Futurama is back! And that was a Zoidberg quote from season 4.

The December issue of Wired has an interview with Matt Groening and David X. Cohen talking about the history of Futurama and the new season (direct to DVD and eventually Comedy Central). It’s a really interesting piece and provided much insight into why the show is so perfect for people who enjoy geeking it up:

After the show got a green light, Cohen assembled the geekiest writing staff television had ever seen: one MA in math, one MA in computer science, one MA in philosophy, one PhD in chemistry, one PhD in applied math, and some normals to balance things out. “I went from Home Improvement, where people earnestly pitched jokes about farting and table saws, to a place where there were discussions about nanophysics and string theory and quantum mechanics,” writer Eric Horsted says. “I could only follow the conversation for a few minutes before my brain would start sweating and I’d have to reach for a copy of People.”

“One of the great things about the show was the instantaneous, intense fan reaction,” Groening says. It operated on several levels, rewarding multiple viewings, and it was full of catnip for geeks: In addition to the riffs on The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Star Wars, there were allusions to classic videogames, programming languages, Schrdinger’s cat, and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

“The operating principle of Futurama was that you can do a joke that 1percent of the audience gets, as long as it doesn’t derail the enjoyment of the mass audience,” Cohen says. “And that 1 percent becomes a fan for life.”

As much as I can enjoy the geeky Star Trek references and whatnot, I’m glad to say I’m not as hardcore as some:

Some jokes in Futurama were written in a strange alphabet that fans had to decrypt. “Most were jokes about aliens eating people,” Cohen says. “Like, an alien sign on a restaurant says TASTY HUMAN BURGERS.” He checked the Web a few hours after the pilot aired and discovered that the freeze framers had already cracked the code. A trickier alien alphabet was devised.

My copy of “Bender’s Big Score” (the first part of the new DVD set) will be arriving from Amazon this week… along with the first two pieces of my Christmas shopping.

I’ve decided that Christmas shopping this year will be done entirely online. After having seen some of the Black Friday videos out there, I’ve lost all faith in and patience with people.