Fans, take note: Two new books – Futurama Presents: Bender’s Guide to Life: By me, Bender! and The Art of Futurama: A Visual History of Matt Groening’s Cult Classic Animated Series – have arrived just in time for the holidays.
Twelve seasons into its 25-year run, Futurama remains as sharp and witty as ever. The latest season serves up many laugh out loud moments, with the creative team tackling everything from familial trauma to alternate timelines to apocalyptic scenarios. The show has found a welcome home with Hulu after a decade-long hiatus, with two successful seasons under their belts and two more coming through 2026.
After the show’s well-received panel on the Main Stage at this year’s New York Comic Con – which included supervising director Peter Avanzino and creator Matt Groening engaged in a drawing competition – that Futurama duo along with executive producer Claudia Katz, voice actor John DiMaggio (Bender, Robot Santa), and producer Lee Supercinski sat down with The Aquarian to discuss the recent season, their creative decision-making process, and how working with a streamer is different than a broadcast or cable network.
People were pretty stoked at the panel today. The energy was even better than last year.
Matt Groening: We’ve been on a long time, and then we keep getting canceled. Then we come back. People were talking about their favorite episodes. We’ve had how many series finales?
Claudia Katz: A lot.
Peter Avanzino: They still write them now.
Matt Groening: When we were first on and we were struggling, we got canceled. We ended up on Adult Swim for a while, and then Comedy Central. I think in reruns of the cartoon, people over years and years finally caught on to it. Now it’s beloved.
You guys made me nervous this season when I saw opening title card jokes like “Who Keeps Canceling Us?” and “We’re Not Out Of Networks Yet!”
Matt Groening: No, we’re doing great now. Hulu loves us.
Claudia Katz: I feel like this is the first time we’ve actually done the show where the show has been supported in a really continuous, great way.
John DiMaggio: I’ve seen more advertisements for Futurama than ever before with this. They obviously understand the product that they’re pushing out. They get it. It’s important to a lot of people.
Claudia Katz: We have a great team. They’re really terrific.
There’s a certain darkness to some of the episodes this season – the chatbot creepiness, doomsday by fashion, and then the coffee apocalypse. I was thinking about how Season 7 of The Simpsons had darker moments like Bart selling his soul. Disenchantment got more serious as it went along. I like how it shifted in tone. Have there ever been any Futurama episodes that you wanted to go darker? Or you wanted a really dark one with some humor?
Matt Groening: I think it depends on the story. With science fiction you’re dealing with apocalypse stuff. We’re trying to honor the great science fiction that we grew up with, and then try to take it to new places and be funny. By the way – comedy and science fiction rarely mix well. Generally, in the comedy science fiction animation, the rocket ships are shaped like something else, like a piece of broccoli or whatever. My attitude is that’s not funny the first time, and the second and third time it’s infuriating.
John DiMaggio: But the thing about science fiction, though, is that it’s based in the stories of the day. Think about all the morality plays within Star Trek episodes – naturally, that’s just going to happen. Unfortunately, we are living in a little darker times than other times, and that reflects in the writing in order to make it funny, to make it the satire that it is.
Peter Avanzino: I’m a director, it’s already written, but I don’t feel the show is dark. Even when the world’s about to die, it’s humorous, and then next week it’s there again. It does get sad. When it’s dark, it’s emotional more than any actual doomsday.
Claudia Katz: I love a heartfelt and funny episode. To me, that’s our best.
John DiMaggio: That’s what [Season 5 episode] “Jurassic Bark” is – one of the most popular and one of the most hated [episodes], if you will. It’s 21 minutes and 30 seconds of pure comedy, and then 30 seconds of just tear your heart out of your chest.
Matt Groening: For those of you who don’t know, we killed the dog, and at the time, I said, “You can’t kill the dog.” Fans have come up to me and said, “I just want to talk to you about ‘Jurassic Bark,'” and then they start crying. There was a Japanese movie in the eighties [Hachi-ko] based on a true story of a guy whose dog followed him to the train station as he rode into town every day. The guy died, and the dog came every day to the train station to wait for his master. I went to see the movie, and I knew it was a tear jerker. I said, “I am not going to cry at the end. I’m not going to cry. I’m not going to cry,” and at the first shot was the dog as a puppy, I started bawling.
Claudia Katz: Not only does the dog die, but he almost dies of a broken heart. It’s that time lapse thing of waiting. It’s the same thing. I just remember I cried at that table read, I cried at the animatic screening… I do think you [Matt] saved that episode, in a way, because I think there was a propensity to make a joke at the end, instead of just leaving that moment. You fought the writers on that and won – if we’re going be emotional, let’s just be emotional and not cut its knees out. I think that’s what is special about Futurama – we go for it in a bunch of different ways, which is really fun for us.
This season, you explore some trauma with Fry remembering his birthday party and Bender going through a generational trauma within his robotic family. What is it that makes trauma and comedy actually work for Futurama?
John DiMaggio: It’s like pain plus time equals comedy – I think that is the algebraic.
Peter Avanzino: Comedy is when someone stubs their toe and tragedy is when you stub your toe.
Matt Groening: Mel Brooks said, “Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die,” [Laughs].
You just mentioned how supportive Hulu was, but in the creative process, are there any differences in creating a show for streamers versus traditional networks the time?
Matt Groening: The time. Everything in the past has been done for broadcast, and it’s generally around 22 minutes. Almost every season they shave a little bit more time in order to squeeze in more commercials. It’s so fun not to have to structure something for an act break with a bump to it and go to a joke and then a commercial. Then have to do a reset after the commercial and go, “Oh my gosh, the boulder missed us.” So, streaming is fun.
Peter Avanzino: Broadcast was to the frame.
Claudia Katz: We would sit there and pull [frames]. It’s just liberating from a storytelling point-of-view, because if you need an extra 15 seconds, you get an extra 15 seconds.
Peter Avanzino: I remember when it came back the first time to cable; there was discussion that we could do more nudity [or] cursing, but the show still had a sensibility. The decision was made that is not our show. Just because we can do it…
John DiMaggio: I’m just waiting for Bender to get permission to say “cock.” Then it’ll be just downhill from there. All my wishes, they will not come true. [There’s] that George Carlin bit – “And the cock crowed three times. It’s in the Bible!”
Matt Groening: This is what John’s like all the time [Laughs].
John, given that you like to clown around a lot, do you ever keep the cast from getting the voice work done?
John DiMaggio: It’s like herding cats when we’re all together.
Matt Groening: We get the scripts as written. Then in the moment, one of us comes up with another joke or something. When I want to really make them crazy, I write it down on a piece of paper and hand it to him [John], so nobody knows what the joke is. And then he says it. One that we didn’t use was on Disenchantment, where King Zøg has been driven insane, and then somehow his ex-wife and his daughter are naked in an orgy scene. Zøg comes running in and sees them, and from the sheet of paper he said it, then he fell on the floor laughing. Do you remember? [pause, then to John] Do you want to say it?
John DiMaggio: Yeah, sure. “Ah, full bush.”
Matt Groening: That’s not how you said it.
John DiMaggio: “FULL BUSH!”
Matt Groening: We couldn’t use it. I was willing to do it, but…
Claudia Katz: I think it got taken out.
How much ad libbing do you do in the booth, and how much do you guys keep that?
John DiMaggio: The scripts are so good, all you gotta do is the script. What’s beautiful is that we’ll get what’s in the script… they’re open. As long as you have it right, what the writers have busted their asses to put on the paper, there’s a little bit of permission to go, “Hey, can I try something?” Sometimes it sticks to the wall, and sometimes it slides right off, but as long as we get what’s on the page, there’s a little freedom after that. But the priority is to get what the writer [has done].
Matt Groening: The writers are trying to write the funniest thing they can, and then it’s such a blast to take a script that you think is funny, and give it to these guys and just have them find another level of humor.
Peter Avanzino: Because we get the scripts, I know exactly what it should sound like because I can act it out. When it comes in, it’s nothing like what I thought it should be, but it’s funnier. I think the way they’re written is pretty verbally finessed. You can’t make up the wrong things Fry says. They seem to have to hit those marks, but there’s a still a lot of room [for tweaking].
Lee Supercinski: We record as an ensemble for the most part. Not everyone’s in every scene. We can’t get everybody, but for the most part the actors in the room are together recording those scenes. I think that’s a huge benefit that we get to do that.
John DiMaggio: We get to riff off each other.
Lee Supercinski: So they heighten their performances, but even as-written performances get so heightened because they’re able to play off with each other. We record typically two to three minutes of screen time in a single pass. It’s also just basic recording sessions – very joyful, very fun to have everybody together.
John DiMaggio: And we’ve all known each other for so long. It’s family stuff. You get in a room, and somebody does something and you’re just on the floor immediately because of it.
You guys get a lot of scientific advice on the show from actual astrophysicists and scientists. Have they ever come to you with a concept that they have to explain to everybody?
John DiMaggio: Constantly, and not only do they have to explain it, they won’t stop explaining it.
Matt Groening: They spend so much time arguing over scientific minutia. I don’t know what they’re talking about.
John DiMaggio: What was the episode where everybody’s brains kept changing? “The Farnsworth Paradox”?
Peter Avanzino: “The Prisoner Of Benda.”
John DiMaggio: Right. They actually had to figure out the math in order to get the brains back into the right place.
Peter Avanzino: If I could say, I don’t think they had to figure that out. It could have just happened still in a funny way, but they did and it’s a good story.
Claudia Katz: Whenever we do a time travel episode, they sit and map [it] out because time travel is just rife with… It’s very hard to do it in a way that doesn’t have holes, but they figure that out.
Peter Avanzino: There’s a lot of phenomenon that you can explain, but we have to then figure out how to show it in a cartoon.
Claudia Katz: My favorite thing is we have meetings to hand out the episodes, and if we get tricky stuff Pete will say to David [X. Cohen], “How are we supposed to show this?” Then David just starts chuckling. It’s very sweet. He’s like, “You’ll figure it out.”
John DiMaggio: “That’s a you problem.”
Futurama has been around for 25 years. It’s had peaks and times it’s been canceled. Now that it’s on the Hulu and it’s back on the rise, what would you say is the future of the show from here on out? Do you think that maybe this time it’ll have more longevity over time?
Matt Groening: So far, Hulu loves us and are treating us so nice. Our ratings are great.
Lee Supercinski: The Hulu run has been very successful, and we feel very supported. Nobody knows what the future is or how long the show will go, but this time it feels really great being supported. Hopefully, it will be a very, very long run.
.
Photos by Bryan Reesman
