"Screen Magazine"   Feb 04, 2008

Back To The "Futurama": Rough Draft Studios Updates Animated Series For Home Video Market  By Dixon Galvez-Searle

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The trailer to the new "Futurama" movie, "Bender's Big Score," opens with a bold claim, but one that hardcore fans can take to heart. "This holiday season, a story that began with the greatest tragedy in television history..." says the narrator as the camera pans past a series of shocked faces. Cut to protagonist Philip J. Fry, who wears a surprised look on his face. "We were cancelled?!" he asks.

"Bender's Big Score" is the first of four feature-length, straight-to-DVD installments of Fox's dearly-departed animated series. Rough Draft Studios (Glendale, Calif.) is slated to produce the remaining three movies, and also worked on "Bender's Big Score," which debuted on DVD November 27. Rough Draft has produced several other high-profile cartoons, including "Beavis and Butt-Head," "Drawn Together," "Ren and Stimpy" and "The Simpson's Movie."

In "Bender's Big Score," Planet Express is taken over by criminals. Bender falls under their command and is used to execute their schemes. "Bender's Big Score" features the same gang from the "Futurama" television series and guest appearances by Al Gore, Coolio and Sarah Silverman.

It's been five years since "Futurama" ceased production. Throughout the series' four-year run on Fox, scheduling changes made it hard for "Futurama" to find a consistent audience. But the show found new life on Cartoon Network, as well as on Comedy Central and through DVD sales.

"It was sort of a tough go when we were on Fox. Comedy Central had it on [the] same night, same time and I think it found a whole new fan base than from Fox," says Rough Draft partner Claudia Katz. "I think that probably led to increased DVD sales [and] at some point [it] made sense from a business model to produce more."

The new straight-to-DVD, feature-length "Futurama" movies are a different beast, just by virtue of their length. Dwayne Carey-Hill, director of "Bender's Big Score," agrees, saying, "It's a much bigger, longer story. It's definitely written as a feature-length story...that was a writing challenge and a directing challenge."

With the time elapsed since the last original "Futurama" production, animation technology has changed. While the television "Futurama" episodes were high-end – specifically in the "revolutionary" blending of 3D and 2D – the five-year time gap poses unique challenges to the new direct-to-DVD "Futurama" movies.

"I can really appreciate how well It's animated and how great it looks," says Carey-Hill.

Despite the five-year gap and the switch from 30-minute episodes to feature length, the "Futurama" creators are maintaining the same ethos as before: "Now a lot more people are [blending 2D and 3D] and I think we felt the need to up the ante a little bit," says Katz. "I think in Dwayne's movie we will probably have, if not the best CG battle, one of the best space battles ever. We just constantly feel the need to challenge ourselves and improve what we're doing."

For "Bender's Big Score" the producers switched from Alias Power Animator to Autodesk Maya. With this switch, producers had to change every single model for the show to fit the new system. Rough Draft Studios also became an entirely Macintosh-based studio for this production.

Fans seem to be enjoying the results of Rough Draft's efforts. "The response has been overwhelmingly positive, which is really nice," says Carey-Hill. "We've been in the top 10 in Amazon. We don't really know what that translates to in numbers, but we're assuming that's pretty good." At press time, "Bender's Big Score" ranked #30 on Amazon.com's best-selling DVD list.