While ”Simpsons ” creator Matt Groening continues to draw raves for his new Fox sci-fi series, ”Futurama,” you should know that, technically speaking, it wasn’t his first attempt at a sequel. Back in 1994, he spent several months working on a ”Simpsons” spin-off centered around the curmudgeony Krusty The Clown — with one unusual twist: The show would not be animated. “I thought it would be so cool to do a live-action spin-off from a cartoon,” says Groening of the project, which was to star Dan Castellaneta (who voices Homer). “I wrote a pilot script in which Krusty moves to L.A. and gets his own talk show. We had this running joke in the script that Krusty was living in a house on stilts and there were beavers gnawing their way through the stilts. But somebody at the network pointed out how expensive it was to hire trained beavers — and an equally prohibitive cost would be to get mechanical beavers — so I said, ‘If we animated this, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.'”