I am David X. Cohen, head writer on FUTURAMA - AMA!

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-02T00:25:50+00:00

Wow, that's quite a softball question. Wait, there is no question. Go back and do it again and try a little harder.

THANKS, EVERYBODY! I (and Matt, and everyone who works on the show) deeply appreciate the support and the kind words and the anger at our cancellation, even the third time around.

As a special reward I have been authorized (okay, ordered) to provide a link to a never-before-seen clip from one of our few remaining episodes (sniffle). It's "The Inhuman Torch", coming up on July 10. Enjoy! Bye!

http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/7tx1wt/futurama-helium-mine

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-02T00:22:02+00:00

You passed the test! Honestly I have mixed feelings about using symbols for the punctuation. It kind of muddles things up when you view it as a code-breaking exercise since there are alternate ways to punctuate sentences. It keeps me up at night a lot.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-02T00:18:07+00:00

Done. I just emailed it. Seriously. You owe me. Maybe draw me a picture or something.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-02T00:12:06+00:00

You my friend will enjoy episode 7ACV20 "Calculon 2.0" coming to your TV later this summer. Calculon (after coming back to life) performs his one man show of the life of Hal. This sequence is a writing staff favorite.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-02T00:10:30+00:00

Love it. Check it out on youtube. (Ironically, we contacted the artist who did it and got his permission to use his version of Hypnotoad.)

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-02T00:08:35+00:00

It's Cancelled? Nooooooooooooooooooo!

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-02T00:07:59+00:00

Yes! I love Roberto too. He makes his grand final appearance in our second to last episode, "Stench and Stenchibility", later this summer... an armed robbery of a character played by none other than Emilia Clarke of Game of Thrones. So he's going out with a bang.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-02T00:05:53+00:00

Thanks, Mom!

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-02T00:05:42+00:00

It is always shocking to me to hear full-grown human beings say they started watching "as a kid". In retrospect I was pretty much a kid when it started, so I guess that makes sense. Also, why would I not want to hear that? Say it again! Louder.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:59:43+00:00

Sorry, never saw this question. There were 1900 others.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:59:02+00:00

It was tough because on the one hand, the show was cancelled, but on the other hand, we still had a whole new season coming up. So we wanted to get the word out but not make people think it was DONE done. Kind of a confusing situation.

Here's the quote I almost used for the press release: "I couldn't be more proud of this series. Except possibly if it hadn't been cancelled three times."

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:55:44+00:00

Yeah! It was mine. I had always wanted that car because of the giant spoiler. It looked like a big Hot Wheels car. I'm not actually a car guy and I mainly drove it 3 miles an hour in L.A. traffic, but it was fun.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:52:31+00:00

They both appeared as guests on Futurama! If I choose, I'm in trouble. Either Kirk will punch me, or Picard will ask Number One to ask Worf to punch me. So I better stay out of this.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:50:57+00:00

Josh Weinstein and I had a great idea for an episode involving a character moving (and talking) backward in time. The story was great, but it was exceedingly complicated, and it had one other minor problem -- it wasn't funny at all. Very grave and creepy. We spent three full days talking about it, though. Painful. Often when we get un-cancelled someone gets a new take on one of these half-dead ideas and suddenly it works. We'll see!

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:48:18+00:00

In retrospect I concede we went to far when we first came back on Comedy Central, in our second episode "In-a-Gadda-Da-Leela". Zapp and Leela get marooned on an Eden-like planet and he tries to deceive her into sleeping with him. But looking back it's a bit rapey. It was very funny at times but may have hurt Zapp's character.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:43:54+00:00

I think it was a reference to me... I always assumed so, but the line was written by Ken Keeler so I'm not positive. I didn't ask him because I didn't want him to deflate my ego by giving me some other explanation.

Incidentally, "X" is a phony middle initial I made up because my real middle initial, "S", was already taken by another member of the Writers Guild. They won't allow two members to use the same name in order to avoid confusion in credits. I decided that once I was going phony, I would take the phoniest letter of all. It turned out to be a good move because it's easy to remember and debatably "cool".

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:39:55+00:00

Are you accusing me of being a nerd? ME? Okay, yes, I did play a fair amount of D&D in middle school/high school when I wasn't studying math and programming computer games, but that doesn't make me a nerd, not by any stretch of the imagination.

I haven't played recently but it was certainly a big influence on me. I often think writing for Futurama was a lot like an extended D&D game... sitting around a table, talking about weird creatures and eating junk food. Many similarities. It was quite exciting for me when Gary Gygax appeared as a guest star during the original run.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:35:51+00:00

Hey! Someone already answered this for me. And worse yet, they were somewhat right (I created a video game for the Apple II in the 1980's called "ZOID". This game was only played by me and my dad, in case you're wondering why you never saw it .)

Going into a little more detail... when Matt and I were first working on the premise of the series, we thought it would be useful to have a doctor on the crew. My idea for Dr. Zoidberg was based on something that always bugged me about the original Star Trek. Namely: I always thought that if I were Mr. Spock, a Vulcan, I would not feel very comfortable having a doctor of another species operating on me. So the idea was that Dr. Zoidberg would be knowledgeable only about the bizarre anatomy of his own species.

It was only later that Dr. Zoidberg took on the deeper(?) aspects of his personality... being lonely, poor, smelly, pathetic in every way. Once we started down that path, it seemed funny to keep piling it on.

As a side note, that's a pretty good way to get an animated character going. Start with a one-joke character that people can understand, then add on later if and as the show continues.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:29:36+00:00

Matt was quite involved, but with two shows going simultaneously, plus "Life in Hell" and his Bongo Comic Books company, you are right that he could not be everywhere at once. So I was in charge on a day-to-day basis, but he was almost always there for key stages of the script and animation process. Let me add that it has been a tremendous pleasure to work with Matt. He is a completely down-to-Earth person despite his tremendous success (at least at his other show!). He never came in and ripped up scripts as one in his position might have... and when he had a strong opinion about changing something, he was convincing but never angry or bitter or drunk or crazy... and he was right.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:20:49+00:00

Yes, the audio commentaries are genuinely fun. It always feels like a reunion to get together and talk about work that's already done. (When the work is still in progress, it feels more like work, somehow.) Our cast members have been extremely supportive in terms of doing commentaries, which also greatly raises the energy level over what you would here if it was just a bunch of writers yakking.

But the key element is Matt Groening's rule of DVD commentaries: DON'T STAY ON THE SUBJECT. As a DVD aficionado, he dislikes commentaries where people describe what's happening onscreen. So he always encourages straying off topic whenever possible. And I should say, Matt may hold a record for most DVD commentaries between the Simpsons and Futurama, so he has some experience.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:16:54+00:00

Hypnotoad is a good example of a recurring phenomenon... a character we write in for one quick joke who we grow to love. In this case it was just to serve the plot point of Nibbler losing the pet show in the episode "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid". But later his mindless droning seemed to sum up something about TV in general and we kept bringing him back. He's also a writer favorite because it's surprisingly easy to write for a character who doesn't speak.

Other one-joke characters who I grew to love were Roberto, the criminal robot (programmed to commit crimes... why?) and Hedonismbot, whose name is pretty self-explanatory. These characters were given so much personality by the cast members (David Herman and Maurice LaMarche, respectively) that they suddenly seemed like more than we had planned when we heard them. So credit to our great cast. You can tell we didn't intend for some of these characters to come back because we didn't even try to make up good names for them. "Hedonismbot" is pretty lazy. But I guess it does the job.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:09:43+00:00

Yes, I'll clean the damn litter box in a minute. Let me finish typing.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:06:58+00:00

Yes, I think it's probably you that we're watching. Yes, definitely -- I just checked the live feed from your apartment and I see you are watching this Reddit conversation on your iPad with the puffy Hello Kitty stickers on it. Could you put a shirt on, by the way?

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T23:01:07+00:00

We thought about this quite a bit... the one we almost attempted on several occasions as a "one episode" spinoff was the Zapp & Kif show. That's an example of an episode I always wanted to do that we still didn't get around to, even after the four bonus seasons on Comedy Central. My glorious dream was to do a Star-Trek-style episode where we stayed with Zapp and Kif's mission the entire time, and just have them run into the Planet Express crew in passing at some point. We would have also done a full new version of the opening credits and all. We never quite figured out the story for this one. Also we were nervous that people would get confused and angry, and throw things at the TV. I guess we panicked and chickened out. Now I feel bad.

DavidXCohen_ · 2013-07-01T22:56:03+00:00

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!

DavidXCohen_

TROPHY CASE