Futurama Season 14 has come to an end, and the producers behind it all opened up about having to release yet another series finale and more coming in the future. Futurama is one of the most unique adult animated series of the 2000s as it has not only survived multiple cancellations across multiple networks, but it is also a series that has had to end its story multiple times as well. Because while it’s always been cut short, Futurama’s creative team have found ways to say goodbye to their characters each time.
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With Futurama Season 14 being the final full season of the animated series with Hulu (for now), ComicBook got the chance to speak with executive producers David X. Cohen and Claudia Katz about having to craft yet another series finale, the show’s renewal with Hulu for three more specials, and some of the season’s biggest developments. Read on below for our interview (which has been edited for length and clarity).
Futurama Had to Do Another Series Finale
NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK: Futurama’s finale is called “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion,” and I love its almost flippant tone. I don’t think that’s the right word, but it kind of felt like, “Oh, you want an ending, so does everybody.” That’s only something that a show like yours could experience after having so many finales. So what was the approach going into this one and needing to end the show again?
DAVID X. COHEN: I can tell you a little bit about just the whole philosophy of that episode going into it because it’s an idea I’ve actually thought about…kind of a scientific idea about the endings of stories. And so it’s a bit self-referential, but I believe that human beings actually did evolve over hundreds of thousands or millions of years to need to know the end of a story. Just to give you an example, you picture humans have just gained the ability to make sounds and someone can convey information and they say, “If you go over that hill…” Then it’s like if you have the instinct to want to know the end of that sentence, you probably have a better chance of surviving because it might be you’re going to find a pile of delicious fruit or it might be you’re going to get eaten by a bear.
It’s like the need to hear the end of a story I think could give you a survival advantage. So this episode explores how people want to know the end of the story. The basic heart of it is that Fry has this movie he snuck into as a kid, PG-13 when he wasn’t 13, he never got to see the end of it, and the movie may not exist anymore in the future. So there’s sort of this epic adventure to find the end of that movie that leads to a lot of other stories that we also want to know the end of. So it’s ending about endings.
Teasing Futurama’s New Hulu Specials
I love it especially because you get so many opportunities to play around with everybody as sort of a potential goodbye, but thankfully it’s not. It was renewed. So I wanted to ask you two about the decision to see it renewed with new specials rather than a full season?
CLAUDIA KATZ: My optimistic spin on it is I think that Futurama is an excellent IP for movies. I think just the strength of our characters, the concept, everything else and just the fact that we can go anywhere, meet anyone, do anything and just explore all these both real and fantastical things. I’ll just say it is much more conducive than The Simpsons where you’re stuck in a much more finite universe without really either using flashbacks or flash forwards. I think in that regard, they’re really interesting and exciting to us.
When we did those DVD movies…I will forever thank David and the writers for figuring out how to tackle doing movies that had to live as episodes that had to then live as commercial break acts, I think that was a real mathematical storytelling conundrum. So the really nice thing of these is they live as specials. They are not designed to ever be divorced from each other and shown separately. That part is really exciting and interesting to us. I think David and our great writing team, and Matt, often write episodes that could be features.
COHEN: We think of individual episodes as movies, basically. It’s like if we were going to do a movie, this would be the plot and we’re going to use our characters to do it and we have 22 minutes to do it. So it’s actually a bit of a relief sometimes to be able to try a new format and say, let’s expand upon this and do something we couldn’t do in 22 minutes. So I think it’ll be a treat for everybody.
KATZ: Would we prefer getting a 20 episode order to that? I mean, I would probably be disingenuous if I said no. But I think it is an exciting, really interesting, and challenging format. We love a challenge, and we’re in process on the first two. I’ll let David speak to it more, but I think they’re going really well. I think they are working well and playing well, so hopefully fans will really love them.
COHEN: The first one’s a big holiday epic movie for holidays of 2027, and it involves a big Bender romance with a snowman. You’ll believe it when you see it. Fry’s childhood hopes and dreams for X-Mas, and us as sort of an emotional way of dealing with the character who Coolio played, and dealing with the real life tragedy that he passed away. Giving that Kwanzaa Bot character a farewell.
Are these specials going to be feature length like the DVD ones?
KATZ: They’re 66 minutes. We’re called them “Triple Extra Large.” They’re XXXL specials, and I would say they’re probably shy of a conventional animated movie. Which is good because maybe that leaves room for us to do a real animated production.
COHEN: Another way to look at it is basically it’s about the same amount of material as a season and we’re presenting it in a different way. I think it could be quite exciting.
I do have to dig into a little bit of the nerdy stuff because I know Futurama fans will ask about certain things in particular. One of the theories that had been going around for years, and then finally got kind of touched on in this season, was “The Other.” That one line forever ago has grown into something huge, and Leela was revealed to be “The Other,” but now there’s another “Other.”
COHEN: It kind of started as a joke on our end, but if you’re excited about that, get ready for the third and final of the three specials that we’re now working on because that is going to really embrace that. So we’re not done with that.
Biggest Reveals in Futurama Season 14
That’s so great to hear! Another big one is that Marianne made her return to the series this season. She was a cool addition during the Comedy Central era as Zoidberg’s love interest, but then fans were like “Where did she go?” How did you figure out how to bring her back to the series and explain where she’s been without going the traditional “She dumped Zoidberg” route?
COHEN: It’s a difficult character to keep around all the time because Zoidberg becomes sort of a winner when she’s around. So yeah, we have to deal with it delicately. I’m going to credit my wife. My wife said, “What if she’s been off studying?” So that’s just a thin excuse we use to say why she hasn’t been there, but actually that was my wife’s idea. Then the episode where she comes in, which involves this alien corpse flower and a lot of stuff about botany…you have to take my word for it, but I found it to be, in my mind…it’s one of the most beautiful episodes of the entire run of the series, both visually and emotionally.
I think in our minds now Marianne has become associated with these surprisingly emotional episodes where you’re like, “This is going in a goofy way,” and then at the end you got a tear in your eye. I think that’s a great use for her.
KATZ: It also is so redeeming of Zoidberg because you realize he’s been supporting her. It gives him this great emotional depth we haven’t really always seen. So I love that part as well.
COHEN: By the way, that episode, even though that is a big thrust of it, it also has a beautiful story with Hermes and his dad and their relationship. So it’s got two quite emotional stories in it.
Figuring Out the Futurama and Disenchantment Crossover
I do have to ask about the big event this season as well with the Disenchantment crossover. It’s cool to see Futurama returning the favor that The Simpsons paid for it forever ago to bring Disenchantment back in this way. How did you all figure out how to work in Disenchantment after its own finale, but then making sure it still felt like a Futurama episode?
COHEN: Matt Groening obviously pushed quite hard and he made this happen, which wasn’t easy because one show was on Netflix and one’s on Hulu. It required cooperation, which we’re very grateful that we got from Disney and Netflix to put them together. Once we had that, as you were just saying, my concern as just overseeing the meshing of the two is it has to be a Futurama episode still. I think 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.
I think it felt much more natural than other animation crossovers have in the past. And they’re both Matt Groening’s drawing style. Having said that, we tried to make it feel like an adventure that the Futurama characters, that Fry particularly, were having in a new place. Then there were a lot of hurdles to overcome to do that, which I will let Claudia speak to.
KATZ: David, you had a great point also, which is Fry is eternally a fish out of water. That’s how he started in the series. He is literally a man who starts out of time, so him going there is really not so unique for him. I think Matt has actually wanted to do this for a long time, and I think it came up even a season or two before. It took so long to get all the approvals and work everything out that we squeezed it in the second to last episode of this past season. From an animation and technical standpoint, Disenchantment, it’s Matt’s style of characters, but even that was 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. Just the background style of Disenchantment is so much more elaborate than anything we do on Futurama. We had just a much larger and different crew to do all that. I mean, they’re basically feature worthy backgrounds, which we sort of found out the hard way when we first got the footage back, our characters almost looked like color forms on the backgrounds because they were so gorgeous, ornate and Matt’s characters are basically pretty graphic styled.
We actually had to devise a way because we couldn’t afford to have our overseas animators add shadows and highlights and tones to everything. So we devised a way to do that here through the compositing we do, and again, had a much bigger crew. So when it came up, I was like, “Oh boy, how are we going to do this?” And so David was very collaborative about going like, “Okay, what are the rules? Because we need to make this happen.” The unfortunate rule was like, “We’re not going to give you any more money.” Not from David, but that’s the rule of all TV production, always. Which was fair because the budget was already set.
We had to figure out how to pull this off on the same schedule and budget we normally have. Luckily [Digital eMation] is one of our overseas partners, and was able to really step in and do some of the heavy lifting we usually do here in terms of lighting. The other rule, which was pretty complicated, was you guys can only use existing backgrounds that we had. And so I would say for 98% of it, the director, Andrew Hahn and a team here at Rough Draft went through and found BG plates to reuse and make us able to pull this off.
I’m really happy with how it came out, and I think the fans are going to love it. It’s also a very sweet episode. I think since it unites our Disenchantment trio of Bean, Elfo and Luci, fans are just going to be excited about that.
COHEN: Yeah, that was a big goal of Matt. Josh Weinstein, who was the head writer of Disenchantment, wrote this episode. And a big goal for them was both the three main characters of Disenchantment ended up in these disparate locations and stuff at the end of the series. We wanted to give them one last hug. So that was a big goal.
KATZ: Which we did, so I think people will be pleased, we hope. It turned out being a great storytelling adventure.
COHEN: A lot of our Futurama cast played all of the side characters on Disenchantment as well, so that was a convenience and point of interest. Having Billy West as the Professor and Sorcerio talking to each other was kind of a fun thing for us to do internally.
Futurama Season 14 is now streaming on Hulu. What are you hoping to see from Futurama’s future specials? Let us know all of your thoughts in the comments!
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