Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1493292
D E PA R T M E N T 29 KEYFRAME BACK TO THE FUTURE Futurama When last we checked in on the crew of the Planet Express intergalactic delivery company, main characters Fry and Leela agreed to let Professor Farnsworth repair a button that causes time to jump back- ward. The button, when activated, will restore the frozen universe of Futurama. Over two million households watched that final episode in September of 2013. A full decade later, with that button pushed, Matt Groening's game-changing sci-fi series will return on Hulu. Creatives on this revival are cagey with details to prevent spoilers, but they note that Futurama's future will most likely look both bright and retro. Back in 1999 when the series premiered, they ref- erenced the look of the 1930s and '40s and consulted reams of magazines and art and architecture books in search of inspiration. Classic films like Metropolis and Invention for Destruction generated visual ideas, along with the comic sensi- bilities of Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges, and Buster Keaton. "Matt Groening had all of these New York architecture books and books with cool water towers," recalls Director Crystal Chesney-Thompson, who worked on the original series and is working on the reboot. This contributed to a library to refer to for inspiration for the original retro-futuristic look. Back at the dawn of the new millenni- um, the technology available to Fry, Leela, and the crew would seem positively quaint today: items like video screens that pop out of devices that resemble fax machines. But guess what? Those same devices will be back. "We'll still use that model," says Chesney-Thompson. "It's sort of the futur- istic charm of the series that we've jumped thousands of years into the future, but there's still this quirky stuff that we can relate to and go, 'I remember those kinds of phones with the cords.'" Animation techniques have also evolved since the dawn of Futurama. The blending of hand-drawn animation with CG images for elements such as the Planet Express ship was a creative mountain to scale when the show was in its infancy. Pre-digital crowd shots were laborious. Chesney-Thompson recalls the days of drawing a row of people, duplicating the process, and shrinking everything down to fit on a single page. Crew members collected the unused paper crowd shots and taped them together into a ball which was tossed around the cubicles. The ball, which is stashed somewhere in Chesney- Thompson's garage, eventually grew to about the size of a basketball. If you are picking up on the irony of primitive animation techniques being used to create a show that is all about the future, you're not alone. At the same time, given its satiric bent, that doesn't much matter. A show that can wring humor out of robosexual marriage— the controversial union of robots and humans—as it did in the "Proposition Infinity" episode, can get away with not having the most cutting-edge alien. "At its core, we draw comedy from social and political commentary," says Chesney-Thompson. "So you can take anything that is funny, whether it's back in 1999 or today, and then tell it on this sci-fi stage." "It's sort of the futuristic charm of the series that we've jumped thousands of years into the future, but there's still this quirky stuff that we can relate to…" — Crystal Chesney-Thompson Fan favorites will make a comeback when Futurama reboots. Futurama ™ and © 20th Television. SPRING 2023 29