Press - Rough Draft Studios

You cant talk animation without mentioning Rough Draft Studios. The shop is, in one way or another, behind nearly every major American animated series in the last two decades. The creative powerhouse helped drive the cartoon boom of the late 90s, churning out work for colossally successful toons like The Simpsons, Futurama, Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and Looney Tunes. They also pioneered cutting-edge animation techniques for The Maxx, Star Wars: Clone Wars, Baby Blues, and Spy vs. Spy. (read more...)

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

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. (read more...)

Futurama is back, and Joe Strike tells us how the TV series found new life on DVD in the new feature release, Bender's Big Score.

When Philip J. Fry stumbled into that cryonic freezing chamber back on New Year's Eve 1999, he had to wait 1,000 years to be defrosted into the world of the far future. On the other hand, when Futurama itself fell into the deep freeze of cancellation, it only took four years for the show to come back to life. Vociferous, dedicated viewers have saved more than one series from cancellation, but it's an exceedingly rare television phenomenon when audience demand puts a cancelled show back into production... (read more...)

David X. Cohen is watching a short animation clip on a computer monitor. It's a tight shot of two robots' pelvises. They thrust their cube-shaped midsections together and swap a DVD from one of their disc drives to the other. This, Cohen explains, is footage of a sci-fi stage show, a suggestive all-robot version of Cirque du Soleil. "Nothing makes me happier than a scene with no living being in it," he says. (read more...)

In the year 3000, TV network executives will know better than to cancel series which have small but rabid audiences and a potential for growth. But in 2003, Fox pulled the plug on “Futurama,” its four-season-old animated comedy series about a pizza delivery guy named Philip J. Fry who wakes up in the 31st century after having been cryogenically frozen since Jan. 1, 2000.
But “Futurama,” like Fry, had more life left. Cartoon Network picked up the series for its Adult Swim channel, where 2.1 million viewers now watch and re-watch the original 72 episodes each week. DVD box sets sold well. Web sites sprang up. Fans clamored for more. (read more...)

‘Futurama’ makes a triumphant return in direct-to-DVD film returns - Good news, everyone!
After a long, long four-year wait, “Futurama,” the black sheep of Matt Groening’s animation family, finally returns with a feature-length, direct-to-DVD film, “Bender’s Big Score!”
The crew of Planet Express, relegated to nightly syndication on Adult Swim, makes its triumphant return Tuesday with an adventure that picks up right where the series abruptly ended, taking a similar path as its Adult Swim brethren “The Family Guy” – canceled, and then miraculously uncanceled. (read more...)

Claudia Katz has helped produce a number of diverse and interesting shows. She's worked on such projects as Futurama, The Simpsons Movie, Drawn Together, and a whole lot more. Recently, she helped produce Bender's Big Score, which is the first of four Futurama direct-to-dvd movies... (read more...)

I always enjoyed Futurama, but I never managed to get into the habit of watching it. I guess that means it's all my damn fault it was canceled for disappointing ratings, so maybe this is an incredibly bad way to start off a review of the direct-to-video movie Futurama: Bender's Big Score. (read more...)

Reruns and DVD sales don't just add a few bucks to a studio's coffers. Sometimes, they can resurrect a show from the dead.

That's the fan-driven story behind the release next week of Futurama: Bender's Big Score (20th Century Fox, $29.99), a feature-length, direct-to-DVD film. "Futurama," the Emmy Award-winning animated series created by "Simpsons" mind Matt Groening about a pizza delivery boy who is accidentally cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the year 3000, ran on Fox from 1999 to 2003. (read more...)

Director Dwayne Carey-Hill and Producer Claudia Katz on Bender's Big Score: The RT Interview By Alex Vo

DVD sales speak volumes and nobody's listening more closely than Fox. After robust sales in the home market paved the way for a Firefly movie (Serenity) and re-opened production on Family Guy, Futurama -- Matt Groening's and David X. Cohen's beloved sci-fi animated series, unceremoniously canceled in 2003 -- is returning for four new DVD movies... (read more...)

Rough Draft draws, colors, and animates Fry, Leela, Zoidberg, and the rest of Planet Express; animation studio's exec talks about the process. Sweet gorilla of Manila! Hermes' head is in a jar!... (read more...)

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Claudia Katz on Futurama the Movie: Bender's Big Score By Evan Jacobs

Futurama is one of the most loved shows to have ever graced the television airwaves. (read more...)

Good things sometimes happen when you behave in a geeky and enthusiastic fashion. For example, from the minute I heard that four brand-new Futurama movies were going into production, I wet myself a little and then went insane. (read more...)

A survey of innovative animation shops, plus hot toon properties at this year's NATPE conference.

They say you can't go home again, but when it comes to Rough Draft Studios' work on Matt Groening's Futurama, all bets are off.

The studio, which produced all 72 episodes of the 1999-2003 animated series, returned to animation duties on a series of four direct-to-DVD features, starting with the release of Bender's Big Score on Nov. 27. (read more...)

As Mike Scully mentioned in his previous interview, when Matt Groening and company finally gave The Simpsons Movie a green light, they came to realize the work was just way too much for their usual production studio, Film Roman. To help them out, they then called on old partners Rich Moore and his company Rough Draft.

For those who read the credits, Rough Draft is one of the busiest for-hire studios in the world. It’s Korean operation does a ton of work on anything from Warner Bros. to many of the top anime shows Japan has to offer. Moore is one of the partners of the Los Angeles branch. His work has won him four Emmy nominations and two of the actual statuettes (both for Groening’s other beloved animated project, Futurama). (read more...)

Name your favorite Simpsons episode, and there's a good chance Rich Moore directed it. "Cape Feare", "A Streetcar Called Marge", "Flaming Moe's", "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie", Marge vs. the Monorail"... all of these were overseen by Moore. After several seasons with The Simpsons and a stint on The Critic, Moore became the supervising director on Futurama, where he remained until the show was tragically cancelled in 2003.

For most shows, that's the end of the story, but thanks in large part to heavy rotation as part of Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" lineup, Futurama is making a comeback with four direct-to-DVD features - the first of which, Bender's Big Score, is scheduled to debut this November. (read more...)

Rough Draft Animates TV Family to Look At Home on the Big Screen in The Simpsons Movie By Joe Strike

After 400+ TV episodes, The Simpsons come roaring onto the big screen.

Once upon a time the TV set was referred to as `the idiot box.' It's taken more than a few years, but Homer Simpson, TV's number one idiot has finally broken out of the box and made his way to the movie screen. The Simpsons Movie (opening July 27, 2007) is far from the first animated TV series to travel from living room to multiplex; at the peak of their popularity Hanna-Barbera stars Fred Flintstone and Yogi Bear made the journey, and more recently SpongeBob and South Park have done so as well... (read more...)

“Futurama” is coming back. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment at San Diego Comic-Con International is expected to announce more details about the first original “Futurama” productions since the animated show went off the air in 2003.

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score will be released Nov. 27 directly to DVD. It’s the first full-length “Futurama” feature based on the TV series; three more films will be released individually through 2008, all with the original creative team and voice cast on board. (read more...)

No one will ever mistake Bart Simpson for Bambi, but Springfield's best-known slacker and Disney's four-legged forest dweller have one thing in common: Both are animated in classic, pencil-to-paper, 2D animation. When "The Simpsons Movie" opens Friday, it will be the first 'flat' feature-length cartoon in over a year, and the first major one since Disney gave up on 2D with 2004's unmemorable "Home on the Range." (read more...)

A survey of innovative animation shops, plus hot toon properties at this year's NATPE conference.

Things continue to hum at Rough Draft, a production house founded in 1991 by Gregg Vanzo, and Rough Draft Korea, which Vanzo co-founded the following year with his wife Nikki. During the past year, the companion studios, which have worked together on the likes of Fox's "The Simpsons" and "Futurama", Nickelodeon's "SpongeBob SquarePants" and Cartoon Network's "Dexter's Laboratory" and "The Powerpuff Girls,"... (read more...)

HOT SHOPS : These innovators represent the cutting edge of television's new toon renaissance.

These surely are the best of times for Gregg Vanzo, who in 1991 founded the red-hot animation production house Rough Draft Studios and the following year co-founded Rough Draft Korea with his South Korea-born wife, Nikki. (read more...)

Gregg Vanzo won his first Emmy award this year, the payoff for 15 years of serious "pencil mileage," the grueling hours required to make drawings come alive. (read more...)

Norman Bel Geddes and a streamlined aesthetic set the tone for Futurama, which imagines a Y3K Manhattan more complex than the city today.

Claudia Katz is the lead producer of Futurama at Rough Draft Studios, the firm Matt Groening selected to design and animate his latest cartoon. From her studio headquarters in Los Angeles, Katz told how she lends shape and humor to the future. (read more...)

MTV hits all the right buttons with this stylish, fast-paced animated series, which combines snappy dialogue and rapid-fire witticisms, while tapping into the burgeoning popularity of other-world existences. (read more...)

"The Maxx" succeeds with its edgy, spiky style and disjointed storytelling.

The latest in MTV's "Oddities" series is rendered with a certain panache, transmitting a darkly compelling view of animation in the service of visceral fantasy. Indeed, "Maxx" based on the comic book created by Sam Keith, has been packaged with a sharp appealing look. (read more...)

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