Friday, June 23, 2006

Futurama Resurrected

For the second time (Family Guy being the first), an animated series returns from the dead. Fox and Comedy Central have just announced that Futurama will come back for a minimum 13-episode run... The Matt Groening/David X. Cohen created series was cancelled several years ago, but there's been a vigorous campaign by the show's fans to have it revived. fak3r.com gives the chronology of the shows rebirth. Apparently the original voice cast has been re-signed. I assume Rough Draft will again handle the production. I recently had a conversation with a friend who worked at Rough Draft for several years on the original Futurama run. According to his estimate, by the time he finished there he'd put in a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of unpaid overtime. Any hint of unionizing the production in those days was met with claims that the studio would lose the production if Rough Draft unionized. Of course, that was before Film Roman employees made the other Fox shows union, and before Rough Draft signed a Guild contract to work on The Simpsons Movie. If those threats were ever true, they're certainly not true now. So, assuming that Rough Draft will indeed be producing the new Futurama episodes, one hopes the artists will this time see the benefits of working under the protections of a union contract (something the writers and voice actors on the show have always understood).

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