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GOING ON A 'BENDER' WITH DAVID X. COHEN
| | 'Futurama's' co-creator talks about the show's newest DVD movie, 'Bender's Game'
| | | By Justin Aclin | | Posted 10/31/2008 | |  | |  David X. Cohen is a geek for all seasons. Not only is the former "Simpsons" writer and co-creator (with Matt Groening) of the cult classic series "Futurama" a huge sci-fi fan, not only does he have a degree in physics, but he also spent many of his formative years playing Dungeons & Dragons. Which explains a lot of the sword and sorcery content (not to mention prevalence of 12-sided die) in the latest direct-to-DVD "Futurama" movie, "Bender's Game" available on DVD and Blu-Ray on Tuesday, November 4th.
Cohen spoke to Wizard Universe about the film's origin, and why fans won't see a medieval version of Elzar. | |  WIZARDUNIVERSE: You're a big Dungeons & Dragons fan. Is it heartening to you to think that people will still be playing Dungeons & Dragons in a thousand years?
DAVID X. COHEN: They will now, yeah. With this model of behavior to look at for the next thousand years, they'll know what they're supposed to be doing.
Several of us did play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons when we were kids, and it certainly had a big influence on me and I'm sure [writer] Eric Kaplan and some of the other original writers from the series. And I think it's still unique, even today. It almost stands out more today as a really interesting way to design a game, because more than ever now we're used to looking at video. Games are now almost movies, and you're involved to some degree or another with a character in the movie. But Dungeons & Dragons just forced you to use your mind to imagine things and, if you are the Dungeon Master, to actually create things, which is basically like writing an episode of "Futurama."
You create a world and populate it and ideally have a good story and a back-story to go with it. I think it's a great thing for kids to be doing, now that I'm a parent of a two-year-old and picturing what she may be up to when she's 14, whenever I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. I'd just as soon have her be sitting around the dining room with her friends making up crazy monsters.
That seems like a pretty good activity now more than ever with all the things kids could be doing.
There are really two distinct parts to "Bender's Game"—the sword and sorcery stuff, as well as a plot involving Professor Farnsworth and the Planet Express crew trying to break Mom's iron grip on Dark Matter fuel. How did the two halves of the story come together?
COHEN: It was fairly complicated. We knew we wanted to do the swords and sorcery part, the medieval part, and that that should be the visual theme of the third [DVD film]. We wanted to see all the characters in their medieval and fantastical forms. But we did not want to do a full hour and a half of that. We felt like it would get repetitive, and we didn't want our take on it to be as long as a real "Lord Of The Rings" movie or something like that [Laughs]. Part of the parody nature of it is to move things along at a quicker pace, and so once it bogs down to the level of detail of the original, people have to keep track of where every army is, and I think it would not have worked well.
So, we wanted to find a way to get into [the Medieval stuff] that would be fun and just mix it up a little bit, and that's how the fuel crisis was born. Because at the time we started discussing the story, which would have been two years ago, you can look at a graph of gas prices and figure it out, but somewhere back around then fuel prices had taken a big jump up. We thought, "This is in the news a lot, we have our Dark Matter in the future. It's a very mysterious substance, and it has this parallel to oil, and it may have other powers that could help us get into our main story." So we decided to roll with that.
In the meantime, during the production process, the actual price of gas dropped sharply. We were kind of stuck with this theme of gas is very expensive. We thought "Uh-oh. It kind of makes sense in its own right, but people won't get the reference to reality anymore." But then luckily for our DVD, but not for anyone else anywhere in the country, gas prices rocketed up much higher. Once again the DVD makes sense. So the collapsing the economy saved the day for the currentness of the DVD.
There's a fairly major revelation in "Bender's Game" that I won't spoil here involving certain relationships between characters. When we spoke last year you mentioned there were some continuity bits in the DVD movies that you had in mind for a while. Is that one of them?
COHEN: That was something that we've been always wanting to unload. That was planned more than a decade ago, at this point. And we'd never gotten around to it.
Was there medieval stuff that you guys came up with that you couldn't fit in? Like there are other characters that got medieval forms?
COHEN: Overall, yes. We certainly did not get to see all of our characters in medieval form. It was basically, again, a matter of complexity. The story is somewhat complex already. There are a couple of different groups of characters off doing different things, as is standard in these fantasy stories. And then we used the side characters to populate the world. But at some point I think the epic quality of it starts to fade if every five seconds it's like, "Oh here's what Elzar the chef looks like medieval form." There's again a balance to be struck, because you want people to actually get wrapped up in that story rather than to make it, "Oh, it's a parade of characters and what would they look like."
So there's this visual quality to it and it's really cool to see the characters, but part of the thing we've discovered all along in the course of production of "Futurama," especially in these DVDs which we want to have a more epic feel, is we really need people to get swept up in the actual story and the epic sci-fi and fantasy stuff that's going on on-screen. We've always found that the more people buy into that story and the more of a real and clever sci-fi story it is, the more the humor of the characters and their emotions seems to play well. Once people accept that these are real characters in this real situation, no matter how crazy, then they buy into their emotions and their personality quirks and everything like that. But if it's more of a parade of jokes, we've found that people forget what's going on, and none of it seems to play as well.
So I think when it works well there's a really good dramatic sci-fi story going on, and a clever sci-fi story if we did our job. And it's funny. So again it's a trade off, but we figured, okay, we'll get as many characters as we can into this story in their medieval form, but try to keep people in that world and not keep reminding them, "Oh that's so-and-so from the real world." We didn't want people to pop back and forth too often between worlds. In other words, we want them to be in that medieval world and buying it once we're there.
Bender goes through a lot in the course of "Bender's Game," I think it's safe to say. By the end of it, is he a changed robot, or is he back to his usual self?
COHEN: [Laughs] Bender doesn't change. That's the crux of Bender, you can't teach Bender a lesson. Bender does what Bender wants to do. Except, of course, if he has a malfunction or a magnet comes near him, or whatever. Aside from that, Bender will not learn any lessons. His behavior does not improve, and he is no more courteous or thoughtful than before, despite whatever ordeals he's been through.
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"Bender's Game" hits stores on Tuesday, November 4th! | | | | | | |
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