Wired 7.02: One-Eyed Aliens! Suicide Booths! Mom's Old-Fashioned Robot Oil!

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20081004174227/http://www.wired.com:80/wired/archive/7.02/futurama_pr.html

Matt Groening, the brains behind The Simpsons and Fox's new sci-fi series Futurama, is a mainstream subversive and businessman extraordinaire. Groening (rhymes with "braining") was, unlike Bart, a good student (he was elected student body president of his Portland, Oregon, high school), before going on to counterculture cartooning and the transformative creation of a show that warps the minds of kids all over the planet.

Groening's gently perverse, sometimes savagely satirical take on the world allows him to have his career both ways. He gets paid a lot of money to mock the establishment, which he used to do for free. He keeps on penning the comic Life in Hell for alternative weeklies, as he has for the past

15 years, while enjoying a happy middle age (45) and family life (he and his wife have two young boys). His untamed sense of humor reveals a frank genius for skewing orthodoxy.

But The Simpsons' irreverence and even Groening himself have now become part of the mainstream - D'oh! - and profitable brands. As he reluctantly admits, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is his "boss," broadcasting The Simpsons to 70 countries worldwide. Groening's wildly successful corporate franchise rakes in millions a year in books, T-shirts, figurines, and other Simpsons paraphernalia. And each Simpsons episode is a major production, employing 50 musicians, 60 production crew and actors, 100 animators in the US, and 300 more in Korea. (These days, other people write and produce the scripts, though Groening remains involved in shaping and tweaking them.)

Success notwithstanding, he keeps pushing one message: "The authorities don't have your best interests at heart."

In Futurama, a midseason replacement slated to début this spring, Groening transports his message a millennium into the future, to the new New York of the year 3000. Slyly piercing the hype and optimism that surround new technology, the show is populated by 20th-century celebrity talking heads in jars, narcotic soft drinks, while-you-sleep advertising, one-eyed she-aliens, jet-powered scooters, beer-drinking robots, and a corrupt megacorporation run by a despotic mom.

Though he draws his newspaper cartoons by hand with a simple pen, Groening's animated extravaganza about the future uses computer animation and the latest software. Like the rest of us, he's both fascinated and anxious about the fast-forward, high tech, tool-laden world we're making - a keen ambivalence that makes Futurama a signature Groening paradoxarama.

Matt Groening: It's about a pizza delivery boy named Fry who, on New Year's Eve 1999, gets inadvertently frozen in a cryogenics lab and wakes up 1,000 years later. The themes: If you are a loser, is it possible to reinvent yourself? How do you deal with the desire for youth, for the return of dead loved ones, and what does it mean to be finite in the universe? Boy, is this too pretentious or what?

We have upped the ante for anybody who does the future - ours takes place after yours. It also gives us an opportunity to justify any gadget we want.

Faster-than-light travel - which right now we are calling the "convenience drive."

As a kid I saw the 1956 movie version of 1984 on TV. I kept watching this horrible Big Brother dystopia and waiting for the space patrol to rescue everybody. But the space patrol never came! I realized then, as disturbing as it was, that there were really fun possibilities in science fiction.

The genre seems to have more respect now - for some it's even become a kind of religion.

Science fiction for the most part operates on a New Age military motif: If we can just follow orders from our benevolent captain then we can defeat the outside evil and everything will be great. Right? I am trying to do something a little bit different from Star Trek and Star Wars. I imagine a corporate, commercial, confusing world where the military is just as stupid as it is currently.

Our big earthly villain is Mom. Mom runs MomCorp. She is this very scrawny elderly woman who wears a fat suit to make her look more lovable and she is beloved all across the world. She is very rich from manufacturing Mom's Old-Fashioned Robot Oil.

Traditionally, science fiction goes for a sense of wonder with exotic aliens and nifty rocket ships and dastardly villains. We'll have those too - we have death rays and hideous mutants, cyborgs and bug-eyed monsters. And we have robots who want to kill all humans.

But we'll also use these conventions to comment on the absurdity of real life - and science fiction itself, but without being campy. The whole idea is to make an epic that both honors and satirizes the conventions of science fiction.

One of the lead characters, Bender, seems like a recurring type, the neurotic robot.

He is beyond neurotic. He is totally corrupt. He shoplifts. He thrives on the things that harm humans. He actually gets energy from smoking cigars and drinking beer. Bender also gets us around censor problems - he can't be a bad role model for kids, because he is just a robot.

The future is always presented as monolithic - people all dressed in the same spandex. I think it will have far more variety than the present. In the future everything is under construction. There are a lot of loose wires sticking out of walls.

The Simpsons are still on the air in the year 3000. Many of our favorite celebrities are still around - they are just disembodied heads in jars. In the very first episode, our hero Fry hides out at in a head museum where he stumbles upon Leonard Nimoy's head in a jar. So he holds up his fingers and says, "Hey, Spock, do the thing!" And Leonard Nimoy's head says, "I don't do that anymore."

I grew up reading tons and tons of science fiction magazines and books, everything from Isaac Asimov to Philip K. Dick. I recently decided to reacquaint myself, and while I liked a lot of them, their time has passed. I mean, a lot of the books took place in 1994!

Every one of them has been off. No one predicts the mundane. The idea that in the future you would go to a store and pick up movies to watch by looking at empty boxes on a shelf was something no science fiction writer predicted.

Yes, many visionaries predicted something like TV but no one foresaw deodorant commercials.

Right! In Futurama our characters are thoroughly inundated by advertising, especially subliminal advertising that comes out of your pillow into your dreams. We also have tons of vending machines, including a suicide booth. That really disturbed Fox. "You said this was going to be very positive," they said, "so why are people killing themselves?"

Nope, out of business. All gone. Intel gone. Pepsi gone. By the way, if a sponsor wants to pay us enough money, they can still be around.

Well, all these gadgets look great but they don't really work right. People have jet packs, but for some reason they get to work in a transparent elevated pneumatic tube that you literally zoom through. At the end of the tube, you come shooting out and smash into a wall. I don't know why people keep taking it.

When I first read 1984 as a kid I found it very creepy and nightmarish. I just reread it last year and was surprised at how mild it was. Reality has gotten pretty bad.

People's attention spans are shorter. Having so much instantaneous choice - just a remote control with the television - makes the overwhelming message of the medium simply that "nothing matters." Whatever it is, it is going to be replaced by something else in another 30 seconds.

On the other hand, I think these Crash Bandicoot games for the Sony PlayStation are fantastic. So many videogames are just mirthless clobbering, but Crash Bandicoot has the feel of an old cartoon.

I don't agree. The Internet, email, and the Web have revived writing - there are many more people writing more stuff and writing it better than there were 10 or 15 years ago.

Most TV is pretty stupid. Growing up, I thought, if I could only get my hands on a TV show, I'd do something fast and funny. The Simpsons was my first experiment and it worked. It annoys the hell out of some critics because we're saying the authorities don't have your best interests at heart.

I still am - I have been doing Life in Hell in alternative papers every week for 15 years!

I've never placed a priority on reaching huge amounts of people. My goal has always been to try to make the audience that likes what I do really like what I do, and hope that big numbers will follow. Also, the comic is just me, unlike the huge group that works on animation. I draw it alone and it goes out and they either run it or they don't and they almost always run it.

Definitely. We created a character named Cubert who will anticipate fan complaints about the show's inconsistencies, and then will address them within the show. One of the fun things about doing science fiction is that it has this built-in responsive culture.

We have what we call freeze-frame moments - there are a series of alien alphabets you can find, and we'll also provide the keys to figure them out. We'll see what the cryptographers out there can do.

The weird intensity of fans is fascinating. We succeed when we give them something worthy of their devotion. This is going to sound totally corny, but the idea is to honor fans for their enthusiasm, rather than just manipulate them into buying more products. Obviously, Futurama, like The Simpsons, is a commercial enterprise so that is part of it. But, for instance, both Star Trek and the Grateful Dead found ways to broaden fans' activity. Audiences expand the mythologies of a creator's world.

They also sometimes hijack the characters. As a kind of counterculture guy, what do you think of other people's use of your creations?

Personally, I don't have a problem with it. This is part of the price of being successful and being part of the culture. I love it when there is a crude painting of Bart in the window of a bakery in East Los Angeles. I love the dreadlocked Bart Marleys. Unfortunately, because of the nature of our world, artists are required to vigorously defend their copyright or they lose it. I don't care if some kids appropriate my stuff for their Web site, or some fraternity guys make a bootleg Bart T-shirt. But when people are making millions and millions of dollars just ripping you off, then legally you have to go after them. I have been accused of being a big bad guy because Fox has come down heavily on people. All I can say is, I don't own the copyright on The Simpsons - Fox does.

This is a confusing area. Bart has been appropriated to promote the vegetarian cause, which I have sympathy for, as well as neo-Nazi skinhead stuff, which I don't. While I am delighted that so many people feel Bart is speaking for to them, I am not happy about the Nazi stuff.

Again, it is an issue of my personal mark being used to say things I would never say. There is an essay on the differences between men and women attributed to me that keeps showing up all over the place on the Net. It is mildly funny, but the humor is sexist, and I think anyone who knows me would know that I didn't write it. But not everybody knows me.

I once created a font in my handwriting for The Simpsons. Somebody did a bootleg version, so now I see my handwriting on T-shirts, album covers, billboards, all over the place. I never thought when I created it in 1987 that 10 years later I could drive down the street and see a bad version of my own handwriting being used to advertise a Mexican radio station.

Absolutely! There are weekly fan-written Simpsons scripts posted on the Internet. I can't read them - I will be accused later on down the line of having stolen somebody's idea. But I love the idea of it.

As a teenager I was a huge admirer of Frank Zappa, who didn't allow any element of music culture to get beyond him. He made the connection between '50s doo-wop and Igor Stravinsky. Since I liked Stravinsky and greasy rock and roll, this appealed to me. I like mixing it up.

Growing up I was a huge admirer of Walt Disney, P. T. Barnum, and Hugh Hefner. I got in trouble in grade school because I had a biography of Hefner. I read somewhere that the Playboy mansion in Chicago went 24 hours a day, which meant he could stay up as long as he wanted. I liked P. T. Barnum because I loved the idea of owning a museum of oddities. And of course Walt Disney created Disneyland.

Yes, it was Disneyland in particular. My great unfulfilled ambition - to do my own amusement park - is really why I am doing Futurama. I'm not kidding. If this show takes off, I'm going to do an amusement park.

These days I am a huge fan of Lynda Barry. We both do weekly comic strips but went in completely different directions. She thinks I am insane for having gone to Hollywood, and she is probably right. She lives a very comfortable life writing fiction and drawing her comic strip. Some days I think, "Man, I could have done that!"

I'm fascinated by Iron Chef, a Japanese cooking show that's sort of American Gladiators meets Julia Child. I like the utter humiliation the chefs suffer. The judges sip the soups or whatever the chefs have made, then render their merciless verdicts.

I watched the trailer for the Star Wars prequel. I was surprised by how much bodily excitement I felt. My calculating commercial brain says that it is going to be the biggest moneymaking film of all time.

A little. I spend maybe a half-hour with my laptop on my stomach in bed while watching TV.

A few years ago I decided I would acquaint myself with the literature of the 20th century - in chronological order. I read Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, Love and Mr. Lewisham by H. G. Wells ... I soon realized that at the rate I was reading I was going to fall further and further behind in the 21st century.

I am fascinated by the alternative comics scene - one of the great countercultures still going. As we race along trying to get to the future as fast as possible, here is a very old-fashioned art form - there is no drum machine, there is none of that slick, anonymous feel that goes on in cartoons. If you read a newspaper, comics are little windows of reality, of human expression, surrounded by vast columns of gray lines.

If I were not making up my own stories I would have a great time being an audience.

For most creative people, being full-time appreciators of other artists cuts down on the amount of work they produce. I'm not afraid my habits may reduce the amount of work I produce. I just love weird stuff. I was once a rock critic, and now I only buy stuff you can't hear on the radio. I seek personal expression.

I find that whole world very dull. I can't get interested in anything involving economics. But don't get me wrong - I am a commercial artist. As much as I love the Simpsons show, I also love those Simpsons figurines. To me the figurines are part of the creative product. OK, I'm not that proud of the Simpsons asthma inhalers, but that comes with the territory.

I've learned that it is very frustrating to give money to political candidates who lose. They use the money to buy misleading ads, so all you do is throw away your money on a system you despise. The solicitations are endless. And during the Gulf War there was incredible pressure to get Bart on board to support the troops. Some town in the Midwest even sent me a proposal for a statue with Bart putting one foot on top of Saddam Hussein's head. They wanted me to contribute money. It was like, what the hell?

If God punished you and you awoke to find yourself the next president of the US, what would your first act be? I'm assuming you would be a benevolent dictator.

I don't have a funny answer to that: It would have to be campaign finance reform. I think it is a real detriment to democracy.

I wish I could have done it faster. At the start, Fox was desperate for programming so they took a chance on something very unlikely, risky, and controversial. An animated cartoon for adults on prime-time TV? They were not even sure we could sustain an audience's attention for a half hour and considered making it three short cartoons.

The expectations are higher. The Simpsons has been so phenomenally successful that it's hard to believe I can knock it out of the park a second time.

You have two young kids. Are you having to work hard to impress them with Futurama?

They have given me all sorts of advice. I asked my son, What is the military salute in the future? Without hesitation he showed me: In quick succession, pound your heart, pound your forehead, and then do sort of a half Sieg heil salute. And I said, Yep, that's it. And so it is.

I used to be amused by how pervasive advertising was in our society. But seeing ads on the little divider bars on the conveyer belts at grocery store checkouts made me think, That's enough. I read Future Shock in the early '70s and said, Future shock will never happen to me. It has. At least in regard to advertising.

I don't know. All I know is that there's too much exhaust that comes out of technology and there's too few frogs.

No - I don't want anything to get beyond me. I try to listen to a bit of obnoxious hip hop now and then, to sampling and b-boxes and all the rest. Just a little, because a little goes a long way.

I have so many other ideas. I want to do my version of an animated rock-and-roll show.

In Futurama, they are able to test you and find out what you would be best at in life. If you take a test at age three, they will find out that, yes, you should be a doctor or a delivery boy or whatever. They are accurate. But that doesn't necessarily coincide with what is in your heart. Our main characters - Bender and Fry and the others - are all outcasts who want to go against their programming, whether or not they will be successful. For instance, Bender, whose whole name is Bender Unit 22, because he is programmed to bend girders, really wants to be a cook. That is his goal in life. But he doesn't have taste buds. So it is absurd. Yet I think that is the secret - doing what you want rather than what you are told.

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