Transcript:Commentary:I, Roommate


 * Note: One question mark in bold (?) means that the speaker was not identified by the transcriber.
 * Note: Three question marks (???) means that the word in proximity to the question marks is a suggested word, but not necessarily correctly identified, or if there is no word near the question mark (a space away is not near), then no suggested word was provided.

Matt Groening: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another audio commentary of Futurama. This is Matt Groening. Eric Horsted: I am Eric Horsted, writer and co-executive producer. Billy West: This is Billy West, I do some of the voices on Futurama. Bret Haaland: I'm Bret Haaland, a director. Gregg Vanzo: I'm Gregg Vanzo, supervising director. David X. Cohen: David Cohen, executive producer. Rich Moore: And Rich Moore, supervising director with Gregg. GV: Yeahp. MG: This is the third episode in the series. And this is the series that– had a trouble beginning– with the Fox Network, who felt that the show was too outrageous and too much out of space. This was our attempt, the third episode, to bring the show back to Earth. <!-- well, finish the rest later... ?:

-DXC Bachelor Chow, Matt. One of your earliest ideas for the show, I believe.

-MG Well, I think that's a good idea-- I always wanted to have Bachelor Chow right now and so-- this was-- Anyway, the network really-- really was freaked out by the show, the suicide booths-- and lobster creatures and Bender being so anti-social and so-- yeah, this was our show to tone things down. This script was written specifically to their specifications. And their reaction, David?

-DXC "Worst. Episode. Ever."

-MG Yeah, they really-- they really hated this script, and -- sorry, Eric -- and this was the point at which, we decided we wanted to the show that we wanted to do. Their notes made no sense anyway, they're completely contradictory. And so-- we did what we wanted.

-DXC Every lot of people say that they like this episode, 'cause it is a little more down to Earth than-- it made people care a little more and think about the characters and Fry and Bender.

-EH Yeah, have to admit, it was one of my favourite episodes. I like that.

-GV? I basically had fun drawing Fry's butt.

-RM? We all do.

-DXC So, Billy West, you're talking to yourself in this scene as Fry and the professor. Where did these voices come from?

-BW Well, you guys showed me the drawings originally, the moncal??? sheet of each character and he was like-- you could tell he was dortery??? and ricklidy and I even acting him that way, and he's got a little Wizard of Oz in him and little this or that. When you fuss them...

-DXC When we are in the studio, you do sort of take on the characteristics -- physically -- of the voice you're doing.

-BW I don't know if that's the way to do things, but I have always thrown myself - like totally - into it.

-DXC Why aren't you answering my questions in the voices of the characters?

-BW Can I do it again? [Professor voice] Well, the professor sounds like this. It is all ridicty and he has a race of superhumans. [normal] And Fry--

-? Too late; too late.

-BW Yeah, okay.

-DXC We all know what he sounds like!

-BH This is the first episode we get to see Calculon. Yeah, that's pretty exciting.

-EH Television history was made.

-DXC That's Maurice LaMarche as Calculon. He is always really funny, whenever he goes into that role.

-BW He's one of the greats, though.

-BH? I-- I had a rather perculiar perspective on this setup, I was trying to get a little bit of depth. And this one worked out a little better.

-BH In these early episodes, we are all trying to nail the characters as best as we can. Particually Leela.

-DXC Yeah, I can see she has changed a little bit since that picture.

-BW That Fry voice is 25-year old me. [laughter] No, I mean it really-- pretty much what I sounded like, I think, back then.

-DXC That line, I remember, the stood??? viewer may have noticed that Hermes' lips were not moving at all there. I remember, "this seems kind of quiet", we wanted him to say something, but we had already exhausted our animation budget, so we just said, "yeah, whatever".

-GV He was gonna notice.

-BH This was a very difficult sequence to draw, because of the rotating beverages and the number of martini glasses and the cutting and the--

-GV And it comes in many other shows later on too.

-DXC And you mean, by number of martini glasses that made it difficult, you mean the number that was on your desk, when you--

[laughter]

-BW? There are-- are subminial things you put in a scene like this or am I imaging things?

-? Oh, no, no.

-BW? This wasn't one of them.

-? Too many late hours to have any extra time...

-? Clever.

-EH It's a good looking cake.

-BW I have to say Bender is the greatest character, to me he was like the breakout character, because he was-- he could get away with doing all the stuff that you are not supposed to see on TV, because he's a robot. Smoking and drinking, deportoury???.

-DXC I'm not gonna go into the formal to this question, but the nerdiest computery viewers might wanna look up Bender's apartment number in the ASCII-chart. That's right, you heard me.

-BH This was probably the best shot to describe how small Bender's apartment was-- the arial downshot.

-MG You know, it's really hard in animation to do a confined space, and this-- that's really good.

-DXC First use of "kill all humans", perhaps?

-EH And not the last.

-DXC This conversation always sticks in my mind as one of the most memorable early sequences.

-EH Little neuances, little body language. Details.

-? On the studio, we called that snappy wizzling.

-? Yeah, but how's able to wizzle?

-? Is there like a wizzle-chip in there or somewhere?

-RM? This is some of the early drawings of the Planet Express ship, we didn't have any 3D to work off, so we-- we faked a lot of this.

-DXC You're gonna redo it though, right?

-RM? Yes, sir. Gotta sizzle??? will never be--

-MG Things I like about this is the story telling is a little more linear than on The Simpsons, and I think we decided to do that early on, because the setting is so fantastic, and-- science-fictiony, that-- we really tried to tell a story straight through, and I think it really helped the show's lifespan.

-BH Oh, this is a bad drawing. [laughter] There isn't enough distractions, you know, to keep you away from noticing.

-EH Fry's stomach!

-BH Yeah, exactly.

-EH Do we see more of Fry's stomach in this show than other?

-BH Watch Fry's belly grow throughout this episode.

-EH And look at that, Billy West's sticking out, also.

-BW Is the residence guy John DiMaggio too?

-DXC Yeah, that's John DiMaggio.

-BW And he's also the voice of Bender?

-DXC Yeah, the "apartment man" here, actually.

-BW He does a great slob, you know.

-? Yeah, I've seen it!

-? This is my favourite background coming up.

-? Wow...

-DXC Inspired by?

-? Escher.

-? Escher!

-? M.C. Escher.

-? Or "Esc-key" as we call him.

[New Jersey]

-? Woah-

-EH Never prouder.

-DXC The New Jersey bashing begins, resuming in episode 9, probably a few other ones here and there. Episode 8, also. I think we were the first to come up with the idea with bashing New Jersey, right?

-? Yeah, absolutely.

-EH I love Hattie, she's a great character.

-BW Oh, Tress MacNeille, yeah.

-? With the lazy eye.

-? That cast??? on her face.

-? Even her clevage line is rinkly.

-? Nice touch with the music.

-RM Earlier, that was little musical interlude that sounded retro-y like on Bewitched or one of those shows.

-DXC Christpher Tyng, our composter, really-- has come up with a lot of great music for the series.

-MG Can I admit something? I have never seen The Odd Couple. Really, I haven't.

-DXC You haven't? Then we also made up that cigar joke that you're seeing.

-MG No, I noticed that everybody was houling and laughing at the animatic, so I assumed that this was a dead on parody.

-? Well, not exactly.

-DXC Who was it-- I remember someone being very upset that that nice chair was getting squashed. Does anyone remember who that was? One of the designers, I think.

-? Tom Gammel???.

-DXC Oh Tom Gammel???, one of the writers. So he appreciated furniture, he really didn't like seeing it crushed like that.

-? Noo--

-? I don't understand, it's a nice chair. Come on!

-? They're beautiful drawn.

-? Perfectly good chair!

-? Well, by that logic...

-? ??? things doesn't make sense.

-EH I notice Fry is fairly thin there, he'll get quite a bit thicker later on.

-? Oh yeah.

-? Oh the early days.

-DXC There is an image that's kind of vivid in my mind.

-? We pull strains on that, because we wanted really fast and voilent.

-DXC Zavulon is a reference to my college roommate, Zef. How's it going, Zef?

-? Okay, Fry's belly is a little bigger.

-? In one night...

-DXC The viewer gets a lot of chances to figure out what's going on in this sequences going...

-? Bummer...

-DXC One little goof we made, is involving Lobröw beer, because when Fry first got frozen, in 1999, he had a Lobröw beer in his hand, but when he woke up, he has often subsequenctly seen drinking Lobröw beer. I guess might not be a mistake, it just survived for a thousand years. One of the carefully planned things in the series was the success of Lobröw beer.

-? The recipe has been in our family for several generations.

-MG ??? kept saying in an interview, that the audience loves a slow thinker.

-? And it applies to almost everybody in the scene.

[phone]

-DXC That's great.

-? My favourite line right there.

-DXC So, Eric Holsted, you should this script to a bounce of school children the other day - this is true-- this is true - as a little inspirational talk how you can get a carreer writing. How did this "ass" part go over?

-EH It actually hasn't happened yet. Happening on Friday.

-DXC How do you invision it will go over?

-EH I think there will be lots of giggling and appreciation of the fine archievement in writing that's occured her.

-BW What style of animation is this? I know that there are tradiontal like cell drawing, handpainted stuff.

-? Aoh, well.

-GV Does anyone know?

-BW This is like a different-- this is like a departure from all that stuff, isn't it?

-GV Well, yeah, do hand drawing, and then there is digital painting in this show, as oppossed to The Simpsons.

-BW Yeah, that's what I meant like handpainted cells and that, but those have been pretty much replaced?

-BH Ah, yeah, pretty much. It's almost the same process, but it's all digital now, also.

-DXC So the initial drawings are by hand, but the colouring by computer? That's a good summary?

-BH Yeah, exactly. There you go.

-GV And then we have the additional of the all the 3D elements, that we do there. The more realistic elements, which are not in this show too much, though. Another episode.

-BH This is one of the-- earlier jackets that Leela had, I think all tend to favour her pilot jacket a little more, in a later episodes.

-? The ??? are a little petty coded.

-DXC The shadow there. How comes the light in front of him, and the shadow in front of him?

-BW That's the future for you. Could have been a brighter ball behind him somewhere.

-DXC This was tricky, I remember. Show these microscopic things, and thank God for Bender's focus out eyes.

-? This is just difficult to pull out for drunk Bender.

-DXC It's easy for us to write "five o'clock rust" in the script. It's easier than for you to draw.

-? We actually broke a rule here, as we actually never supposed to bend Bender's neck. But it looked kinda funny and sad and pathetic, so we did it anyway.

-BW It looks funny. I think we should abolish that rule.

-DXC What's he getting at?

-EH The joke behind that is...

-? Originally, we had a little tick in Bender's eye, but that was too distracting. So we cut it.

-? I love the sound effects on that fast running.

-BW This always sticks in my mind, it's like the Lost Weekend with Ray MaLand???.

-? Public library, that's great.

-BW That 3 o'clock in the morning lounge music...

-MG Did people get that owls are nuissiances in the future? We laid that in enough?

-DXC We started out laying it a lot, but...

-? Actually, I met someone about a week ago, who was really into that.

-MG Really?

-? Very excited about that.

-DXC Excellent.

-MG That rats are gone, but owls are everywhere.

-? Owls are now the new pest.

-BW Well, then the new owls ate Fry's popery??? in his new digs in New New York?

-DXC Did that make it on the air? I don't think it made it on the air. I think we had to cut that for time.

-BW Wow, I remember reading it... how much time do you cut of a-- an episode sometime?

-? Often, entire sections.

-BW Stuff that's been animated?

-? Entire painful sections...

-DXC We-- as part of our deal with Rough Draft - Rought Draft people can correct me if I don't have it quite right, but I believe we get to get two minutes of animation beyond what will fit on TV. Is that right?

-GV Right, just about two minutes.

-DXC That's how much we cut out. However, we don't cut out two full minutes of stuff, for we will take out a little pause here and there or pull someone's dialogue over an exterior shot of the house. So, for example, we saw their house, then we cut inside and they started talking. Some times we will start over the exterior, that kind of thing to save time. We don't usually, *really* cut two full minutes out.

-? And there is also entire speeding up of scenes or sections of the show.

-DXC Yes, in emergency, we have the computer technology to actually speed up whole sections of the show. Very rarely used actually on this show. Simpsons uses it a little more.

A painful thought is that for syndication, you have to cut out another minute or two. A lot of these stories are pretty complicated and gonna be very hard to edit down. We'll just apply the computer speed up though.

-? Or don't syndicate it.

-DXC What would Billy-- Billy, what would the professor sound like if we spedt him up 50% or so?

-BW Well, it depends on how you do it, if you use the eletronic gadget, you can have it in real time and the voice doesn't speed up.

-DXC I suppose we use the Billy West gadget.

-? ... comedy ??? who do the voicing.

-BW I am being difficult!

-DXC I know.

-BW [spedt up professor voice] Good news, everyone.

-MG So basically, what we are saying is that if you are watching this in syndication, you are not getting the whole thing. We recommend buying this DVD. Thank you.

-? Tell your friends, tell all your freinds.

-? If you have stolen the DVD, go back to the store and give them the money.

-DXC I love the pose how he's holding that.

-RM Little ??? pose.

-? That was a great gag.

-DXC How close have we stuck with that design for their apartment? Have new doors and things appeared?

-? Ah, they come and go. As we need them.

-? Flexiable floor plan.

-? Everybody sing.

-BW This is the part that's always in a half-inch by half-inch on your screen-- in the corner of your TV screen.

-? I can read it!

-DXC This is the main thing you get when you buy the DVD.

-BW I know people who wait till the end of the show and they get a magnifying glass right near the TV set, and all they want to read is who did what.

-MG Animators?

-DXC Take that, animators!

-? We suck... -->