Notes from Futurama Executive Producer’s David X.Cohen Reddit AMA…OK AND SNEAK PEEK CLIP!

Some of the notes are from an interview we did with Futurama Exec-Producer David X. Cohen early last month but there are some other cool tidbits like what is his favorite animated series other than the ones he worked on and his inspiration for Dr. Zoidberg. Notes after the jump!

So yea, we are certainly trucking through a rather eventful final season of Comedy Central’s Futurama and things look to be going smoothly as the crew sets to do a panel at San Diego Comic Con before they ride off into the moon-set. One of the attendees for the Futurama SDCC panel is David X. Cohen, executive producer, of whom we had a chance to speak with not too long ago and just recently took part in a Reddit AMA where fans from all walks of life got to ask him a bunch of questions. The particular notes I am most fond of include his reaction to Futurama being cancelled:

When Futurama first got cancelled after four seasons on Fox, it was a little more upsetting. Four seasons is a very intermediate amount… not clearly a failure or a success. Most shows get cancelled either several seasons earlier or several later. So we weren’t sure how to feel. I guess we decided on “bad”.

Now having done seven seasons by our count (we include the four DVD movies as season five), and 140 episodes, it feels like a good run. If you were told in advance your show would make it that far, you would jump at the deal. Granted it took us 14 years to do seven seasons, but still, not too bad.

Also with the 52 recent episodes for Comedy Central I feel like we really got to a lot of subjects that we wanted to cover and got to develop the characters quite a bit… and this current final(?) season ends with a very strong, emotional run. So all in all, yes, I will feel okay with it if this really is the end.

The idea of catching up to the Simpsons if we were to come back is definitely more of a nightmare than a dream. To do that, we’d have to get an order of “20 episodes a year for 20 years”. Noooooooooo!

This is a rather stark contrast to what some of the cast members feel as both Billy West and Mo LaMarche have pushed statements saying they would want Futurama to return in some capacity.  Having said that David seemed pretty confident that the series has written several great season finale episodes  and gives notes on what would be a proper finale for this run:

I feel like we’re starting to get pretty good at writing series finales — it’s a bad sign when you have a lot of experience doing that. We are definitely going for the model of “Epic Sci Fi” blended with “possibly heart breaking emotional story”. In that vein I think it’s a little closer to “The Devil’s Hands” in that we will spend more time on the Fry-Leela angle. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we will actually see Fry and Leela’s real, genuine, actual, factual wedding in this one. People get angry with me for saying that because they think I’ve given too much away, but rest assured that it moves onward and upward and backward and pretty much in all directions from there. 

In any case, I am really excited to take the rest of this ride with Futurama and the season finale sounds epic. David would go on to talk about plot devices for other episodes and you can check that out over on Reddit here. David was also nice enough to post a trailer for an upcoming episode of Futurama called ‘The Inhuman Torch’ set to air July 10th on Comedy Central @ 10pm EST.

 

Futurama is all new tomorrow night on Comedy Central @ 10pm EST, check your local listings.