Commentary:Xmas Story

Topics of Discussion

 * When Conan O'Brien left The Simpsons, David immediately took his desk and started working there. O'Brien left a note for whoever would take the office informing them among other things that the window was sticky, where the garbage was and which corner of the office to urinate in.
 * Animation of heads in jars is harder if, like O'Brien, they stick out of the jar slightly.
 * Matt says that Bender falling off the cliff and through the ice is one of the best moments in Futurama.
 * The skating kids are a homage to Peanuts, and are all dead now.
 * The snow and rain in Futurama, according to Cohen, is better than any other show, including live action shows.
 * The medal Farnsworth won is a bronze. It was decided that a gold would be too far fetched.
 * A commentator's mother, a teacher, only ever commented on one thing in the series the use of "aks"
 * In early production they considered regular use of updated words such as "aks" and "li-bary".
 * The scenes around the Xmas tree were written to be in the lounge, but they decided it would work better in the bigger room in which the Smell-o-scope is kept.
 * Unlike The Simpsons, female characters are used for slapstick comedy.
 * This episode's plot was one of the earliest developed, with the gist of it worked out before the pilot's
 * It is incredibly difficult to storyboard movement of characters and the camera in a round room.
 * Humans have designed and built robots that serve no purpose or endanger them, such as homeless robots, Santa and the Robot Mafia.
 * However this can be explained by the robots building themselves
 * The Store Clerk was last seen in A Fishful of Dollars.
 * Bongo from Life in Hell appears
 * Frank Welker is the parrot, it took a lot of work to make it more and more annoying as the episode progressed.
 * Hermes' chair was designed so that his butt would hang out of it.
 * Clock tower is based on the film Safety Last, The New Yorker then stole the joke from them.
 * Voice of Santa was John Goodman here but later became John DiMaggio
 * Episode was controversial, and the network forbid them from airing the subsequent Xmas episode at 7pm.
 * The show was never intended to be aired at 7pm.
 * The the clock at the end is set to be the time at which the episode was to air.
 * the "trash pickup" line was re-written about 10 times.

Highlights / Quotes

 * Matt Groening: I'm Matt Groening. I hung around a little bit.
 * Bill Odenkirk: It's only marginally more difficult to get a live head to live in a jar, than to animate it.
 * Unknown: I always love doing Bender dancing, it always comes with a really good song.

Goofs

 * Cohen mistakes "A Fishful of Dollars" for episode 104, whereas it was actually 106

Commentators

 * Matt Groening
 * Executive Producer
 * David X. Cohen
 * Writer
 * Executive Producer
 * Rich Moore
 * Supervising Director
 * Peter Avanzino
 * Director
 * Paul Calder
 * Editor
 * Bill Odenkirk
 * Producer
 * John DiMaggio
 * Actor (Bender, miscellaneous)