Posts with tag david x cohen
Posted Mar 21st 2008 10:25AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: TV on DVD, Futurama
As the first
Futurama straight-to-DVD movie,
Bender's Big Score, begins airing on Comedy Central (they'll air the movie as a four-episode blok on Sunday night), Fox has announced the name and release date of the second straight-to-DVD epic.
AnimationMagazine.net reports that
Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs will be released on June 24, and they note that Fox calls it "the most tentacle-packed
Futurama epic." Since it's a continuation of
Bender's Big Score, I'll talk about the plot of the new movie after the jump, for the benefit of those who haven't seen the first movie yet.
Continue reading New Futurama movie coming to DVD in June
Posted Nov 26th 2007 11:01AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: TV on DVD, Interviews, Futurama
On November 27,
Futurama comes back in a big way with
Bender's Big Score, an "epic" film involving all the characters from the show that ran on Fox from 1999-2003. The DVD is the first in a series of four direct-to-DVD releases, which will be edited into 16 episodes that will air on Comedy Central in 2008. Fellow Squadder Brad Trechak
gave the disc a positive review last week, which is high praise coming from a big fan of the show as he is.
David X. Cohen, executive producer and show-runner of
Futurama, spoke to me via phone last week. We didn't have much time, only about ten minutes or so, so we got down to the nuts and bolts: how the movies will play on Comedy Central, some information on the show's comeback, a quick preview of the next DVD, and how the Fox executives felt about being ground into all-purpose powder.
Continue reading David X. Cohen of Futurama: The TV Squad Interview
Posted Jun 18th 2006 8:19PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: Other Comedy Shows, TV on DVD, OpEd, Animation, Retro Squad, Futurama
(S01E03) So, now we've seen how Fry gets to the year 3000, and we've met the Planet Express crew. Now's the time to tell some stories.
There were a bunch of interesting tidbits from the DVD commentary to this episode. One was the admission from Matt Groening that the storytelling in
Futurama was more linear than it was on his other show,
The Simpsons, mostly due to the fact that there's so much going on in the background of a typical
Futurama epsiode. Well, with all due respect to Groening's genius, duh. I've always equated the storytelling on
Futurama to what the early years of
The Simpsons were like before the pop-culture asides and other wackiness started to dominate. This episode, where Fry and Bender become rommates, is a perfect example of the show's storytelling prowess; an episode like this would have been told completely differently on
The Simpsons, or at least on the show from it's third season onward.
Continue reading Futurama: I, Roommate
Posted Jun 15th 2006 11:15AM by Joel Keller
Filed under: FOX, Talent, Industry, Animation, Adult Swim, Interviews, Celebrities, The Daily Best, Retro Squad, Futurama
If you've watched any cartoon on TV in the last fifteen years, chances are you've heard
Billy West's voice. West is one of the premier voice actors working today, and during those fifteen years, he's used his versatile voice to create new characters -- and resuurect old ones -- all over the television and movie landscape. From Shaggy to Bugs Bunny to Woody Woodpecker to the Cherios Honey Bee to the Red M&M, the 54-year old West has put his imprint on all of them. But most people know him from two classic cartoon series: On
Ren & Stmpy, he did the voices of both main characters (he picked up Ren after creator John Kricfalusi was fired after the first season), and on
Futurama he did the voices of Philip Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Dr. John Zoidberg, and Zapp Brannigan, among others.
In this wide-ranging interview, conducted by phone on May 31, Billy and I talked about his history with John K., the way he went about creating some of his
Futurama characters, his early-'90s role on "The Howard Stern Show", and the influx of celebrity voices in current cartoon movies (let's just say he's against it). We also went over all the
Futurama Season One episodes in the 90-minute (!) interview, which you will see in my
Retro Squad coverage of the show. He was even nice enough to do a
Futurama / R&S -themed intro for our APB podcast, which we used
to open podcast #13 last week. Needless to say, Billy West is a mensch.
Continue reading Billy West: The TV Squad Interview
Posted Jan 5th 2006 10:33AM by Anna Johns
Filed under: FOX, Animation
Last
month,
Joel reported on an article
in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald which suggested that
Futurama may be making a return to television. This
morning, America's own
Variety magazine is reporting similar news. Although FOX refuses to confirm the report,
Variety says that strong DVD sales and high ratings for
Futurama reruns have led FOX executives to
reconsider their 2003 cancellation of the animated program.
Variety says that creator Matt Groening and writer
David X. Cohen are in negotiations with FOX to revive
Futurama for television. In that article last month,
Groening and Cohen both said that they hoped to be in a similar situation to
Family Guy, which was cancelled
by FOX but then brought back to life when DVD sales reached the fourth-highest ever for a television show.
Futurama had five seasons and three emmys.
What do you think? Would you like
Futurama to
return to weekly television? And then there's always that rumor about a
Futurama movie...
Posted Dec 20th 2005 3:55PM by Joel Keller
Filed under: FOX, Talent, Programming, OpEd, Animation
I've always noticed that other countries seem to
appreciate Matt Groening's humor more than we do here. Sure,
The Simpsons is a long-running hit here, and has
a huge fan base, but it seems like it's damn near
revered in England, for instance, to the point where you
hear more Brits quoting Homer Simpson than quote Monty Python. So it's no surprise to see that Australia's
The
Syndey Morning Herald has the scoop about a
possible return of Groening's other great series,
Futurama. According to Groening and writer David X.
Cohen, DVD sales of old episodes and the return of
Family Guy under similar circumstances has bouyed their
hopes that the show will return soon.
"Three months ago, I would have said we were going to start
tomorrow," says Cohen in the article. "And one month ago I would also have said we were going to start
tomorrow. So... my current estimate is that we're starting tomorrow."
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