Fox Executives Ruthlessly Recast Futurama At The Very Last Minute
When Matt Groening and David X. Cohen's animated sci-fi comedy "Futurama" began to be developed in the late 1990s, it was not treated with the respect one might expect for a follow-up to "The Simpsons." Where Groening's previous cartoon dealt in the classic sitcom setup of a dysfunctional family, "Futurama" was a harder sell, set in the year 3000 but in a world that largely looked like the late '90s. Only with aliens and spaceships.
Fox, the channel on which the show premiered, should have been a good home. After all, "The Simpsons" was an incredible success at that point, entering its 10th year on the network. Mike Judge and Greg Daniels had produced the excellent "King of the Hill" for Fox, giving the channel another animated sitcom hit. Seth McFarlane's "Family Guy" was in development around the same time. All of these shows would become part of Fox's "Animation Domination" programming block in 2005, when "Family Guy" was revived after a few years of being canceled (ultimately staying on for 20 seasons and counting). But it would never include "Futurama," which was canceled by Fox in 2003, returning in various incarnations over the decades, but not on the network.
For "Futurama" voice actor Phil LaMarr, the show was always treated somewhat poorly by the network. At a 2022 convention, he noted that while "The Simpsons" was successful enough to escape executive notes, the developing "Futurama" was subject to their whims. Those notes carried over not just to the content of the show but its cast. For as inimitable and beloved as the voice performances of Billy West and Katey Sagal are (as series leads Fry and Leela, respectively), they were not the show's first choice. And their casting was a bit of a shock to the original voice actors.
The voices you know from Futurama
"Futurama" came out of a particularly high concept. Fry (Billy West), a slacker pizza delivery guy in 1999, takes on a prank call that leads him directly to a cryogenics lab. He falls in a chamber and wakes up 1,000 years in the future, where he's given the chance to live life the exact same way, working and ultimately falling in love with one-eyed Captain Leela (Katey Sagal).
Both characters are impossible to divorce from their vocal performances. Fry, in particular, is one of a million Billy West voices but also one close to the heart of the legendary voice actor, who at the time was being feted as a natural successor to Mel Blanc. As he told the New York Times, the performance "became a high-pitched version of me, trying to remember the dumb innocence of being 25." For as versatile as West is (his other significant "Futurama" credits include Professor Farnsworth, Zoidberg, and Zapp Brannigan), his performance as Fry is possibly his most impressive, creating impeccable and memorable deliveries even while sounding like a normal, kind of "dumb" guy.
Katey Sagal might lack the vocal versatility of West or other utility cast members in the show like Phil LaMarr, Lauren Tom, and John DiMaggio. But she was an established actress, and her work on Fox's "Married... with Children" in particular had fine-tuned her comedy chops. Out of her distinctive voice came Leela's mix of no-nonsense professionalism and neuroses, creating a unique character with strength and the occasional bit of misplaced confidence.
Because both actors are so crucial to the show, it's hard to imagine any other voices mixed with those characters. Originally, the show was going to feature Charlie Schlatter as Fry, and Nicole Sullivan would be Leela. But in the development phase, that changed.
The original Fry and Leela
It wasn't as if Charlie Schlatter or Nicole Sullivan lacked the experience or the talent to play the leads of a new Matt Groening cartoon for Fox. Schlatter had been acting steadily since the late '80s and became something of a protégé of Dick Van Dyke's when he joined the cast of the famed actor's show "Diagnosis: Murder." As an accomplished actor and voice actor, he could have made for a great Fry, capturing some of the same "dumb innocence" that West found.
Nicole Sullivan, for her part, was a long-running cast member on the Fox sketch comedy series "MadTV." While most of her vocal performance roles would come after she was recast on "Futurama," her work on "MadTV" demonstrated versatility and humor — in a show like that, you need to be able to do a lot of characters, and she could. Given her later voice work, most notably as Shego in the "Kim Possible" series (whose co-creator Mark McCorkle had to deal with executive notes of his own), it's easy to see how she could have come up with a similar tough-but-vulnerable characterization for Leela as Sagal did.
Both actors were on the rise, and both were talented. There was no reason to suspect they couldn't lead a show like "Futurama," but the Fox executives would make their decisions regardless. This was a harbinger for a show that would be affected by network decision-making for most of its run.
Schlatter and Sullivan were fired
While "Futurama"'s Phil LaMarr claimed at a 2022 convention Fox executives saw the show as creator Matt Groening's "red-headed stepchild" next to the massive hit that was "The Simpsons," the series made a mark of its own. A lot of that had to do with Groening and showrunner David X. Cohen sticking to their guns, coming up with creative solutions to explore their science fiction premises and get the network off their backs. But they couldn't get their original actors for Fry and Leela.
Looking back at the series, it's hard to imagine anybody but Billy West and Katey Sagal as the two characters. There are too many hours of them in character, too many memorable moments both hilarious and heart-wrenching. The show played well with the casting, and one classic episode, "A Bicyclops Built For Two," effectively turned Leela into Sagal's character from "Married... with Children."
Still, the swift dismissal of the original actors was seemingly ruthless. As "Futurama" voice actress Lauren Tom recalled at the same convention, it began with Charlie Schlatter getting a call from his agent that he was fired. When Schlatter called Nicole Sullivan to vent, she had to hang up to take a call from her agent, and she learned she had also been fired. West had regrets for the show's loss of these "super talented people," but all of the actors at the convention could relate to the story in some way. As Tom said, "Anyone who's worth their salt has been fired at some point."