Commentary:Rebirth

Topics of Discussion

 * Billy West voiced the fly that gets burned in Farnsworth's experiment.
 * The episode starts off where Into the Wild Green Yonder ends, but when they wrote it, they didn't know whether or not the series would continue. They therefore left it very open-ended.
 * This is the third Futurama premiere episode after "Space Pilot 3000" (the pilot episode) and Bender's Big Score (the first of the movies).
 * David X. Cohen mentions that there was a hiatus of TV episodes of seven years between when the shows stopped airing on Fox, and when it started again on Comedy Central. While he hadn't researched it beforehand, he said that that might be a record for a TV show.
 * The crew thanks Cartoon Network and Adult Swim for airing reruns of the show during the hiatus, and Comedy Central for helping revive it.
 * David X. Cohen discusses his and Matt Groening's original idea for the return, in which the crew would appear in another universe, or a distant part of our universe, as a result of passing through the wormhole. Read more about this here.
 * This is Frank Marino's first Futurama episode as a director.
 * Many fans on the Internet said that the new episodes included a lot more nudity than previously. Matt Groening points out that he thinks the amount of nudity is about the same, but it just happened to be that the first two episodes of season 6 ("Rebirth" and "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela") were the two with the most nudity.
 * Claudia Katz points out that nudity is funny.
 * The episode contains a lot of storytelling for just 21 minutes.
 * It is pointed out that while the thing that helps telling Leela and Robot Leela apart is that Leela has a Wristlojackimator while Robot Leela has a bandage, there is one scene when they are mixed up.
 * It was difficult to constantly find a new way in which Bender could dance, and not have it be too distracting.
 * They discuss disturbing sound effects, like the ones when Fry hit Leela with a bat when she won't wake up.
 * John DiMaggio discusses how he beat-boxes as Bender, and in his private life with a folk band called.
 * The Cyclophage is in 2D when hanging on the Planet Express ship, which is 3D.
 * The scene with Fry having to decide which Leela to shoot, is inspired by a scene from the original Star Trek in which two Kirks fight, and Spock has to decide which one to shoot.
 * David X. Cohen mentions that some may wonder how Bender was saved by stem cells, and jokingly says that Matt Groening can answer that question. Groening claims that he never even thought of that.
 * Bender's skeleton, as seen above the birthing machine, is inconsistent with how it has appeared before - it's different every time. They were consisted with Kif, however, as it has previously been established that he didn't have bones.
 * In most storyboards of the episode, they didn't deal with how Zapp made it, but Matt eventually had them came up with the ending joke that dealt with this.
 * The robot versions of Fry and Leela originally kissed, but this was cut for time.
 * The whole monster was a pretty late input, and the first version of the script didn't have it at all.
 * Matt Groening points out that it's kind of a stretch that Bender survives the explosion. David X. Cohen comes with an explanation include the elastic properties of monster necks.