Matt Groening (left), David Cohen, and Bender the robot at Groening's studio. *

Photo: Sian Kennedy * David X. Cohen is watching a short animation clip on a computer monitor. It's a tight shot of two robots' pelvises. They thrust their cube-shaped midsections together and swap a DVD from one of their disc drives to the other. This, Cohen explains, is footage of a sci-fi stage show, a suggestive all-robot version of Cirque du Soleil. "Nothing makes me happier than a scene with no living being in it," he says.

Cohen has another reason to be happy. The segment he's watching is from Futurama, the show that he codeveloped back in 1999 with Simpsons creator Matt Groening. (Cohen wrote and produced some of the animated sitcom's most popular episodes.) With that pedigree, Futurama seemed like a can't-fail proposition, but it was canceled five years ago. This footage, however, is new: Futurama is back in production, and the unexpected return is as curious as the story of its abrupt cancellation.

Set in the year 3000, Futurama's interstellar sci-fi future isn't a shiny utopia like The Jetsons or a dark dystopia like Blade Runner. It's a time that seems wonderful or awful depending on how you look at it — just like the present. "On The Jetsons, there's a machine that ties your tie for you," Cohen says. "On Futurama, there'd be a machine that tied your tie, but it would malfunction and start strangling you."

Those kinds of macabre twists would be Futurama's undoing. Fox was expecting something familiar, The Simpsons in space. Executives certainly were not prepared for the bizarre contours of Groening and Cohen's brave new world. "The network's attitude quickly went from tremendous excitement to great fear," Groening says. "They were very troubled by the suicide booth. They didn't like the 'All-Tentacle Massage' parlor."

Futurama premiered to strong ratings, but as the show was shuffled around the schedule, viewership slipped. Every season, the renewal notice came late — so late that there wasn't always time to deliver a full slate of episodes. After the fourth season, the people working on the show waited and waited for a renewal notice until they eventually assumed — correctly — that it wasn't going to come. "We didn't get to finish the way we would've liked," Cohen says.

Futurama was never a mass market success — it never generated universally known catchphrases like "Don't have a cow, man" or a movie that grossed half a billion dollars. It just attracted a niche of enthusiastic devotees. But in the modern media landscape, a hardcore niche of fans can be all you need.

Futurama was killed, but like some B-movie cyborg it refused to stay dead. The fans watched the 72 episodes religiously in syndication and shelled out $170 to get the entire run on DVD. So, in 2005, Fox green-lighted 16 new episodes. Cohen and Groening have reassembled many of the hundreds of writers, animators, and voice artists who'd gone on to other projects to create four DVDs of new material, including sexy robot stage shows. The first DVD hits stores on November 27, and the features will then be divided into half-hour episodes when the entire run of the series begins airing on Comedy Central next year.

At last, Futurama is getting a fifth season.

Star Trek had a token alien crew member. Futurama's crew includes an alien, a mutant, and a robot.

Image: Matt Groening; Futurama TM and 2007 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Matt Groening's studio in Santa Monica, California, is where Futurama is written and where Groening draws his comic strip, Life in Hell, which has been a newspaper fixture for nearly three decades. It's also where Groening keeps his music collection. There's an entire room stacked floor to ceiling with LPs, CDs, and tapes, everything from Swiss yodels to Balinese gamelan. It's a sunny afternoon in late September, and Groening's a day late delivering the latest installment of Life in Hell. "When I'm procrastinating, I come in here and file a few dozen records," he says.

Groening, 53, is an omnivorous mediaphile, and it shows in his work. The Simpsons began as a straightforward parody of the conventions of domestic sitcoms but quickly turned into a nonstop barrage of pop culture references and allusions. For Futurama, Groening drew upon a childhood shaped by Isaac Asimov stories and the colorful covers of pulp magazines. (There's a stack of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures from the 1950s on a shelf near a few of his Emmy statuettes.)

Groening shows me another media archive housed nearby in the studio: a wall full of sci-fi paperbacks. He points to some that he and Cohen studied while working on their show. Arthur C. Clarke! Alfred Bester! Stanislaw Lem! Rudy Rucker! Kurt Vonnegut!

Futurama plays off of what science fiction has taught us to expect from the future. It plays off of Star Wars and 2001 just as The Simpsons plays off of Leave It to Beaver and The Brady Bunch. But Groening's sci-fi literacy is incomplete. There's a glaring black hole in the center of his geek cred, one that Futurama fans may have a hard time fathoming.

Matt Groening has never seen an episode of Star Trek.

Cohen, on the other hand, likes to brag that he's never not watching Star Trek. Which is one reason that Groening approached him to work on Futurama.

In the early 1980s, while Groening was making a name for himself as a cartoonist chronicling the punk rock and bohemian subcultures of LA, Cohen was making a name for himself on the New Jersey high school math-team circuit. He went on to study physics at Harvard and get a master's in computer science from UC Berkeley. But he was also the president of The Harvard Lampoon, and he left academia to write comedy.

After he started working on The Simpsons in 1993, he became fascinated by the "freeze framers" — obsessive fans who videotaped episodes so they could pause them and look for gags that lasted only a split second. So he gave them little Easter eggs. In a 1995 episode in which Homer Simpson enters an alternate universe and becomes a 3-D model, Cohen inserted an equation into the background of one scene. It seemed to offer a counterexample to Fermat's last theorem. Then he lurked on the alt.tv.simpsons newsgroup to gauge the geek response. (Confusion at first, then astonishment when they tested it, then despair when they discovered that it was accurate only to eight decimal places. D'oh!)

Cohen mercilessly lampooned the passion and the fickleness of these fans through the character Comic Book Guy. He wrote the episode in which that character first utters the line "Worst. Episode. Ever." (Cohen's voice is a touch nasal; he does an excellent rendition of this immortal phrase.)

By the time Groening tapped him to codevelop Futurama, Cohen had a rep as "the sci-fi guy" in the writers room, the one who scripted a parody of The Fly and lobbied for more screen time for slobbering alien characters Kang and Kodos. Groening had already thought a lot about Futurama and had conceived many of the characters, but Cohen injected a left-brained sensibility, a background in math and computers... and that encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek.

The two sketched out their vision of the year 3000 on a whiteboard, which now sits in a storage area at Groening's studio. Among the tenets they set down: Robots should have their own soap operas. There won't just be smart dust and smartphones, there'll be smart sausage. Medicine will be much more advanced, so slapstick humor can include amputations. A quote credited to Cohen is the centerpiece of the board: "Reality should not stand in the way of comedy."

Futurama focuses on the staff of an interstellar package delivery service: a 150-year-old inventor and his prepubescent clone, a one-eyed mutant, a kleptomaniacal robot, and a nebbish from the 20th century who just emerged from a cryofreezer. One week their jobs might take them to a planet where all the creatures are pure liquid (hijinks ensue when someone accidentally guzzles the emperor). Another week they might visit a planet inhabited by giant slugs, which excrete an addictive substance that's become the most popular soft drink in the galaxy.

Cohen explained to Groening that there had to be a doctor character on Futurama — like "Bones" McCoy on Star Trek. But in a clever inversion of Dr. McCoy — a human frequently called upon to treat weird aliens — Cohen dreamed up Dr. Zoidberg, a crustacean-like physician with a distressingly limited knowledge of human anatomy.

The two carefully plotted a story arc and a series of revelations that could unveil over several seasons. Then they took it to the network. "It was the most worked-out pitch in Fox history," Cohen says.

After the show got a green light, Cohen assembled the geekiest writing staff television had ever seen: one MA in math, one MA in computer science, one MA in philosophy, one PhD in chemistry, one PhD in applied math, and some normals to balance things out. "I went from Home Improvement, where people earnestly pitched jokes about farting and table saws, to a place where there were discussions about nanophysics and string theory and quantum mechanics," writer Eric Horsted says. "I could only follow the conversation for a few minutes before my brain would start sweating and I'd have to reach for a copy of People."

Cohen was the head writer and showrunner, handling the day-to-day operations and directing voice-over sessions. Groening chimed in on what was funny and what wasn't and shielded the staff from network interference as much as he could... even when they had a character traveling back in time and inadvertently sleeping with his own grandmother. "I'm very proud that I never said no," Groening declares. (That episode went on to win an Emmy.)

The comedic style of Futurama was similar to The Simpsons: A single joke could blossom into an increasingly hilarious cluster of gags. And there were lots of celebrity guest voices. (In the year 3000, many 20th-century celebrities' heads have been preserved in jars.)

The animation was by Rough Draft Studios — it had done ink and paint work for The Simpsons and caused a stir with The Maxx, which combined hand-drawn art with CGI and live action. Rough Draft's artists smoothed out Groening's sketches but maintained the essential feel. For instance, the delivery company's spaceship is a 3-D model as sleek as a star barge from Amazing Stories, but the prow appears to have an overbite, like a Simpsons character.

The show premiered on Sunday, March 28, 1999, at 8:30 pm, immediately after The Simpsons. But within a year, it was moved to 7 pm, where it was usually preempted by football games. "After they moved us to 7, they launched a promotional campaign with the tagline 'The Fun Begins at 8!'" Groening says. "I never got that. I think 'The Fun Begins at 7!' just rolls off the tongue."

At Rough Draft Studios in Glendale, California, these artists working on paper get windows. The CGI geeks work in the dark basement.After the cancellation of Futurama and the delivery of the last episodes in 2002, the staff dispersed. Several of the writers went to work on The Simpsons. One who had scripted a note-perfect satire of Star Trek actually went to work on Star Trek: Enterprise. Cohen wrote a couple of pilots, including an animated comedy called Grandmaster Freak & the Furious 15 that would have starred rapper Ice Cube. Ever the math buff, Cohen was excited about the many different ways to geometrically arrange Grandmaster Freak and his posse onscreen.

But Futurama refused to die. Cartoon Network began airing reruns in January 2003, and they were greeted with wild enthusiasm. "It was beating late-night talk shows in key demographics, like 18- to 34-year-old men," Cohen says. The show has also been a hit on DVD. Sales figures are closely guarded, but one of the nerdier writers calculated that, based on their residual checks, the total gross to date is more than $100million.

"One of the great things about the show was the instantaneous, intense fan reaction," Groening says. It operated on several levels, rewarding multiple viewings, and it was full of catnip for geeks: In addition to the riffs on The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Star Wars, there were allusions to classic videogames, programming languages, Schrdinger's cat, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

"The operating principle of Futurama was that you can do a joke that 1percent of the audience gets, as long as it doesn't derail the enjoyment of the mass audience," Cohen says. "And that 1 percent becomes a fan for life."

Some jokes in Futurama were written in a strange alphabet that fans had to decrypt. "Most were jokes about aliens eating people," Cohen says. "Like, an alien sign on a restaurant says TASTY HUMAN BURGERS." He checked the Web a few hours after the pilot aired and discovered that the freeze framers had already cracked the code. A trickier alien alphabet was devised.

Soon, the obsessive audience members knew the mythology of the show better than its creators. "We'd have to search the fan sites to check references we'd forgotten," says Patric Verrone, a Futurama writer. For instance, in one episode a character casually explains that all videotapes were erased hundreds of years before by the Second Coming of Jesus. None of the writers could remember the specific year. But a Web fan had created a detailed timeline of the show, which noted that the resurrection and erasure occurred in 2443.

In 2005, Groening and Cohen met with Fox execs to discuss the possibility of bringing the show back for a feature-length DVD. "It was a great meeting," Cohen says. "One of the first things we heard was that two DVDs would work better than one." The network eventually agreed to fund four features, which would be divided into 16 episodes for syndication — nearly a full season. For instance, one DVD, "The Beast With a Billion Backs," can be viewed as a full-length movie about a creature that carries on a simultaneous affair with everyone in the galaxy. But it can also be viewed as four 22-minute installments.

Groening seems almost stunned by the support and encouragement of the network. "It's been," he hesitates, searching for the words, "different. They've really been gracious and enthusiastic and supportive." But that hasn't softened the tone of the show. The new episodes feature a product called Torgo's Executive Powder, an all-purpose substance that's used as a cleanser, an explosive, and a treatment for jock itch. It's supposedly made from ground-up Fox network execs.

On a monitor, there's a wireframe 3-D image of what looks like a Death Star. We're in the Rough Draft Studios office in Glendale, California. Actually, we're directly under the Salvation Army next door; the studio had to expand when it was working on the original Futurama episodes back in 2000. During the busiest months last year, when both the new Futurama episodes and The Simpsons Movie were in production, there were 140 people employed here and an additional 500 in Rough Draft's sister studio in South Korea.

Rough Draft's director of CGI, Scott Vanzo, explains that the tricky part of mixing 3-D animation with traditional 2-D animation is making the 3-D look suitably rough. This Death Star model is from the climactic sequence of the first new DVD. A group of nudist alien con artists have bilked the people of Earth out of all their possessions, including the planet itself. Then the nudist aliens do what any colonizing force would do — they surround Earth with solid gold, jewel-encrusted Death Stars. A ragtag band of Earthicans (not Earthlings — they now call themselves Earthicans) leads a last-ditch attack on these Death Stars. The rebels include Futurama's main characters, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the mascots of three major holidays: Robot Santa, Kwanzaa-bot, and the Hannukah Zombie. Oh, and also Al Gore.

Gore provides his own voice — it's his third time on the show. He appeared the first time as the leader of the Vice Presidential Action Rangers, and then as Emperor of the Moon, but the new DVD is his finest hour. Geeks will be on the edge of their seats as the Nobel laureate fights his way past the defenses of the nudist aliens and enters a gold Death Star through an unguarded vent, shouting, "Finally, I get to save the Earth with deadly lasers instead of deadly slide shows!"

Cohen says that they're giving hardcore fans no excuse to wait for the airing on Comedy Central next year. "We're producing it in HD with 5.1 surround sound, and we're filling up every bit of available space on the disc," he says. There'll be a few minutes of material that won't appear on the TV versions of each episode, an in-depth lecture on the role of mathematics in the show, and a full episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad, the most popular show in the 31st century. It consists of a shot of the titular amphibian, who fixes viewers with his trance-inducing gaze. (Diehards who watch the motionless toad for half an hour will discover hilarious fake commercial breaks and a few other surprises.)

Cohen credits DVD sales as the force behind Futurama's return. "This new revenue stream saved our neck," he says. "It might be a very brief window when DVDs are so powerful. If the show had been on 10 years earlier, we'd be dead. A few years from now, when Internet speeds are better, maybe one person buys it and shares it with a hundred of their friends."

Back at Groening's studio, he is talking up an idea he had for another episode inspired by Kevin Kelly's death clock. Kelly recently calculated how much longer he had to live — he estimates around 23 years — and posted his own personal life countdown clock online. "I started thinking, wouldn't it be cool if you had a death wristwatch?" Groening says.

He and Cohen bat around the story potential of the death wristwatch. Surely, by the year 3000, a gadget like that could recalculate the time of your death on the fly, beeping if you are in imminent danger of dying? They start toying with the concept: Wouldn't it be funny if the death wristwatch were running fast? What if the battery died?

All of the episodes for the Futurama DVDs have already been written, and as far as these two know that's the end of the show — for real this time. But they continue plotting, just in case. "It would be a great episode, and there's a message there," Groening says. "You can't live your life constantly looking at the death clock."

Senior editor Chris Baker (cbaker@wired.com) wrote about Penny Arcade in issue 15.09.

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