Posted on March 21, 2025

Sitcom Toons, part 3: Futurama

After all the shows I’ve worked on, I can still count the number I was watching as a fan before being invited to contribute. That number is one. That show was Futurama.

I initially gave it a pass when it debuted in 1999 since I was no longer watching The Simpsons then, and this seemed like more Simpsons. But as time went on and the buzz picked up, I bought the season 1 DVD set. That did it. Hooked. I was sad to see it go after season 4 in 2003, but grateful for so many episodes of a smart, multi-layered animated SF comedy. Apparently, it was too smart for TV executives, so I was certain we would never see its like again.

Then, one day in 2007, my phone rang. On the other end was my friend Stephen Sandoval. I first bumped into him as a fellow artist in anime fandom about twenty years earlier, then we bumped again when he joined the party at Xiaolin Showdown season 2 in 2005. He asked me if I was available to draw storyboards for episodes of…Futurama.

“That’s impossible,” I said, “because Futurama was cancelled.”

“Not any more.”

You could have floored me with a butterfly wing at that moment. Yes, it had been cancelled from TV, but it was now coming back on DVD. In the anime world, this was called an OVA (Original Video Animation), a format that was born in late 1983 when home video became widespread enough to support new productions. Thanks to a deal with Comedy Central, Futurama was now breathing that rarified air and they were planning not just one, but FOUR direct-to-video features.

Each would run the length of four TV episodes (about 84 minutes), structured so that it could be split up into four TV-length shows if a broadcast ever became possible again. Stephen was serving as a storyboard artist on the first one, and recommended me to his director, Dwayne Carey-Hill. Dwayne liked the cut of my jib, and in short order I was freelancing on a TV show I would have happily watched on my own.

I’ve written it before, but it bears repeating; this is an extremely rare situation in the TV cartoon biz. The number of cartoons we choose to watch fits into a narrow window of available time, personal interest, and too much experience in the sausage factory. By percentage, the number of American-made cartoons that have fit into my personal window is vanishingly small. Futurama just happened to be one of them.

What happens when we apply to work on cartoons that we’d never choose to watch? Not much, actually. A producer doesn’t need you to love the product, they just need you to be good at your job. And part of being good at your job is giving it your best effort whether you love it or not. It can be a nice bonus if you come in as a fan, but in some cases it can make a producer hesitant. If you’re too close to whatever that thing is (let’s use Star Trek as a random example), your fandom could potentially make you inflexible. And the last thing anyone needs is an argument about some obscure gimcrack getting in the way of a deadline.

Short version: those of us in animation spend most of our careers working on stuff we don’t love, and probably wouldn’t watch. So when a Futurama comes along, you grab it with all available hands and teeth. That’s what I did.

The studio was Rough Draft, which had been making the show since the beginning and is still making it today. (I just learned that Season 12 is streaming, so now I have more to look forward to.) In 2007 they were located behind an art gallery or something in the LA-adjacent city of Glendale. You’d walk through the front of the building to a production suite in the back, then descend into a basement dungeon where all the artists were sequestered, drawing away, surrounded by their personal brickabrack. It was very cozy and inviting, and you could feel in your bones that everyone was exactly where they wanted to be.

Dwayne introduced me to the first of the four features, which was titled Bender’s Big Score. Evil nudist aliens send Bender on a rampage through time, forcing him to steal all of Earth’s priceless treasures while avoiding rampant time paradoxes that inevitably catch up with everyone. I was given a hunk of script for “Episode 2” and a HUGE pile of model sheets for reference (it was still the days of paper), and sent on my merry way.

I remember finding the work easy to draw, but challenging to perform. The animation is limited (like it is in most sitcom toons), so most of the time, characters remain still and the performance is in their gestures and expressions. I’d done it before, but every production has its own visual language, so there’s always some trial and error.

I must have made it through OK, because the next thing I knew the other director (Peter Avanzino) was tapping me on the shoulder to work on the second feature, titled The Beast With a Billion Backs. This time, Fry is dealing with heartbreak which then expands to include everyone on Earth when a planet-sized being from another universe wants to get all up in their business.

For Beast, I was lucky enough to work on two of the four episodes. And then, unfortunately, my Futurama tenure was over. Rough Draft had all the hands they needed to continue from there, and I went on to other shows at Warner Brothers. I wish I could share with you the storyboards I drew, but my request for copies went unfulfilled. And this is where I can tell you what specific thing made Futurama different from all the other shows I worked on.

The usual process when you draw a storyboard is roughs, revisions, and cleanup. When the cleanup is approved, you add dialogue and scene descriptions for each panel. Scene descriptions support what you see in the art. It’s a form of technical writing that makes heavy use of film language. It can be extremely tedious, but it’s a necessary function in communicating the intent of a scene.

Simple example of scene descriptions (from another show)

On Futurama, I was told not to add scene descriptions. Instead, a production assistant would do it. The thought of that made me nervous, because unless they were siphoning info out of my brain, they may not know precisely what I intended. But this was a whole different animal. Rather than writing words to support the pictures, they had to physically cut up a paper copy of the script and physically paste the text onto the storyboards. In other words, the pictures were supporting the words. The writers wanted to see their exact words on the page to make sure the artists were drawing exactly what they wrote.

That explanation was kind of mind-blowing. It created a lot of extra labor and implied a lack of trust. It also implied a chilling effect on creativity. I get that they wanted to protect the writing, but you can do that without crushing the life out of the art. There was some room for improv, but it was limited to the gestures and expressions. I did invent one gag, where Zoidberg sneezed and his tendril-nose flew off. It landed on a table, paused, then ran back up and reattached itself. Another way to show how creepy he is. The director left it in the board to see if it would fly, but the writers nixed it. So you didn’t get to see that. I wonder how many other things you didn’t get to see.

From a purely technical standpoint, even if you do draw exactly what’s in a script, there’s no way the text in that script is going to provide all the information an animator needs. Futurama deals with that by adding a step between storyboards and animation called layout. It’s a slightly rougher version of key animation in which some frames are drawn at full size to maintain quality control and give the animators a head start. If not for that, they’d be taking a huge risk in sending out a storyboard with incomplete scene descriptions.

I know, this is insider talk, but it’s an element of preproduction that gets zero press because it’s not much fun. I always take it very seriously as a director, and have made it one of my specialties. I’ve taught classes in it. It works as an insurance policy to get what you want out of an animation studio. Most of them are in Korea, and most of the animators don’t speak English. Everything we write gets translated for them, so it’s vital to keep it accurate and concise. For this reason, I always volunteer to take full control of the process when I sign on to a show. It pre-solves many, many problems for everyone downstream.

I could go on, but I kinda doubt it’s the sort of info you were looking for here. So I’ll get back to the topic. Bender’s Big Score was released on DVD November 27, 2007 and aired on Comedy Central the following March. The Beast With a Billion Backs came out June 24, 2008 and aired the following October. When Futurama was renewed again, the four direct-to-video movies came to be known as Season 5. In the time since then, Hulu scrambled the episodes a bit and Season 5 become Season 6. But it’s all still available. (And to be clear, I’d work on Futurama again in a heartbeat if the opportunity arose.)

Where to find the episodes

Because of the text-pasting process I described above, I didn’t get an archival copy of any of my storyboards, but was amazed to see that one of my scenes ended up as a deleted scene in the DVD bonus features for Beast. If you happen to have this one, you can see it under the heading “Amy, Fry, and Leela.” So if you want to know what my Futurama storyboards actually looked like, there they are.

As for my other scenes, here’s how you can find them…

Directed by Dwayne Carey-Hill
I was one of seven board artists
Won the 2007 Annie Award for Best Home Entertainment Production

Trailer | Wikipedia page | IMDb page | Fandom Wiki

MY SCENES FROM EPISODE 2

Opening line: “Stand back, you wing-wangs!”

Despite warnings from Professor Farnsworth, alien criminal Nudar leaps into a time sphere and meets himself the day before. Right on cue, the warning catches up with him and a time paradox kills his other self.

Closing line: “Someone get a mop.”

Hermes laments that he’s now a bodiless head, then laments how quickly his wife paired up with Barbados Slim.

Opening line: “Be honest, does my eye look monstery?” Fry is irritated as Leela pretties herself up for a date.

Nudar and his minions order Bender to seize a case being held by Farnsworth. Closing line: “Bender knows when to use finesse.”

Directed by Peter Avanzino
I was one of six board artists
Won the 2008 Annie Award for Best Home Entertainment Production

Trailer | Wikipedia page | IMDb page | Fandom Wiki

MY SCENES FROM EPISODE 2

Opening line: “I can’t remember anything except a blinding light and a searing ass pain.”

It’s Bender in the hospital after trying to breach a dimensional rip into another universe. TV’s Calculon shows up to fake sympathy to work off a legal charge against him.

Bender decides to become a Calculon stalker. His first outing is to join the paparazzi to spy on Calculon’s plastic surgery.

Worried about the severity of the dimensional rip, Farnsworth swallows his pride and asks his rival Wernstrom for help. They start with an experiment to prove that robots can’t pass through the rip. “Playtime IS fun!”

Calculon agrees to recognize Bender as his number one fan and stalker.

MY SCENES FROM EPISODE 4

Fry leaves Earth to meet up with Yivo, the planet-sized creature in the other dimension, where robots cannot go. Bender, now running the League of Robots, decides to retaliate by raising “a damned army.”

Bender strikes a deal with Robot Satan. In return, he has to give up his first born. Which he does without a second thought.

Earth has decided to break up with Yivo, and sends an envoy to take care of the awkward part. Before Fry can break the news, Yivo offers up a gigantic engagement ring.

Closing line (Zapp Branigan): “Sweet Sally in the alley!”

All living beings on Earth ascend on heavenly escalators to shack up with Yivo.

Closing line (old hag): “This place makes Nutly look like crap.”

Fry is the last human left to take the ride, and he offers a touching goodbye to Bender.

Closing line (Bender, sad): “Death to humans…”

Now living on Yivo’s giant body, Leela is the last one to drop her skepticism…just in time for the planet to be attacked by Bender’s “damned army.” And that was the end for me!

More links: Futurama Wikipedia page | Season 5 Wikipedia page