Groening Interview in Mother Jones
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
This is eight years old, but chalk this up to the wonder that somethings stay on the internet without getting deleted. Mother Jones, a progressive minded political magazine, did an in depth interview with Matt Groening in 1999. It’s not a silly Hank-Azaria-bites-deer interview either, but one where he spells out his ideas and feelings about The Simpsons and Futurama. At the time, Futurama was about to debut on Fox, so much of the interview revolves around that. It’s also of interest that, in this interview, he does confirm having a knowledge of the old science fiction pulps — which fits, since he’s of the age where kids reading a vast amount of cheaply produces fiction digests was as common as some kids reading comic books, or in this day and age, playing console video games.
I’ve loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I’ve read quite extensively as an adult. About three or four years ago, I decided to reacquaint myself with literary science-fiction and I went back and read everything from H.G. Wells to the new guys, Neil Stephenson and Rudy Rucker and those guys, and what I was surprised to find was that I’d read so much of it. I’d be reading a novel and think, “Wait a minute, I read this in fourth grade,” but I didn’t remember cause I’d plowed through so much. But a lot of my old favorites I thought really held up, I liked [Robert] Heinlein and [Philip K.] Dick and Cordwainer Smith and Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Sheckley — the funny guys, the guys who have a sense of humor.
Basically, Futurama and the concept behind it was a labor of love. That’s a good thing. After all, after the pioneering success, it would have been very easy, and very cheap, in my view, to spin off characters into a new shows. The Moe Show … The Principal Skinner Show … The Comic Book Guy Show … all of them would be bad, bad, terribly bad ideas. Even more, a standard practice in the entertainment industry is to do variations on a successful concept — that’s why The Family Guy and King of the Hill will always owe a debt to The Simpsons, just as The Simpsons owes a debt to The Flinstones and The Jetsons.
So, it’s good that Groening decided to persue something completely independent of The Simpson. Plus, it’s a good thing that he decided to persue something he’s had an interest in. According to the interview, producer David X. Cohen shared the science fiction love. Even more, the idea of Futurama gave Groening an excuse to conduct “research” into the genre. Cohen and Groening’s enthusiasm helped sell the show nearly immediately:
I spent way too much time — a few years — researching science fiction and making long lists of things I wanted to do and characters and ideas that I wanted to explore. After I assembled a few hundred pages of ideas, I got together with David Cohen, one of the writers and executive producers on “The Simpsons,” who is also a lover of science fiction and has a great knowledge of science and mathematics. He was excited and he had a lot to do with the thrust of the show and the direction, so he and I developed this thing together, and took it to Fox. They’d been begging me for years for another show, and in the meeting — which lasted about three hours because we had so much to talk about, we just knew the show inside and out — they jumped up and down and ordered 13 episodes on the spot. And then, that’s when the honeymoon was over, after that. The second they ordered it, they completely freaked out and were afraid the show was too dark and mean-spirited, and thought they had made a huge mistake and that the only way they could address their anxieties was to try to make me as crazy as possible with their frustrations.
Of course, there are other interesting things Groening talks about in this old interview. There’s his Life in Hell comic strips, the nature of business in Hollywood, the business of satire, and so on. Definitely an interesting read.
The Simpsons, Futurama, Life in Hell, Matt Groening, David X. Cohen, Mother Jones
The Simpsons Game has met with largely mixed results. Fans of the show love or like the game’s humor, but serious gamers are largely unimpressed with the quality of game play, not seemingly impressed with the Neverquest or Grand Theft Scratchy gags. It would be easy to say that the expectations for the game were pretty high – the game got a lot of press, whether it stemmed from the jokes itself, or from the fact that one of the companies that got ribbed 
