Futurama Producers Explain How They Made That Disenchantment Crossover Happen (Exclusive)

Futurama has finally made fans’ dreams come true with a huge crossover with Disenchantment in the penultimate episode of Season 14, and the producers behind it all explained how this crossover actually happened. Futurama is nearing the end of its latest season with Hulu, and one of the big events that fans had been looking forward to was a new crossover with the cancelled Netflix series, Disenchantment. Naturally, a lot of things had to line up in order for these Netflix and Hulu projects to merge for a single episode.

Speaking to ComicBook about the episode, series co-creator David X. Cohen and executive producer Claudia Katz really went into detail about all of the work that not only went into making the Futurama and Disenchantment crossover happen, but still making it make sense as an episode of Futurama. With Matt Groening pushing for the crossover for quite a while, it turns out that the crossover has been years in the works before it actually made it into Futurama‘s slate.

Futurama Producers Reveal How Disenchantment Crossover Happened

As Cohen explained, Matt Groening “obviously pushed quite hard” and made the Futurama and Disenchantment crossover happen. It wasn’t easy to do considering one is a Hulu exclusive, and the other is exclusive to Netflix, but the two companies gave them permission and cooperated in putting them together. But Cohen’s main concern with the “meshing of the two is it has to be a Futurama episode still.” As the showrunner put it, “Futurama is a great platform for that because in our world, our characters often do go to strange new worlds or dimensions. And so visiting Dreamland is actually, I think, within the possible realities of Futurama.“

Noting that as a result of Dreamland working within Futurama‘s world, and the two shows already sharing Matt Groening’s art style, the main goal for Cohen was for the episode to “feel like an adventure that the Futurama characters, Fry particularly, were having in a new place.” And then there were a lot of hurdles to overcome to do that” with many hurdles to overcome. As executive producer Claudia Katz spoke to these hurdles, Katz revealed that this crossover had been something that Groening had been wanting to do for years, and it took quite a lot to blend the art styles together.

“Matt has actually wanted to do this for a long time, and I think it came up even a season or two before, and it took so long to get all the approvals and work everything out that we squeeze it in the second to last episode of this past season,” Katz revealed. But then getting into the technical side, there’s much more than fans likely expected, “From an animation and technical standpoint, Disenchantment, it’s Matt’s style of characters, but even that has evolved. They have five fingers, they’re anatomically more human. I think each time Matt does something, he wants to reevaluate and try to knock things up a few notches.”

The Technical Side of Futurama and Disenchament’s Crossover

As Katz detailed about blending Futurama and Disenchantment together, the team had a much larger crew to help with Disenchantment‘s much more detailed backgrounds, “They’re basically feature worthy backgrounds, which we sort of found out the hard way when we first got the footage back,” The producer explained that Futurama‘s characters “almost looked like color forms on the backgrounds because they were so gorgeous and ornate, and match characters are basically pretty graphic styled.” Thus the team had to devise a new way to blend it all better.

Needing to work within the already set budget and schedule for Futurama Season 14, the teams had to come up with certain “rules” for its production such as only using backgrounds that they already had, figure out the kind of lighting for the medieval setting and more. As Katz joked, “There’s a lot more candles in a medieval fantasy than there are in the year 3000, it turns out.” Cohen and Katz explained how it was also a big goal for Groening and Disenchantment head writer Josh Weinstein for Bean, Elfo, and Luci to have a special reunion moment.

“The three main characters of Disenchantment ended up in these disparate locations and stuff at the end of the series, and we want to give them one last hug. So that was a big goal,” Cohen explained. They also had fun using the voice actors shared between the two series like Billy West, which led to the moment between the Professor and Sorcerio, and ultimately they’re hoping that fans will enjoy all of the effort that went into it. You can now check out Futurama and Disenchantment‘s crossover episode together with the rest of Futurama Season 14 now streaming with Hulu.

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