Futurama: Bender’s Big Score, Part 2

In part one of our interview with executive producer David X. Cohen, David told us about the demise of the animated scifi series Futurama and its return as the straight-to-DVD, full-length movie Futurama: Bender's Big Score. Today, David reveals plans for Futurama beyond Bender's Big Score as well some insight into his own gaming habits…

Gamesville: Are there additional straight-to-DVD movies planned for Futurama?
David X. Cohen: Yes, there are four original movies in this second installment of the show.

Can you tell us anything about the other three movies?
Bender's Big Score ends on a little bit of a cliffhanger, which isn't necessarily something new for us. Previously, we would end shows on cliffhangers and not go back to resolve them because it was part of the joke and everything would return to status quo in the next show. Not this time. The second movie, which is tentatively titled "The Beast With a Billion Backs", will pick up roughly where we leave off in Bender's Big Score and will guest star David Cross as this planet-sized monster from another universe who has a simultaneous love affair with every living being in our universe. It's a very touching, inter-universal love story. Brittany Murphy and Stephen Hawking (in his second appearance on Futurama) are also in there.

The third movie is our real first heavy foray into Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy which is something we haven't really done before. The fourth movie is an epic scifi story about this titanic struggle between two mighty powers, with our loyal crew caught squarely in the middle.

Will the four movies eventually air on television?
Down the line, yes. The movies will only be available on DVD for a good while, then down the line each DVD will be divided into a set of four episodes each, to air on Comedy Central.

Will there be substantive content differences between the DVD releases and the television episodes?
There is some content on the DVD that you won't see if you're watching the shows on television; there are also several minutes of treats on the episodes that aren't on the DVDs. This is our way of saying thank you to everyone who watches, no matter how they watch.

Do you play games?
I have a one-year-old, so I used to play a lot more games than I do now. Of course, if you go old school, I spent the eighties in the arcades and I do believe that I may be the world's champion at Qix. I mean, it's conceivable, anyway.

Any closing thoughts?
First, I want to thank Adult Swim because Futurama has been airing on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim for five years now, and they deserve a lot of credit for promoting the show and keeping it on consistently. Adult Swim brought us a tremendous amount of fans who just could never find the show when it aired on Fox because we were bounced around so much.

Second, I want to recognize Comedy Central for giving us a huge show of support by agreeing to air the new episodes in primetime again… which, if you think about it, is an amazing circle. Usually, people aren't so happy to travel in a circle and come back around again, but in this case that's a lot better than taking a long straight trip into the grave.

Third and finally, if this second installment of Futurama really is the last thing we ever do with Futurama, we're ending it in a way so that we and the fans are satisfied, just like we did last time around with the final episode of the television series on Fox. Come to think of it, writing our final episode is something we're getting good at. Hopefully we can carry on that tradition with a third installment of Futurama, based on how well these four movies do. With luck, Futurama will continue on, in some form, for a long time to come.