Futurama returns to its new home on Hulu Monday, July 29, with a 10-episode season that will please fans both old and new. There are two more seasons on the way, with hopefully more to follow—and the cast and crew was at San Diego Comic-Con to celebrate the show that keeps getting canceled and then finding its way back.
Executive producers David X. Cohen and Claudia Katz—who agreed they’d love to do an actual big-screen Futurama feature film one day—spoke to a SDCC press roundtable about the show ahead of its season 12 premiere. io9 got a chance to ask a question we’ve often wondered: Futurama has been around, on and off the air, for 25 years. Is there someone among the veteran crew who’s sort of designated as the keeper of the lore, to make sure all the continuity lines up?
“It depends on which aspect you’re looking at,” Cohen said. “Because [animation studio] Rough Draft has all the art going back forever. And like every 10 years when we get renewed, they have to redraw everything at a higher resolution because the TV has more scan lines [laughs].”
Katz chimed in. “We have now reanimated our title sequence in 3D, I think three times; this last time was in 4K, and they had to redo everything. It’s funny because I was showing it to David and we were seeing things that we’d never noticed before, because it was in 4K. We were like, ‘What is that? Did you put that in there?’ ‘No, that’s always been there.’ ‘Oh, cool,’” she said.
Cohen continued. “One of the other things I will say that allows the show to come back again and again is there’s been a lot of continuity behind the scenes. Many of the same animators and producers at Rough Draft Studios, for example, our entire voice cast has stayed with the show throughout, which has been super critical and a little bit lucky statistically, probably. And then, even the writers, even now, the writing staff is at least half writers [who] have been there on and off for 20-plus years, and [we also] have newer people who came to the show as fans.”
Added Katz, “And it’s the same on the art side—like you have your sort of stalwarts and then your sort of fresh [talent].”
Cohen then had a secret to share about how the show’s writers manage to keep all that Futurama lore straight. “The embarrassing admission that I’m about to make is that in the writers room, we are frequently consulting these fan sites to see what happened in the old episodes. Even those of us who wrote the episodes. I’ve been to, like, fan Futurama trivia night, for example, and came in second. It’s hard to compete with fans for the repository of knowledge.”
And, of course, “Sometimes, we just forget stuff too. Like, there’s an animation error—you don’t want to blame the animators because everybody forgot,” he said. “The writers didn’t say anything about it. But Leela’s dad, his mouth used to open side to side but now it opens [up and down]. But then it’s going to go back to [the first way]. The thing is, he’s got very flexible jaws! So in some sense, some things do fall through the cracks of time.”
Futurama season 12 kicks off July 29 on Hulu.
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