So we never needed this little guide and, as a throw-away joke - in a literal sense - we showed the Professor in a late episode tossing little robots in the garbage and blowing them up like firecrackers, and one of them was Pocket Pal. We rapidly stopped explaining things to Fry, even though he was our man in the future, from our time, we started thinking of him as another character who was just a dumb guy rather than someone who knew nothing about the future. He was six inches high and he was going to ride around in Fry’s pocket and explain the world of the future, because we thought that, “Oh, people are going to be so confused!” That’s one of those lessons we learned, that people don’t want a lecture on how the future works, they just want to see what’s happening. We then created Bender and Zoidberg, but we kept going: We had Nibbler, and we even invented Pocket Pal, who was this tiny robot. Matt had a couple already when he asked me to join him: Fry, Leela, Zap Brannigan, and Kif. We had a huge number of characters so many that some of them we did not get to during the seven seasons of the show. Getting back to the Futurama pilot, you said that you worked out too much of it when you went into FOX how much of the show as we know it had you worked out when you went into that initial meeting? But I’m going to credit you with planting the seed. I think that’s a really interesting thought, because it is, especially for physics, inspiring to read about space travel and intelligent stars. I bet it did, but you may have just planted that idea in my head. Did your interest in science fiction play any role when you decided to go into physics? My dad got into physics because he wanted to write science fiction, and he thought that would be a good background for a science fiction writer. I come from a family of scientists as well. But he showed up too late to get in on the development stage of Futurama, lucky for me. He’s another writer on The Simpsons and, later, Futurama, and he has a PhD in applied math, so his credentials are a bit better than mine. I had the science side pretty well cornered at The Simpsons, until Ken Keeler showed up. It was a torturous, circuitous route to comedy writing. I pooped out halfway through and ended up with a Master’s degree instead of a PhD and started writing comedy spec scripts. I had two biologists as parents, I got my undergraduate degree in physics and I decided to go study computer science at UC Berkeley. I was mainly a science nerd I’m an SF nerd in the sense that I like to read science fiction, but I was almost a scientist. What were your science fiction nerd qualifications at that point? I think they finally said, “All right, that’s enough! We’ll take the show if you just shut up.” It ended up being a learning experience. A lot of it was just, “What books do we like? What movies do we like?” This went on for a year, which was too much time in retrospect when we finally went in to FOX Network to sell the show, we had too much stuff and the meeting went on for about two hours. Matt came to me and asked if I wanted to collaborate with him, and we started talking in our spare time, because we were both still working on The Simpsons, on weekends and evenings about what we might do in Futurama. I was very interested, of course, being the SF/science nerd on the Simpsons’ writing staff. I was a writer at The Simpsons for five years, and four years into that, rumors started going around that Matt Groening was working on this secret science fiction project.
You co-developed Futurama, along with Matt Groening, and you guys wrote the pilot script together, so why don’t you tell us about how that came about, and how much of the larger story had you worked out at that point? Visit to listen to the entire interview. This interview first appeared on ’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley. He also holds a Master’s degree in Theoretical Computer Science from UC Berkeley, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Harvard University. He has won four Emmy Awards and four Annie Awards.
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Cohen is Executive Producer of the critically-acclaimed animated series Futurama, and also spent five years as a writer for The Simpsons. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirtheĭavid X.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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