Transcript:Commentary:Fry and the Slurm Factory

David X. Cohen: Maurice LaMarche as Calculon. Synthesizer as boxy robot.

John DiMaggio: Dave Herman as Slurms MacKenzie.

DXC: Anyone know who that voice was, right there?

JD: That's Pamela Anderson.

DXC: Pamela Anderson.

Matt Groening: Is that Pamela Anderson?

DXC: Why, it is Pamela Anderson.

?: The Pamela Anderson?

JD: The Pamela Anderson.

DXC: She was into record her part for the sixth episode, one with Fry getting rich and the anchovies and stuff, and then– while she was here we had her do this little cameo also.

Ron Hughart: That's Dave Herman as Slurms MacKenzie, it was just amazing that someone that small could talk that loud.

JD: There's a freeze frame here, and it means, "the following species are ineligible, space wasps, space beavers, any other animal with the word "space" in front of it, space chickens and the elusive yak-face". And the yak-face is what, David?

Lewis Morton: It's a—

DXC: That's Lou. What, Lou?

RH: What, Lou?

LM: Very rare Star Wars figure, only released in like Korea or something.

JD: Okay.

DXC: NERD!

JD: There it is and welcome to Futurama.

LM: I write for Futurama, I have been exposed now as a nerd. That's great.

MG: That was Lou Martin, this is Matt Groening.

RH: I am Ron Hughart, I directed this episode.

JD: I'm John DiMaggio and I play Bender and other characters.

DXC: I am David Cohen, executive producer.

Rich Moore: I am Rich Moore, the supervising director.

DXC: And Lou Martin is the guy who wrote the episode.

JD: Yeah, Lou Martin say "hi".

LM: Yeah!

JD: 3D animation.

RM: With water!

DXC: Is that the first water there?

RM: Mmm.

DXC: Matt, where did you come up with the idea for the name Slurm?

MG: I just wanted, you know, a disgusting soft drink for the future. And– this is one of the very first things we came up with, we wanted to jamback the universe full of very mundane popculture items, it's a disgusting sounding name.

DXC: I'd go along with that.

MG: I love Bender's chest cabinet, because it's like Felix's bag of tricks, you know. We can do anything we want.

RH: I also like the idea that Bender is mostly hollow.

DXC: That was about the fullest he's ever been in fact, in that shot.

JD: Billy West! With the pronunciation of [Zoidberg] "robots" [normal] instead of "robots".

DXC: I love that–

JD: [Zoidberg] "Robots". That's Billy.

LM: This was back when Zoidberg's joke was 'he's a bad doctor'.

DXC: It was only later that he got poor, hungry and lonely.

JD: Filthy.

DXC: Filthy.

JD: Stinky.

RM: And if you'll notice, Bender with the fever is painted just slightly warmer than his usual colour model.

DXC: Point out—

RM: It's a warm red.

DXC: When he's cured later, he's colour changes back, so?

JD: And the antenna is straighter.

DXC: On that eye chart back there, in the ???, it says "no squinting, four eyes".

DXC: Oh, there is some funny censor notes on this show, including on this, "incidentally, some X-rays can see through metal", the Fox censor felt pledged to give us some scientific background to this.

?: "All of you".

?: Ah!

?: Where's that 6502?

DXC: 6502, that's my– the beloved processor of the Apple II home computer. Also I think, the Atari, but I wouldn't swear to that.

RM: Bender changes colour when he removes that watch.

DXC: There you go.

JD: Oh my god.

?: Cool aid.

LM: I never noticed that.

?: Neat!

?: Did he just take her earrings?

JD: How do he go from being feverish to non-feverish?

DXC: From the watch.

?: Removed the watch.

DXC: You're excused.

RH: I always like that scene right there.

DXC: Cool music here also. Oh here comes John DiMaggio in a ravoura??? performance. It's coming up in a minute, it's not only John DiMaggio, but Bender, but also as this transvestite robot we are about to see.

LM: You know, here we go—

JD: I was lucky enough to be talking like that all the time, making fun of everybody [voice] "Why you so stupid, stupid?" [normal] They actually– someone actually got the idea to put it in. I was very pleased, I was thrilled as a matter of fact.

MG: We gotta bring that character back. That's cool.

RH: When I it was in animatic, we would show that scene over and over for the guys at Rough Draft and everybody just loved– loved that.

JD: [voice] Stupid...

?: More transvestites robot.

?: Yeah!

DXC: Matt, you realise this episode has the word "Slurm" and the word "sperm" in it?

MG: Slurm and sperm?

DXC: Both in the– in the dialogue.

?: Coincidence?

LM: We established a few scenes ago, that Fry is sterile, yet in season 3, Fry, we found out, impregnates his own grandmother, so...

DXC: There were so many disgusting in that sentence, that I can't go on.

LM: It's a start.

DXC: There, inspired by the Star Trek 3D chess, obviously, 3D Scrabble.

JD: 3D Scrabble.

?: I always like that shot.

RH: I like how Fry pulls his collar away from his throat instead of Bender.

JD: Another 3D animation shot. Separates us from the Rask??? Man.

?: Beautiful.

RH: Hurdy.

JD: And this is Billy West as–

LM: Glurmo.

JD: As Glurmo, inspired thoroughly by Geen Wilder, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In fact, wathcing him– watching him do this in the studio, he was staring at a picture of Geen Wilder and doing this voice, and it was actually quite amazing to watch.

RH: I think this was one of the times–

JD: It was a little disturbing, 'cause he really nailed it, I mean—

?: The picture was naked.

JD: Tha– oh!

JD: The first time I heard that, cracked me up. David Herman almost got me, I think, suspended from this job, I've ruined sessions, he's made me laugh out loud.

DXC: You ruin sessions in lots of other ways, also.

JD: Yeah, I do. But oh– just genius, Dave Herman. And Billy West.

DXC: And John DiMaggio.

JD: Oh, no. No.

LM: The originally named I had for Glurmo was Slurmy Slunka, which was—

DXC: Slurmy Slunka, you were gonna have Slurms MacKenzie and Slurmy Slunka in the same episode.

LM: Yeah. I'm very unimaginative.

RM: I think the background people did a really nice job with these.

MG: I have a question, I never saw that movie that this is an homage to–

RH: You're fired.

MG: No, what is it? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? No, Willy Wonka?

RH: At the table read, I told you that I had- watch this for reference and you said you hadn't seen it.

MG: See, I'm not lying. I still haven't seen it.

?: Willy what.

MG: So this is pretty—

DXC: Have you seen this episode, Matt?

MG: No, I just saw this—

DXC: If you've seen this episode, you've seen...

LM: Also in the first draft, in the first section, there was a part, and I don't even remember why, that the Gunka Lunkas were shovelling an enormous mountain of cocaine.

?: We cut that out?

LM: And yeah, it got rewritten for some reason.

RH: Originally those Grunka Lunkas were designed to be caricatures of the Oompa Loompas, but we sent that over to Matt and Matt–

MG: Said "dunno what you're talking about".

RH: And he sent back these designs.

MG: Horrible!

RH: These designs came back and they worked out really good.

JD: My favourite moment is coming up with the professor.

JD: Ah, this is just–

LM: This is taking right out of Willy Wonka, all of this action actually happens in the movie.

MG: Really?

LM: Yeah. They really– they really pull each around like that.

MG: The little children cried a lot when they watch this.

DXC: That's Phil LaMarr.

JD: That's me.

?: Your voice is deep.

JD: [singing along] Grunka Lunka lunka dunkity dot!

DXC: Is that guy missing an eye?

RM: I think he is wearing a monocol.

DXC: Oh monocle.

RH: That's what makes him old.

?: ???

DXC: In case the beard didn't sell it. The four foot long beard.

LM: I think there was originally a joke about how good union they had and it was cut, so it was this.

RM: I always thought it was a joke on animators.

?: Who told him!

?: Ah nice effects.

JD: That's great.

DXC: We have a sign on our writers room at our office that says "Real writers room", ever since this episode.

LM: That's the first of like eight Soylent Green jokes over the cause of the series.

JD: Who had the idea to put these shirts, the– those! The ones in Hebrew.

DXC: Hebrew Slurm.

JD: Genius.

LM: I dunno. Well, I wrote the episode, so it must have been me.

JD: Yeah! You're a genius.

LM: The weird thing is, Hebrew Slurm looks almost exactly like "shalom".

DXC: To the point of being confusing.

RH: Yeah, we had to redesign that a couple of times, because of that.

DXC: Amy is clumsy, at least in a wide of the early episodes, we– Matt wanted to have a female character who got hit on the head once in a while. You rarely also see on cartoons.

RH: One, sort of odd and vaguely amusing detail, that scream she makes when she falls down, every time she falls down, the entire series we use that scream that were recorded that time.

DXC: Really funny scream by Lauren Tom.

RH: Yeah, Lauren records a few every time, and we're like "that's good", now put it at that.

?: ??? old away.

JD: Ah, the Slurm Queen. Played by Tress MacNeille, the ever popular mother loving Tress MacNeille, she's great in this.

MG: As gross as this is, we de-grossify it a little bit with the sound. The original sound effects that were put in, so horrendous.

RM: That's great. I've got nieces and nephews still talk about the way that queen squeezes that slurm.

JD: My father's like, "John, that was disgusting, that was really gross, very funny but disgusting".

LM: Now, coming up is the part in the Futurama episode where they run away. Which probably two thirds of our episodes feature either a trial at the end, everyone running away at the end or both.

LM: Here's Slurmy Slunka. Or Glurmo.

DXC: Katey Sagal doing some karate

JD: But this is Billy as well.

RH: These are both Billy.

JD: Both Billy.

?: Billy West.

JD: I– "thanks ma'am". That was actual– I think that was a tribute to Popeye.

LM: No, he said that was the voice he does for Peepeye, Popeye's nephew.

JD: Yeah, that's it. There it is.

DXC: It's a similar, but legally distinguishable voice.

JD: Yes, legally.

?: Legally desgeba???

DXC: I love that line reading, "when is that scheduled?"

MG: That's a pretty lame machine. Just grin him up.

?: Thanks a lot, Matt.

?: He did a lot of work to do that machine.

MG: You know, it looks like a bad prop from a Batman TV show, you know. No no, I'm just saying.

RH: I know what you mean.

LM: Matt, I think this is a bad scene from Batman TV show.

MG: I mean, you have an underground lair.

LM: That would make a good coffee table book, "The Lame Machine in Futurama".

MG: Now when in Batman did they ever lower them into a bath of obnoxious fluids.

?: That's so disgusting.

DXC: Here we go again, we hit a new low.

RM: There's that awful machine again.

JD: Aw, the single tear.

LM: That was the sad-y moment of this episode.

DXC: Lou Martin doesn't like to write a lot of sad.

LM: One tear.

DXC: Keep the comedy rolling.

LM: One tear per episode. How– that's my motto.

JD: Billy West. [biting sound] Genius.

RH: I think there was something where he was eating. We were recording AVR eating and just told him, just do [biting sound].

DXC: I heard him explain that one to say he was imitating himself. I don't know what that means.

JD: You never know with Billy West.

LM: There's a lot of running away in this episode.

DXC: We lay out the stories on index cards, when we are making them up at the early stage. And we have certain cards that are on blue cards, that are the ones we use all the time. We have a very very very worn out, that's "run away".

RM: At Rough Draft call these scenes "crossing the state line ending".

JD: Shot eyes!

RH: This song, we had in there, like a temporary and we couldn't find a song we actually liked—

DXC: We just grew to love it.

RH: Yeah.

DXC: Months of working with this episode.

?: Great.

?: He was hit on the head.

JD: This is the most disgusting part of the episode.

?: So disgusting.

JD: Just the slurpee noise that [noise].

RH: This is the episode for three year olds.

DXC: It's okay, 'cause anyone over two counts in the Nielsen rating.

JD: That's Billy West, all those three of those. Talking to himself.

DXC: Love of our favourite characters die in the course of the episode.

JD: Ah, Dixie.

DXC: The unforgettable role of Dixie.

JD: I was like, the music is– Christopher Tyng does such a great job, but I like all the different versions that he has, the variations on the theme. It's genius.

DXC: The end of season 1.