Tripwire Throwback

Throwback Thursday: Futurama

Published

11 years ago

August 20, 2015

Admin

Back in 2010 in #54, Tripwire ran an interview with Matt Groening and David X Cohen about the return of Futurama so here it is. The series is in limbo currently but you never know

Future Shocks

Matt Groening pic by Gage Skidmore ©Gage Skidmore

David X Cohen pic by Gage Skidmore ©Gage Skidmore

We have had an association with Matt Groening, David X Cohen and Futurama ever since the first Annual back in 2007.

Futurama began life back in 1999 on Fox and ran for five seasons until it ended prematurely in 2003. The future looked bleak for the satirical sci fi series but it was given a temporary reprieve with four straight-to-DVD movies (Bender’s Big Score, The Beast With A Billion Backs, Bender’s Game and Into The Wild Green Yonder). The DVDs did very well and so rumours of a new Futurama series started circulating.

So here we are in 2010 with a brand new run and with the show’s creators renewed with a new sense of enthusiasm.

I caught up with them at the beginning of April, around the time that the volcanic ash first started creating havoc with the world’s airspace. For the pair of them, making the four DVD movies had its pros and cons as they revealed to us.

“When we did the DVDs, we were trying to serve two masters,” Groening explained in his distinctivel;y deep voice. “We were trying to provide a feature-length movie experience as well as construct the DVDs in such a way that they could be chopped up into episodes that could be watched separately. That was a very aggrevating part of the process…”

David Cohen’s slightly more high-pitched tones chipped in.

“I think we were happy with how the DVDs came out but it was definitely a struggle to produce them in such a way that we could pull those things off or try to pull those things off. It is much more natural to go back to our classic old format,” he stated honestly.

In fact, despite the gap between the last time they produced the series regularly and now (almost seven years), the pair were keen to jump in again.

“If anything, I think we were raring to go. One of the great fortunes of the show returning is that virtually everybody who worked on Futurama before has come back. The actors are all back, the original animators, the original directors, the original writers, so it’s back to business. Really good,” Groening admitted.

In fact, it was the DVDs that kept them thinking about the characters, as Cohen told us.

“Doing the DVDs did keep the subject matter on our minds in the period in-between so even if it wasn’t the same form, it did force us to bear in mind what the characters sound like and look like. It also made us think about which jokes work for who so it did keep us up to speed.”

Despite its absence from regular broadcasting, Futurama has held onto its following and so in a year with new content, the audience is keen to see more featuring the characters, something that Groening confirmed.

“The other thing that was very gratifying was after all these years, the enthusiasm of the fans has not abated. If anything it’s stronger than ever. In part it’s because the shows have been rerun so many times that finally enough people have seen them, I think. There’s just an incredible outpouring of encouragement from people waiting to see something new.”

The final DVD, Into The Wild Green Yonder, did end on a little bit of a clifhanger but fans needn’t be concerned as the story picks up where it left off, we were informed.

“This show does have a lot of nitpicky fans and I mean that in a complimentary way. Our fanbase does keep track of our limited continuity very closely and because we did have such a big grand ending on that last DVD movie where the crew was flying off into a black hole to end up who knows where in the universe to points unknown, we thought we did have to address that,” showrunner Cohen revealed.

“Now we did want to quickly reestablish that we’re back to our show as usual so we deal with that in the opening second of the first episode. But we do deal with it. I want people to rest assured that we’re not going to leave them hanging on. And more importantly as our crew disappeared into that worm hole, Fry and Leela were in a passionate kiss. We deal with that as well and there are some sci fi ramifications of their return to Earth that affect their relationship.”

Futurama has built up quite a unique set of supporting characters and some of these recurring figures are going to be back in the new series.

“For any Zapf Branigan fans, we have Leela and him getting stranded together on an Eden-like planet,” David Cohen tantalised us.

Groening gave us a little more detail about this particular episode.

“That’s based on the idea of the biggest cliché in the history of science fiction which is a man and a woman being shipwrecked on a far away planet with no way of leaving. They’re Adam and Eve and that’s the shocker last line of the story. And so we did our version of it.”

But it’s not just about cheap laughs as Cohen’s collaborator was keen to emphasise to us.

“It’s very funny. But we’re trying to do a few things here. We’re trying to be funny but we’re also trying to combine surprising science fiction ideas. The underlying theme in almost all science fiction is that things are not what they seem and indeed in many episodes of Futurama, that’s the case. We do try to throw in surprises.”

Cohen gives us some details about another episode in the run: “We have one in which Bender campaigns to legalise robosexual marriage which is the taboo marriage between a human and a robot. This is due to a shocking relationship he finds himself in.”

It could be argued that it’s the fact that the show continues to mix gags with serious emotional depth that makes it distinctive. Cohen seems to be genuinely pleased when a particular episode does connect with viewers.

“The one thing I’ll say is I do feel a certain degree of pride whenever someone does actually cry or get moved by an episode because it seems like a really crazy show. Intrinsically it takes place in the future and there’s robots. So if we actually get someone to buy into an episode to the point that they will cry or hide the fact that they’re crying, then I feel like we did a good job in terms of the writing. If viewers really believe that these are real people even if they’re not people, then we’ve done something right.”

Using light and dark is something that the series has done from the start and this changing tone will continue in the new run, Cohen assured us.

“Something that we decided early on was not to have everything wonderful in the future, and not have everything be terrible either but try to make it relatable. We wanted to allow ourselves the freedom to do shows where things were darker and do shows where things were lighter too so I think it makes it a little more believable.”

The mixture of comedy and more serious elements is one that has proven popular with its viewers and is something that Cohen feels serves its purpose in Futurama as he admitted to us.

“It’s most exciting when somebody’s laughing along with it, suddenly starts crying against their will and then gets mad at us. We even get angry letters too. Our favourite reaction to the dog episode that some guy put up on the internet is that he thought the show was really funny and he was enjoying it and suddenly he found himself crying. So therefore he hated it and he was very angry at us,” he recalled.

This is something that Groening echoed too.

“I’ve actually had a fan come up to me and denounce me and the show and start crying, telling me about it. And just for the record I was opposed to killing the dog [in the episode earlier on]. I said ‘listen in comedy, in Hollywood you can kill cats, you cannot kill horses or dogs. It’s taboo. You can kill humans but you cannot kick a dog’.”

In spite of the fact that Groening seems to play a major part in running the show, it is Cohen who is actually its showrunner. But Groening doesn’t get off that easily as Cohen was at pains to point out.

“Matt has been very involved this year in general and especially on the first few episodes when we were returning. The first two in fact are ideas which largely came from Matt or at least fifty fifty from Matt so don’t let him make you think that he’s not involved. He’s got his Simpsons office 100 yards away from the Futurama office.”

This is a fact that Groening is able to make comedy capital out of, he told us smiling.

“In the first incarnation of Futurama, we were off the Twentieth Century Fox lot and now I have the opportunity to walk back and forth between the shows and do very sitcom-style entrances when I walk into the room. But David does the hard thing of editing and directing the voice actors. He also supervises the writing. And you’ll agree, David, that we have an incredible team of amazing writers and animators.”

Thanks to their time working on the straight-to-DVD movies, the team have been able to make the animation a little more sophisticated, as Cohen revealed proudly.

“I should add that there were some improvements we made to the animation during the movies which will remain in place for the new episodes, so we have made the full switch over to high definition and widescreen for the new episodes.”

The switch over to Comedy Central from Fox in the US also means that the programme makers have a little more liberty when it comes to what they can show on screen, as Groening told us.

“Comedy Central is less nervous about content, so you’ll be seeing more flesh of the characters you want to see more. Unfortunately you’ll also be seeing more flesh from people you don’t want to see.

You’ll see a little too much Zapf Branigan. Actually one of the biggest laughs in the show is Zapf Branigan with a fig leaf,” he informed us with a slightly nervous laugh.

But just because they have moved from a US network to a cable channel, that doesn’t mean that they wanted to mess around with a format that has worked all these years, something that its showrunner was keen to emphasise.

“I would say on the whole the little more latitude we have with the material has put a little more burden on us, the arbiters of what is tasteful to be part of Futurama, so my view of it is that the new episodes should feel like part of the same show that we’ve always done so I certainly don’t want the characters to suddenly be sprouting X-rated dialogue so it’s fallen more to us and I think we have pushed the envelope a bit in a few of the episodes but I don’t think there’s any episode where you would say ‘that would not have been part of the original run’. I think we’re self-policing.“

It does seem that the pair continue to have real enthusiasm and passion for Futurama. The series is produced in the US and in Korea in terms of its animation. But there is a close connection between the American animators and their southeast Asian workmates, as Cohen was keen to point out to us.

“As usual, the earlier stages of the work are done here. They do storyboarding and design here in California and then once we’ve seen all of it and gotten it to our liking, they send it overseas. It’s their own sister company actually in Korea, Rough Draft Korea and they’re used to working on it so it’s a little more streamlined a process rather than just being farmed out to whoever is available.”

Groening believes that the animators play a huge role in making the series what it is, in terms of quality.

“One of the reasons why Futurama looks so good is because of Rough Draft. They always give you more than you ask for. We’re always surprised by what we get out of them and I think it’s partly because of the unique relationship that David mentioned, that they have a sister company in Korea. So there’s Rough Draft Glendale and there’s Rough Draft Korea.”

Satire has always played a major part in the sci fi series, so with one of the biggest films of all-time a certain 3D epic with blueskinned released in 2009, would we see a parody of Cameron’s hit?

“We make reference to it. I think due to our one year lag in production, we decided we wouldn’t be the freshest Avatar parody if we devoted a full episode to it,” Cohen said slightly cagely.

”We do have a few jokes however where they go to a three-dimensional planet for a delivery, though the Avatar fans should keep an eye out. It’s somewhere around the middle of the run but we do pay homage or the opposite of paying homage to it.”

During the series, viewers are also going to find out a little bit more about the history between Zoidberg and The Professor.

“You’re going to learn a little more about Zoidberg’s origins as far as his connections to the Planet Express Company and to the Professor and perhaps there are some good reasons that he’s there after all,” Cohen hints.

Fans who have enjoyed the celebrity cameo voices won’t be disappointed in the latest run as they have lined up a batch of new and returning vocal talents, as Cohen told us.

“We have Al Gore, there’s also Coolio, another holiday special and this one’s got environmental theme. I’ll mention another frequent Futurama guest, George Takei from Star Trek who will be coming back. We also have Katee Sackhoff, Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, which should be a pleasing choice for SF fans.”

The celebrity cameos do serve several purposes, he argued.

“I think it’s several things. Firstly, we get to meet people who we like and they come into the studio.”

Groening stated, with his tongue firmly in his cheek that this was the main reason for doing them. Cohen continued.”On occasion it actually is helpful to the series for example if the theme is environmental and we have Al Gore, which brings more attention to the theme. In the case of someone like Katee Sackhoff, she appears in an episode that we have set in a comicbook convention, Comic Con in the year 3010, so I think it lends a little more of a realistic flavour to it. When cast appropriately it can emphasise the theme and be publicised appropriately talking about what the episode’s about.”

But there’s a couple of cameos that the pair seemed to be particularly excited about.

“You didn’t mention the most exclusive guest appearances of all. You and me,” Groening revealed.

“We play ourselves as heads in jars. The important thing is that David and I will be there. It’s very gratifying to know that we’re still alive in the year 3010!”, he laughs.

The return of Futurama has given them the opportunity to explore themes that they discussed before the series even started back in the late Nineties as soft-spoken Oregonian Matt Groening admitted.

“David and I took almost two years of just talking about characters and story ideas and places we wanted to go over the course of the series before we even began it back in 1999. And so we’re finally catching up with a lot of our original ideas. There’s still stuff we talked about back then that we haven’t even done yet.”

The reason why the animated series works and has engaged audiences for over a decade now is because everyone on the show uses it to celebrate all that’s great in the genre rather than mock it, an idea that Cohen feels is key to its longevity.

“One of the big discoveries we made along the way is that often the more seriously we take the science fiction angle of the show, the better the comedy plays. That wasn’t obvious to us at all at the very beginning, that that was the way for the show to go because you could just as easily make jokes that undercut the science fiction angle, thinking that those would work. As it’s turned out, we try to take the science fiction seriously with a genuinely dramatic story where characters’ emotions are more believable. You get much more comedy out of the characters when the situation they’re in is interesting. It turned out to be a bit of a surprise that we could do real science fiction and comedy.”

A little-known fact is that one of the biggest influences on the series is one of the most famous sci fi series in the world, something that David Cohen is happy to admit.

“Star Trek is a big inspiration for me on the show as really the straight line from Futurama in terms that it’s the show where a group of people are flying around in space and yet it’s drawing parallels to our world today and attempting to make points about today.”

The run will include a seasonal oneoff, Cohen told us.

“We do have a holiday special, three short stories within the length of a half hour episode. So that one for example is three mini stories about the holidays: Xmas, Robonica and Kwanza.”

Futurama will also see the return of hammy robot actor Calculon.

“We just saw the animatic, the pencil version of the show, of an episode in which Calculon is indebted to the Robot Mafia and they are not happy about that. So Calculon’s back,” Cohen revealed.

For the show’s makers, it is the strength of the supporting characters that are just as important contributing factors to Futurama’s success as its leads.

“I was even commenting to Dan Castalleneta yesterday that just hearing him do the voice of the Robot Devil, even though it’s not one of the everyday regulars, makes me feel that Futurama’s really back,” Cohen admitted.

“He’s one of those characters that comes back about once a year and I feel like ‘Yup, it’s another season of Futurama if the Robot Devil is back’. It means that things are as they should be. He’s so funny. Ironically he’s the character we didn’t intend to have back. It seemed like it was going to be a one-time joke but the voice was so funny that we found ourselves contriving ways to bring him back.”

And it’s not just the programme’s makers that are determined to give their best, as Groening told us.

“We were just in the studio with Dan doing it and it’s amazing. These actors are so good that they can basically do every line in one take and we’d be very happy. But they always give us variations. Dan was funny in every line, every take in a different way.”

Cohen actually feels that the voice talent have actually improved over the years.

“I think they actually got better and I don’t exactly know why. Maybe it was pent-up enthusiasm, maybe they’ve been watching the old shows and just seeing what works and what didn’t. There’s a long feedback on an animated show where they can keep honing the voices. To me they’ve just gotten better and better as they’ve gone along. And the voices have drifted from when they started out as much as The Simpsons did and we are almost unaware of that as we’re doing it. Only when I look back now at the very earliest shows do I see how they’ve changed. But I think they always change for the better and the actors do zero in on what works best for each character.”

The characters have changed over the years as much as the actors portraying them. Central protagonist Fry, slob transplanted from the 20th century to the future, has even grown. They realised that they couldn’t play the ‘fish out of water’ card forever so his seeming ignorance after being in the future for a number of years now is something that’s covered in the latest season, its executive producer Cohen fills us in.

”We just had a joke to address that, which I’ll quote for you. There’s another new holiday in the future, Parade Day in New York because there were so many parades from every different group in New York, they’ve eventually decided to just have one. So Fry is just finding out about this: ‘Fry do we have to explain everything to you because you’re from the past?’ and he says ‘No I’ve been here for quite a while now. I just don’t pay much attention.’ That’s our excuse now.”

Another thing that may also be surprising is that the voice talent admire each other’s work, a fact that Groening is happy to point out to us.

“When we have our table reads on Wednesday mornings, it’s fun both to watch them perform as their characters but also to watch the reactions to each other particularly John DiMaggio, the voice of Bender. He enjoys people; it’s almost as if he were Bender in a really good mood because he enjoys other people’s lines so much that he starts shouting and getting up and walking around.”

In fact, sometimes DiMaggio enjoys the other talent’s work a little too much, as Cohen encapsulates in a story from when the show started.

“In the early days of Futurama, John DiMaggio was so entertained by watching these other voice people, people like Billy West, Tress MacNeille and Maurice Lamarche. He was so entertained that he had a pillow in the studio to cover his face so that the microphones did not pick him up uncontrollably laughing during recording. So we had the John DiMaggio pillow.”

So the show is back but that doesn’t mean that they can be complacent as to how long it will be back for, as Cohen explains.

“I would say as usual we’re not expecting any immediate decision from anybody about whether there’s more. One reason is that here in the US, Comedy Central is going to air half of them this year in 2010 and half in next year, 2011. So they’ll have new material coming for quite a while from their point of view. We’ll have a holiday special to bridge that gap between two runs.”

But after a history that has seen the show cancelled and then return quite a few years later, its makers are fairly philosophical as to its future fate.

“We expect the best, we often hear the worst!” Groening says. “Creatively the show is so much fun to do, it’s not just that we’re proud of the results, which we are but the making of the show is actually really, really fun and animation is not easy. It’s a very arduous process and the fact that the show is this much fun seems like a very science fiction concept. It’s so much fun that we think ‘Of course, we should come back!’ But we’re just happy that we are back. If you’ve ever watched the show before, with these stories that are coming up, you’re going to be rewarded with some great science fiction ideas. If you do know the show, you’re going to be really happy because you’ll learn more about the characters and the stories are really surprising.”