The future for Futurama is decidedly unclear ‘ not that that’s anything new.
The sci-fi comedy series ran from 1999 to 2003 on Fox before production ended. But sales of DVDs and repeats on cable showed interest in the series remained high, and a four direct-to-DVD features were commissioned to continue the show.
With the fourth DVD feature, Into the Wild Green Yonder, finished and release, there is once again talk that this may not be the end for Fry, Leela, Bender and friends. Sales of the DVDs and the success of the show on Comedy Central have raised the possibility that Fox may make more Futurama, and the show’s creators are just waiting for the green light.
‘We would love to continue making more Futurama episodes in whatever form,’ says series co-creator Matt Groening. ‘I think we haven’t exhausted all the story ideas.’
Executive producer David X. Cohen says he’s even got the story worked out. ‘I find myself in the shower in the morning thinking about the next episode that will come on the heels of this episode,’ he says. ‘So I have it mostly worked out and pretty much ready to go if the call comes in from Fox.’
Still, nothing’s been decided and Cohen is reluctant to predict the odds of the show’s return. ‘I couldn’t put an exact figure on that,’ he says. ‘It’s certainly not zero, it’s not a hundred, so we can say 50-50 for lack of a better term.’
Groening, an icon in animation since creating The Simpsons more than two decades ago, says there’s a good case to be made for continuing Futurama. ‘We did these four movies fairly quickly, certainly by animation standards,’ he says. They also were done for much less money than animated theatrical features, which in the case of The Simpsons Movie took four years to make.
In creating visuals for the Futurama DVDs, Cohen and Groening says they tried to create more cinematic visuals and were very happy with the animation work done by Rough Draft Studios. ‘They really knocked themselves out,’ Groening says.
For the voice cast, coming back to their Futurama characters after a gap was easy because the actors had helped create them from the start.
Billy West says he put a lot of thought into figuring out what characters as diverse as Fry, the Professor and Dr. Zoidberg would sound like.
‘Zoidberg was a combination of two actors that were ‘ they weren’t leading men or anything. One was Lou Jacobi from Diary of Anne Frank,’ says West. ‘And then there was this other guy named George Jessel, he was like a vaudevillian burlesque comedian and he had a marble mouth.’ Merging the two created just the right mix of strange for the character, and fit the visual of Zoidberg’s squid-like mouth.
Similarly, voice actor Phil LaMarr says his character, Hermes Conrad, was originally not going to have a Jamaican accent. ‘It wasn’t until I think the fourth episode that Matt (Groening) came in and said, ‘Yeah, it’s not really working,’ which is like a death knell,’ LaMarr says. ‘They’d already replaced two major characters at that point on the show. So when they go, ‘Can you do a Jamaican accent?’ ‘ ‘Yes!”
Lauren Tom says the case was similar for her character, Amy Wong.’She was supposed to be a car mechanic ‘ really tough, lesbian, sort of dyke-y,’ she says. ‘But Matt liked my laugh, so he said, ‘We’ll just case you and then figure out what to do because I’ve got to get that laugh in there somewhere.”
Maurice LeMarche, who voices a variety of voices including Kif Kroker, Calculon and Morbo, says the characters evolved and deepened as the show progressed. He cited Kif’s relationship with Amy as an example. ‘I think that’s where the characters grow, not necessarily a change in the sound of their voices, but in what they want,’ he says.
Groening says he’s spent the last year looking into the contemporary animation scene ‘ he was a judge for the Annecy festival in France ‘ and says the outlook for animation is very good these days. ‘I saw just a staggering amount of great, great stuff,’ he says.
That also extends to the recent run of outstanding animated features. ‘This year, I think one of the best animated movies ever made ‘ and maybe you don’t have to qualify it with animated ‘ Wall’E, is a great science-fiction movie,’ he says. ‘And then you see Waltz with Bashir, this Israeli movie that’s unlike any other animated movie I’ve ever seen.’
