"Futurama" Goes South for Christmas: NYCC Panel Premieres First Footage from the XXXL Holiday Special
Futurama took the New York Comic Con Main Stage on Saturday morning, with Lrrr, ruler of the planet Omicron Persei 8, kicking things off over the speakers with his own list of weekend activities for New Yorkers before threatening to destroy the audience regardless, introducing longtime Futurama producer Lee Supercinski as host. Supercinski celebrated all ten episodes of Season 14, now streaming on Hulu, and brought out creator Matt Groening, showrunner and head writer David X. Cohen, executive producer Claudia Katz of Rough Draft Studios, and voice stars Billy West, Katey Sagal, and Maurice LaMarche.
The session opened with a status check: “Not canceled” (although the show has reportedly ended its regular season run). The panel elaborated that the full Season 14 run recently finished on Hulu with the September 28th finale, "Final Ending: The Last Conclusion," and that the show is already renewed for three supersized specials arriving across 2027 and 2028. Before rolling the first clip, the panel also noted that while Futurama is a show about the future, it is still made the old-fashioned way by human beings, and made for humans too, joking that they had spotted several in the audience.
The first video was pulled from the Season 14 finale, opening on a flashback to a young Fry (West) and his brother Yancy (Tom Kenny) ditching a museum trip to sneak into a PG-13 sci-fi movie. During the film, the brothers broke out in a popcorn fight, and an NYPD officer shut the screening down for serving underage customers, sending the boys home before they could see the ending.
Instead of cutting away, the panel picked the story up live. West, Sagal, and LaMarche performed a table read of what comes next. Back at Planet Express, Fry admitted he never saw how the movie (Death Bot 3000) ended, since it flopped and never came out on home video. Leela remembers a refrigerated film archive at the cryogenics lab, so they head there, braving blizzard conditions in a vault stocked with parody titles like “Megaflopolis,” “Deadpool and Moana,” and “The Fast and the Furries” before locating the reel. When Fry went looking for a candy bar he once left in his old freezer tube, he instead found the same officer frozen inside, who thawed out, drew a gun encased in a block of ice, and launched into a Dirty Harry riff until Leela kicked the ice clean off. The panel admitted afterward that they'd made a few changes to the scene for the live audience and encouraged fans to see the real version on Hulu.
A brand-new Marvel-style post-credits tag for the Season 14 finale, produced with Disney's blessing, picked up with Bender after the finale left him in rough shape. The crew decided to travel back in time so Fry could finally see the end of the movie, and the scene also teased all three upcoming XXXL specials, including a baby reindeer with wings and a moment where Fry appears to propose to Leela.
The panel's grand finale was the first footage ever shown from the XXXL Holiday Special coming in 2027, presented as an early, uncolored pencil animatic. In the footage, the crew reminisces about Christmas traditions, which leads to candy canes. Professor Farnsworth reveals they are nothing but toothpaste and whips up a batch from his new smart toothpaste, which teaches the brusher a full school subject. The idea snowballed into a plan to bring back Christmas, with Fry as Santa and Leela as Mrs. Claus. Since the North Pole melted centuries ago, the team relocated Santa's workshop to the South Pole, which houses adorable winged baby reindeer. Fry shows Leela to the kitchen, where he expects her to bake him cookies so he can fatten up. In the final scene, one of the baby reindeer munches on the smart toothpaste, mutates, and suddenly begins talking.
Q&A
As is tradition, most of the panel’s time was a live audience Q&A, with questioners rewarded with a hand-drawn sketch of a character by Matt Groening.
Asked for favorite episodes, Sagal revealed that her favorite is the upcoming holiday special.
A fan of The Simpsons ride at Universal Studios asked what a Futurama attraction might look like. Groening's answer was decidedly less ambitious, saying he would just like to take over the defunct Shoot the Freak attraction at Coney Island.
One fan praised Season 14's crossover with Disenchantment, "A New New York Yankee in King Elfo's Court," prompting Groening to explain that Disenchantment came about partly because Futurama was off the air at the time, giving him a chance to keep working with the same animation studio, run by Katz, and nearly the same cast. The one exception was Sagal, who he figured was too busy, and he promised to have her back if Disenchantment ever returns. The production challenge, the panel explained, was that Disenchantment had a much more elaborate background and lighting style, so the team at Rough Draft combed through every episode to reuse existing background plates, with the writers doing their best to stay within those sets. Groening added that the real difficulty was negotiating to bring Netflix and Disney together on the crossover.
Asked what surprised them most about the show, West said he never imagined he would still be talking about Futurama 27 years later. Groening recalled that he and Cohen worked together on The Simpsons, spending about two years of lunch breaks dreaming up science fiction stories. By the time they pitched the show to FOX, they had so much material that he believes the network greenlit it in the room just to get them to stop talking. As an example of that over-preparation, the panel recalled Pocket Pal, a tiny robot designed to ride in Fry's pocket and explain the future to him, which went unused for so long that around the 30th episode they realized they didn't need him at all. Groening also shared that when FOX saw the first episode's animation, executives said they expected something more like The Jetsons. Cohen added that by the tenth season of The Simpsons, he assumed the show couldn't possibly last more than another year or two and was looking for something safe to jump to.
Other fans came armed with pitches. A collector pointed out that the last trading card set based on Groening's work was SkyBox's Simpsons cards in 1993 and asked about a Futurama set. When another fan suggested a Futurama crossover with Star Wars, following The Simpsons' own collaborations with Lucasfilm, the panel proposed setting up a suggestion box. On new video games, West teased that he had secret things in the works he couldn't discuss.
A question about the origin of Dr. Zoidberg's signature "woop woop woop" noises led West to reveal that he loved The Three Stooges so much as a kid that he stopped going to church once he discovered them, and that he's sneaked Stooges references into nearly everything he's done since. For Zoidberg, he was improvising frantic noises for a scene in which the character was in a mating frenzy, and the Curly Howard sound simply popped out. Groening then prompted West to plug his memoir, Voice-A-Versa: Finding My Voice(s) Behind the Mic, which West described as a tragicomic life story with a happy ending.
Asked if there was a famous character he enjoys drawing, Groening said he can draw Bart with his eyes closed, then handed over a deliberately wobbly Bart he claimed he drew exactly that way.
The final question asked how closely the team watches fan theories online. Katz confessed that after 27 years, with some writers on staff for decades and others for only a few years, the team struggles to remember everything that has happened on the show. Fan sites like The Infosphere have become its memory bank, and the writers regularly consult them to avoid repeating themselves.
All ten episodes of Futurama Season 14 are now streaming on Hulu, Hulu on Disney+ for bundle subscribers, and Disney+ internationally. The XXXL Holiday Special arrives in 2027.
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