The Furure Is Now

AS I sit here tapping away on my keyboard, it's precisely 6 days, 14 hours, 22 minutes and 15 seconds until Sky One screen the first episode of Futurama.

Sorry to be so obsessive - that's 6 days, 14 hours, 22 minutes and 11 seconds now - but having, ahem, acquired a few episodes on tape recently, we can vouch for the fact that Matt Groening's latest creation is the proverbial dog's gonads.

You probably know the S.P. already - a young pizza delivery guy, Fry, is sent to a cryogenics lab. While dropping off the Quatre Fromaggios, he inadvertently gets frozen and isn't thawed out until the year 3000. All seems lost until he's befriended by an alien named Leela and a foul-mouthed robot called Bender.

The Jetsons with knobs on? You bet!

"As a kid I saw the 1956 movie version of 1984 on TV," Groening reveals. "I kept watching this horrible Big Brother dystopia and waiting for the space patrol to rescue everybody. But the space patrol never came! I realised then, as disturbing as it was, that there were really fun possibilities in science fiction."

Fun is precisely what he has, with Fry encountering flying cars, suicide booths, megalomaniac Matriarchs, psychedelic soft-drinks and robot hookers.

"All these gadgets look great, but they don't really work right," he continues. "People have jet packs, but for some reason they get to work in a transparent, elevated, pneumatic tube that you literally zoom through. At the end of the tube, you come shooting out and smash into a wall. I don't know why people keep taking it."

Although Futurama is well enough endowed with new characters not to need to fall back on the past, Groening has found room for some familiar faces.

"The Simpsons are still on the air in the year 3000. Many of our favourite celebrities are still around - they are just disembodied heads in jars. In the very first episode, Fry hides out in a museum where he stumbles upon Leonard Nimoy's head in a jar. So he holds up his fingers and says, 'Hey, Spock, do the thing!' And Leonard Nimoy's head says, 'I don't do that anymore'."

Needless to say, the series has already spawned its own breed of |ber-anorak, with over 300 designated websites, and merchandising tie-ins that last year grossed $138 million.

"The weird intensity of fans is fascinating," Groening reflects. "We succeed when we give them something worthy of their devotion. This is going to sound totally corny, but the idea is to honour fans for their enthusiasm, rather than just manipulate them into buying more product. Obviously Futurama, like The Simpsons, is a commercial enterprise so that is part of it. But, for instance, both Star Trek and the Grateful Dead found ways to broaden fans' activity. Audiences expand the mythologies of a creator's world."

The first episode of Futurama airs on Sky One in 6 days, 14 hours, one minute and 52 seconds time - or, for the less anally retentive among you, at 8.30pm on September 21st. n

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