Matt Groening, the brains behind The Simpsons and Fox's new scifi series Futurama, is a mainstream subversive and businessman extraordinaire. Groening (rhymes with "braining") was, unlike Bart, a good student in Portland, Oregon, before going on to counterculture cartooning and the transformative creation of a show that warps the minds of kids all over the planet. Groening's gently perverse, sometimes savagely satirical take on the world allows him to have his career both ways. He gets paid a lot of money to mock the establishment, which he used to do for free. He keeps on penning the comic Life in Hell for alternative weeklies, as he has for the past 15 years, while enjoying a happy middle age (45) and family life (he and his wife have two young boys). His untamed sense of humour reveals a frank genius for skewing orthodoxy.
But The Simpsons' irreverence and even Groening himself have now become part of the mainstream - D'oh! - and profitable brands. As he reluctantly admits, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is his boss, broadcasting The Simpsons to 70 countries worldwide. Groening's wildly successful corporate franchise rakes in millions a year in books, Tshirts, figurines, and other Simpsons paraphernalia. And each Simpsons episode is a major production, employing 50 musicians, 60 production crew and actors, 100 animators in the US, and 300 more in Korea. (These days, other people write and produce the scripts, though Groening remains involved in shaping and tweaking them.) Success notwithstanding, he keeps pushing one message: "The authorities don't have your best interests at heart." In Futurama, which broke viewing records when it began on the Fox network earlier this month and comes to Sky One in September, Groening transports his message a millennium into the future, to the new New York of the year 3000. Slyly piercing the hype and optimism that surround new technology, the show is populated by 20th-century celebrity talking heads in jars, narcotic soft drinks, while-you-sleep advertising, one-eyed shealiens, jet-powered scooters, beer-drinking robots, and a corrupt megacorporation run by a despotic mom. Though he draws his newspaper cartoons by hand with a simple pen, Groening's animated extravaganza about the future uses computer animation and the latest software. Like the rest of us, he's both fascinated and anxious about the fast-forward, high tech, tool-laden world we're making - a keen ambivalence that makes Futurama a signature Groening paradoxarama.
Kevin Kelly: Tell me about Futurama.
Matt Groening: It's about a pizza delivery boy named Fry who, on New Year's Eve 1999, gets inadvertently frozen in a cryogenics lab and wakes up 1,000 years later. The themes: If you are a loser, is it possible to reinvent yourself? How do you deal with the desire for youth, for the return of dead loved ones, and what does it mean to be finite in the universe? Boy, is this too pretentious or what?
Why 1,000 years, instead of 100 or 500?
We have upped the ante for anybody who does the future - ours takes place after yours. It also gives us an opportunity to justify any gadget we want.
Like what?
Faster-than-light travel - which right now we are calling the "convenience drive".
How did you decide to do science fiction?
As a kid I saw the 1956 movie version of 1984 on TV. 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. The genre seems to have more respect now - for some it's even become a kind of religion. Science fiction for the most part operates on a New Age military motif: if we can just follow orders from our benevolent captain then we can defeat the outside evil and everything will be great. Right? I am trying to do something a little bit different from Star Trek and Star Wars. I imagine a corporate, commercial, confusing world where the military is just as stupid as it is currently.
So the smart guys are corporations?
Our big earthly villain is Mom. Mom runs MomCorp. She is this very scrawny elderly woman who wears a fat suit to make her look more lovable and she is beloved all across the world. She is very rich from manufacturing Mom's Old-Fashioned Robot Oil.
Sounds like a genre-buster.
Traditionally, science fiction goes for a sense of wonder, with exotic aliens and nifty rocket ships and dastardly villains. We'll have those too - we have death rays and hideous mutants, cyborgs and bug-eyed monsters. And we have robots who want to kill all humans. But we'll also use these conventions to comment on the absurdity of real life - and science fiction itself, but without being campy. The whole idea is to make an epic that both honours and satirises the conventions of science fiction. One of the lead characters, Bender, seems like a recurring type, the neurotic robot. He is beyond neurotic. He is totally corrupt. He shoplifts. He thrives on the things that harm humans. He actually gets energy from smoking cigars and drinking beer. Bender also gets us around censor problems - he can't be a bad role model for kids, because he is just a robot.
So how will the future really roll out?
The future is always presented as monolithic - people all dressed in the same spandex. I think it will have far more variety than the present. In the future everything is under construction. There are a lot of loose wires sticking out of walls.
What becomes of The Simpsons? 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, our hero, Fry, hides out in a head 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".
Do you have any literary forebears?
I grew up reading tons and tons of science fiction magazines and books, everything from Isaac Asimov to Philip K. Dick. I recently decided to reacquaint myself, and while I liked a lot of them, their time has passed. I mean, a lot of the books took place in 1994!
And how far off were they from what really happened in 1994?
Every one of them has been off. No one predicts the mundane. The idea that in the future you would go to a store and pick up movies to watch by looking at empty boxes on a shelf was something no science fiction writer predicted.
Yes, many visionaries predicted something like TV but no one foresaw deodorant commercials.
Right! In Futurama our characters are thoroughly inundated by advertising, especially subliminal advertising that comes out of your pillow into your dreams. We also have tons of vending machines, including a suicide booth. That really disturbed Fox. "You said this was going to be very positive," they said, "so why are people killing themselves?"
Is Microsoft still dominant in 3000?
Nope, out of business. All gone. Intel gone. Pepsi gone. By the way, if a sponsor wants to pay us enough money, they can still be around.
The question every kid will want to know: Is there school in the year 3000? Oh yes. But there are also jet packs.
And the Internet?
Yes, and it is still too slow.
Is Futurama's future a place you'd want to live?
Well, all these gadgets look great but they don't really work right. 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.
Do you think the world is getting better or worse?
When I first read 1984 as a kid I found it very creepy and nightmarish. I just reread it last year and was surprised at how mild it was. Reality has gotten pretty bad.
What about pop culture - is it improving or in decline?
People's attention spans are shorter. Having so much instantaneous choice - just a remote control with the television - makes the overwhelming message of the medium simply that "nothing matters". Whatever it is, it is going to be replaced by something else in another 30 seconds. On the other hand, I think these Crash Bandicoot games for the Sony PlayStation are fantastic. So many videogames are just mirthless clobbering, but Crash Bandicoot has the feel of an old cartoon.
Do you agree with critics who decry the de- cline in literacy? Yes, but so what? We've lost that battle already.
I don't agree. The Internet, email, and the Web have revived writing - there are many more people writing more stuff and writing it better than there were 10 or 15 years ago. You're right. My mind-set is pre-Internet.
Do you watch much TV yourself?
Most TV is pretty stupid. Growing up, I thought, if I could only get my hands on a TV show, I'd do something fast and funny. The Simpsons was my first experiment and it worked. It annoys the hell out of some critics because we're saying the authorities don't have your best interests at heart.
Spoken like a true '60s hippie.
Yeah, I am a hippie, I admit it.
Are you prepared for the fanatical fans Futurama may create? Definitely. We created a character named Cubert who will anticipate fan complaints about the show's inconsistencies, and then will address them within the show. One of the fun things about doing science fiction is that it has this built-in responsive culture.
You sometimes hide things in the frame on The Simpsons. Same for Futurama? We have what we call freeze-frame moments - there are a series of alien alphabets you can find, and we'll also provide the keys to figure them out. We'll see what the cryptographers out there can do.
I bet there will be Web sites devoted to just the alphabets.
The weird intensity of fans is fascinating. 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 products. 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.
Who are your heroes?
As a teenager I was a huge admirer of Frank Zappa, who didn't allow any element of music culture to get beyond him. He made the connection between '50s doo-wop and Igor Stravinsky. Since I liked Stravinsky and greasy rock and roll, this appealed to me. I like mixing it up. Growing up I was a huge admirer of Walt Disney, P.T. Barnum, and Hugh Hefner. I got in trouble in grade school because I had a biography of Hefner. I read somewhere that the Playboy mansion in Chicago went 24 hours a day, which meant he could stay up as long as he wanted. I liked P. T. Barnum because I loved the idea of owning a museum of oddities. And of course Walt Disney created Disneyland.
So you were impressed not by his cartoon genius, but by his theme park?
Yes, it was Disneyland in particular. My great unfulfilled ambition - to do my own amusement park - is really why I am doing Futurama. I'm not kidding. If this show takes off, I'm going to do an amusement park.
Careerwise, do you have any regrets?
I wish I could have done it faster. At the start, Fox were desperate for programming, so they took a chance on something very unlikely, risky, and controversial. An animated cartoon for adults on prime-time TV? They were not even sure we could sustain an audience's attention for a half hour and considered making it three short cartoons.
Is it more difficult to take a chance now?
The expectations are higher. The Simpsons has been so phenomenally successful that it's hard to believe I can knock it out of the park a second time.
You have two young kids. Are you having to work hard to impress them with Futurama?
They have given me all sorts of advice. I asked my son, What is the military salute in the future? Without hesitation he showed me: In quick succession, pound your heart, pound your forehead, and then do sort of a half Sieg Heil salute. And I said, Yep, that's it. And so it is.
Is there anything you've changed your mind about in the past 20 years?
I used to be amused by how pervasive advertising was in our society. But seeing ads on the little divider bars on the conveyer belts at grocery store checkouts made me think, that's enough. I read Future Shock in the early '70s and said future shock would never happen to me. It has. At least in regard to advertising.
Is technology helping the world overall?
I don't know. All I know is that there's too much exhaust that comes out of technology and there's too few frogs. So do you reject certain technologies? No - I don't want anything to get beyond me. I try to listen to a bit of obnoxious hiphop now and then, to sampling and b-boxes and all the rest. Just a little, because a little goes a long way.
Why bother?
Why listen to stuff you don't really like? Because it never existed before.
What's next on your to-do list?
I have so many other ideas. I want to do my version of an animated rock-and-roll show.
So you still haven't learned your lesson?
In Futurama, they are able to test you and find out what you would be best at in life. If you take a test at age three, they will find out that, yes, you should be a doctor or a delivery boy or whatever. They are accurate. But that doesn't necessarily coincide with what is in your heart. Our main characters - Bender and Fry and the others - are all outcasts who want to go against their programming, whether or not they will be successful. For instance, Bender, whose whole name is Bender Unit 22, because he is programmed to bend girders, really wants to be a cook. That is his goal in life. But he doesn't have taste buds. So it is absurd. Yet I think that is the secret - doing what you want rather than what you are told.
Wired magazine/New York Times Syndicate