. We made it three…two and a half….we made it to the middle…to the end of the third season…almost…

MG: Listen, we were so caught up in needless arguing [Laughter] over what can happen. We spent a long time trying to decide how to overcome that one basic problem in science fiction, which is how do you do travel…

DXC: …faster than the speed of light over long distances.

MG: Yeah. How do you cover traveling faster than the speed of light?

DXC: And our ultimate answer is that they still can’t go faster than the speed of light but they have managed to speed up the speed of light so… [Laughter]

TW: Elementary.

DXC: Early on we were very concerned about all these rules of science fiction and being consistent. As you go, you realize, oh, what really matters is to be consistent about the characters and to base the stories around the personalities of these characters and you can pick any sci-fi setting you want and claim that those rules apply. What really matters is that these characters are consistent. It just takes a while to relax about these science fiction rules and realize that we have more freedom than we thought we did originally.

TW: And maybe contradict a rule here and then explain the contradiction at another point?

DXC: Yes. Or not explain it. You know, we’re roughly consistent but the more important thing is to have a good story and to have it be funny.

TW: As it progressed, how did the series evolve from the original concept?

DXC: Less rules is the main thing. The rules started to melt away as we went along but the one thing we stuck with is that we want to make sure we have a real solid story about the characters within the science fiction framework of each episode.

TW: So who brought what to the table in the development of the thing?

MG: We talked about the show so much, we created so many characters. We talked about so many possibilities for stories that we’ve never even done yet. And each of us had characters we were very much attached to. David was very attached to Dr. Zoidberg and that’s basically his character…an alien doctor who has no understanding of human anatomy…[Laughs]

DXC: That was an idea I took from Star Trek. McCoy, who’s a human, periodically had to operate on Mr. Spock, who’s not a human. I always thought if I went in for surgery, I would want someone of the same species poking around my organs. [Laughter] So that’s the origin of Dr. Zoidberg.

TW: It’s a logical thought.

MG: And then, Bender was basically…we were kind of stumbling around. We wanted to create a robot that was different from previous robots in pop culture. But we couldn’t get a handle on what he should sound like. And we auditioned so many people for that robot…

DXC: Including me.

MG: …including David, ‘cause people said: “You sound a little bit like a robot.” [Laughter] And then John DiMaggio…he was Bender. We knew we wanted the robot to be raucous and disobedient.

DXC: We knew he was gonna have all the human vices…

MG: That was your idea.

DXC: …of gambling and smoking…

TW: …and drinking…

DXC: …stealing, whatever. But because we were steeped in science fiction tradition, it was still hard to overcome the idea that he would not talk like a traditional robot. And to have John DiMaggio come in screaming his head off suddenly opened a new avenue.

TW: There must have been characters that you developed but then ended up discarding?

MG: Well, there was one character that I was very attached to and I thought would be one of the most popular characters in the series. It was a tiny toy robot called Pocket Pal.

DXC: He was supposed to ride around in Fry’s pocket and help him understand the world of the future and be terrorized by Bender, who was a bigger, more aggressive robot.

MG: And we finally, after all these years, have one scene with Pocket Pal.

DXC: That’s in The Beast with a Billion Backs, the second DVD. We’re going to see Pocket Pal for the first time. So this is a character that has been in existence for ten years in our files and makes a surprisingly brief appearance before meeting his doom! [Laughter]

TW: So by the time you were ready to pitch the series, what had you assembled?

MG: We had a bunch of character designs, which were fairly close to what they ended up being but not quite, and we had them on big sheets.

DXC: We had a ridiculous quantity of stuff.

MG: We came in and I think the network was expecting the standard twenty-minute pitch and us to tap-dance a little bit. We had story after story after story, character after character. Everything would remind us of something else and we…we went on…what?

DXC: I’m going to say two hours…

MG: For two hours. And they kept on bringing more executives in who were watching with their jaws dropped and they picked up the series pretty much on the spot. In Hollywood, you know, they sometimes say that and you find out later they changed their minds. But in this case they didn’t.

DXC: They did. It took four years…

MG & DXC: They gradually changed their minds. [Laughter]

MG: That meeting was the high point of our relationship with Fox.

TW: Did you have a pilot script in addition to all the various story lines?

DXC: We had the story at that point but the script was pending their go ahead.

MG: I think a basic problem at the very beginning was they didn’t understand that a dystopian future could still be very funny. It worried them that in the future there were coin-operated suicide booths! [Laughs] And that Bender was really unkind. [Laughs] They didn’t understand how likeable Bender was! I’m surprised at how likeable Bender is!

DXC: He’s having a good time regardless of what anyone else is feeling about the situation.

TW: So the pitch was pretty much accepted on the spot? Was it a much easier pitch than The Simpsons?

MG: Well, The Simpsons was an inadvertent pitch because it had already been on The Tracey Ullman Show for a few seasons as very short cartoons and Fox realized it was popular. If you do an animated TV show, you can’t just do a pilot because the economics of it are such that if you’re gonna go, you need a bunch of episodes in the works. So it’s a big risk on the part of the studio or the network. So they did…what?…thirteen?

DXC: They picked us up for thirteen on the spot.

TW: For Futurama?

MG: Yes.

DXC: It makes sense. That way they put you on midseason and you can stay on until the summer and if they make a decision fairly rapidly they can get you back on roughly for the start of the next year. That’s how Fox has generally launched their animated shows. Fox actually does know how to get an animated show off the ground.

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TW: I read on Wikipedia, which is not necessarily known for its accuracy, that there was an issue with control over the series initially. Was that the case?

MG: Well, I would say that David and I were eager to make the network happy. What made us confused was that the different things that were being asked of us contradicted themselves. So it was frustrating, especially after having such a wonderful experience on The Simpsons where the network was completely hands-off. The climate had changed since The Simpsons went on the air. There was a lot more anxiety on the part of the decision-makers in TV and it manifested itself in lots and lots of contradictory notes. At a certain point, we very much attempted to address all these various concerns. But everything we did, they hated even more. [Laughs] So finally we said: “We can’t give you the show you want. We can give you the show we want. And we promise it’ll be a great show.” And so, we did.

TW: And they backed off.

MG: Yeah. They backed off and then we didn’t get much support.

TW: As far as scheduling?

MG: Certainly as far as scheduling. It got moved around. But what was great was that we knew — despite anxiety on the part of the network — that the fans of the show were so fanatical that it just seemed like we would overcome whatever problems we had. And, in a way, this interview today is proof of that because I would say very much the sustained enthusiasm of the fans over the years is what brought the show back.

TW: So did that happen throughout the first season? The memos, the notes, the confusion, the diluting of the concept?

MG: It was the first three episodes that we were really being spun around. Again, trying to make the people who were paying the bills happy.

DXC: Because it’s TV, the show’s being made regardless of whether anybody’s happy with it or not. The schedule marches on to get to the air date so eventually someone has to throw in the towel and just say “Okay”.

MG: Yeah, we lived for a long time with the threat of having the plug pulled on the show.

TW: You had no assurance from season to season?

MG: No. Certainly, no.

DXC: No, we were pretty much left wondering every season.

TW: And it ran for four seasons?

DXC: We produced it over the course of four seasons. It was preempted by football so many times that they actually managed to spread it out over a fifth year as far as their air schedule. So it depends on how you look at it. Four production seasons, five air seasons.

TW: And they switched the time slot and the days of the week?

DXC: Yeah. Numerous times. We were on Sunday at 8:30pm after The Simpsons for a few episodes. A pretty good time slot. Then we were on Tuesday and we did fine. Then, eventually, we were moved down to 7:00pm on Sunday and that’s what did us in because football preempted us.

TW: So the show became hard to find.

DXC: Or it wasn’t on so… [Laughs] Yeah, very hard.

MG: Also it didn’t help that the Fox Network slogan was “The Fun Begins at Eight”! [Laughs] When you’re on at seven…it just…urrrgh…talking about this feels like…I mean, it’s such ancient history…and…um…[Matt trails off]

TW: Hey, I didn’t come here to bum you guys out.

[Laughter]

MG: No, no. There really has been a change of attitude on our parts. I’m not speaking for [David] but I think that I’ve definitely gotten more gracious and diplomatic. [Laughs] Despite what I just said.

TW: During the time that reruns of Futurama were aired in syndication…

DXC: It was on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim for five years. Believe it or not, for five years. It just ended in January and then it moved to Comedy Central.

TW: …that must have helped convince the people at Fox…

DXC: The fact that people kept watching it in large numbers for five years in the middle of the night, yeah, I think did a lot to convince them. And that’s where the fans came in, in terms of saving us.

TW: You must have known all along that there was a fiercely loyal core audience.

DXC: We hoped there was. So that’s when we started approaching Fox and saying: “Hey, maybe we should do something else.”

TW: “It’s maintaining its popularity”.

MG: David always had the idea. He did the math and said: “They cannot lose money.”

DXC: Yeah, I had a spreadsheet, actually. I really didn’t see how they could lose money on releasing a [new Futurama DVD]. When you look at the sales of the original [series on DVD], it seemed like a safe bet. But it took a while for their accountants to come to the same conclusion, I guess. [Laughs]

MG: They thought about it and thought about it and, to their surprise, those ratings and DVD sales [of the series] kept up year after year. So they came back to us and said: “We have a good idea. Let’s make some Futurama DVD’s!”

DXC: Matt and I had our arguments all ready to go with why should we make this DVD movie. Pretty much the first line out of their mouths was: “To improve the economics, it would be better if we did two!” So then it kind of got negotiated up the line to four. This project, like the first one, got off to a very positive start. But this one has remained very positive throughout.

TW: That’s wonderful. As I understand it, the DVDs are released as feature-length films. Then they’re broken into segments and augmented and are going to be aired on Comedy Central.

DXC: That’s right. Luckily we knew about that from the beginning of this project. If we had written these as movies and then been told after the fact “you have to chop them up”, we would have had a nightmare on our hands. But luckily they made the deal with Comedy Central at the same time as they were getting us going on this project. We were given the marching orders: “You’re going to have to break this at three points”. So as we were writing the scripts, we were always bearing in mind that we need to have three cliffhangers where we can say: ‘To be continued’. And people will be so desperate to see the next episode that they would come back. We wrote it very carefully, knowing that we would have to later have it in another format. If we did our job properly, it should play as a movie but it should also have these dramatic moments within where we can have a cliffhanger for TV.

TW: Other than anticipating those breaks in the long form, was there a difference to approaching story? You’re basically doing an hour-and-a-half or two hour Futurama…

DXC: Somewhat. I mean, to some degree it was a relief to have this longer amount of time to work with because the nature of Futurama is that we’re trying to cram sci-fi movie plots into a twenty-two minute show. When we were on the air, our plots were still about as complicated as a typical sci-fi movie and we were desperately cutting down our scripts week after week to squeeze them into twenty-two minutes. In that respect, it was a big relief to have more time to work with ‘cause we always could have expanded on our stories. So, basically, our approach was: “Okay, we’ll make this story a little grander and we’ll have something for a couple of different characters to do so we can intercut from what Bender’s doing to what Fry and Leela are doing and get everybody’s take on what’s going on.” So, it wasn’t that hard to expand.

TW: It actually sounds like it was an opportunity. More freedom, extended subplots…

DXC: Yeah, it was very difficult but also it was somewhat liberating.

TW: And how is that Comedy Central was brought in to air it? Why was that deal made as opposed to Fox choosing to air the programmes?

DXC: Fox has an option to air it if they so desire, as I understand it. There’s nothing preventing Fox from airing it other than they have enough top quality programming already and they can’t squeeze this in. [Matt laughs hard] But Comedy Central, I think, basically saw how well the show was doing on [Cartoon Network’s] Adult Swim. So when the five-year license that Adult Swim had for the show was nearing its conclusion, suddenly [Comedy Central] entered as a second bidder for the rights over the next five years. So, you know, it wasn’t Fox calling them up and saying: “Hey, will you take it over?” There were two interested parties because Adult Swim wanted to keep it and Comedy Central wanted to have it for their own.

TW: And they will also be running the original episodes.

DXC: They’ve started already. In January 2008, they took over the reruns and they’re airing them every day.

MG: It’s been really nice. We miss the Cartoon Network ‘cause they do great stuff, amazing promotion…

DXC: We owe many thanks to Cartoon Network and Comedy Central for their loving treatment of the show. Making the fans really aware of when it’s on so they’ve been able to stick with it.

TW: Do you want to say anything about the four upcoming DVDs? A little preview?

DXC: Sure, sure…

MG: This’ll be a scoop!

DXC: I’ll start with the first one, which, no doubt, all of your readers already own but in case they don’t, involves these nude alien internet scammers who take over Planet Express and use Bender to do their bidding and they send him through time to loot Earth of all its greatest treasures. It’s called Bender’s Big Score.

MG: And that comes with my favourite DVD extra we’ve ever done. What’s it called?

DXC: Everybody Loves HypnoToad?

MG: Everybody Loves HypnoToad! It’s my favourite, I just can’t remember the name. No, I remember, ‘cause the original title was The HypnoToad…

DXC: …And Friends Show.

MG: Yeah, something like that. A full episode…

DXC: Twenty-two action-packed minutes! If you know who HypnoToad is, it’s self-explanatory.

MG: HypnoToad is a beloved minor character on the show and we give him his full episode.

DXC: He has a whole episode.

TW: His day in the sun. The time travel business is very funny.

DXC: It kind of makes sense. [Laughs] There’s actually a lot of little, hidden things about the time travel for the real aficionados. If they freeze frame, they will see, for example, shadows on the wall that will prove that we know which characters were where, at what time and those kind of things. So we did sweat the details on it, in case anyone thinks it’s just random craziness. And we have all kinds of charts and things. But if you don’t follow it at that level of detail, then just enjoy it for its random craziness.

TW: The second one?

DXC: That’s The Beast With a Billion Backs. The crew encounters this planet-sized creature that has billions of tentacles and, without going into too much detail, I’ll say it has a physical relationship with all of the living beings in our universe. That’s a polite way of putting it. So it’s a very touching science fiction love story. And David Cross plays this being. He’s really very funny. Brittany Murphy is also guest starring in that one. And Dan Castellaneta from The Simpsons is back to play the robot devil he played a couple of times during the run of the series. Stephen Hawking is back for his second appearance as well.

TW: I love David Cross and Mr. Show.

DXC: Yeah. He is really funny. There’s an extra on the DVD which is really funny that is just him goofing around in the recording studio…talking about his voiceover acting technique. [Laughs] That alone is worth twice the price of the DVD.

The third is called Bender’s Game. We’ve just seen the animation for that one for the first time over the course of the last two weeks. This one has been very exciting to us all along ‘cause it’s our first foray into the world of fantasy. The land of dragons and medieval witchcraft. All those kind of things that border on science fiction. [They’re] not technically science fiction but it’s an area of great interest to all of our writers who grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons. So that one is visually spectacular and takes us to a new type of world we’ve never seen before. And we’ll get to see the fantasy versions of all of our characters.

And then, going out on a bang, the fourth one is a huge sci-fi epic called Into The Wild Green Yonder (at least tentatively called that). It involves this ancient conflict that’s been going on for billions of years between these powerful races in the universe and, of course, our crew gets caught in the middle. It hopefully has kind of a sweet message at the end, which, if it turns out to be the last moment of Futurama that we ever get to do, I think that we’ll be happy with that ending and, if not, we’ve left the door open just slightly for a way that we can return if Fox so desires.

TW: The wrap up question: What happens now? If Fox so desires, you guys are there? And how much further can it go? Is there much, much more story to tell?

MG: Oh yeah. I see this going on…creatively, there’s no end in sight. We have so many story arcs we haven’t gotten to yet. And the second thing I would say about the Futurama experience has been…this is a group of people who really like each other. I mean, it’s just…the actors get along with each other and with the animators and the writers and there’s this kind of, I guess, underdog feeling about the show and there has been since the very beginning. Everybody’s rooting for the show. It’s not just another job. And basically, pretty much the original crew, animators, certainly all the actors and the writers are all the same people from the very beginning. So that’s been really…

DXC: We have a secret fantasy that, of course, we tell everybody. To do a feature movie at some point. That would certainly be nice, especially now having seen the animation for these DVDs, which for the first time was done in wide screen and high-def. It looks immediately like it could just go up on a movie theatre screen. In fact, we had a premiere for Bender’s Big Score in the Cinerama Dome. We projected it up on this huge screen and it looked great without even intending it to be seen at that scale. We’re pretty much ready to go as far as, you know, the technology and the format of the show. We’ve already made all the adjustments for these DVDs, so we’re ready to go.

TW: So if you had your druthers, that would be your preference?

DXC: I think so, because we’ve done TV and we’ve done these DVDs so…keep trying new things!

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