A Quote by Matt Groening

I always say that 'Futurama' is real, and 'The Simpsons' is fiction. — © Matt Groening
I always say that 'Futurama' is real, and 'The Simpsons' is fiction.
My mother had no interest in cartoons. I remember thinking, 'I am never going to grow into that person.' Which is so ironic - now I get to work on 'Family Guy' and 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama', all of these great animated series! TV was my passion.
'The Simpsons' was about children and married parents; 'Futurama' is about people in between; they're growing up and haven't settled down. Every other cartoon show seemed to be, you know, dumb dad, bratty kids.
I would say that Futurama: Bender's Big Score requires a lot of concentration to watch. It's a very complicated time-travel story. Part of the joke on that was just that the complexity would be over the top. This one is a more straight-forward science-fiction story, I would say. Alien invasion and people running in terror, that kind of thing, with a slight twist of there being an inappropriate physical relationship with the big octopus monster. We've got a straight-up science-fiction movie.
Between 'Futurama' and 'Simpsons,' I'm able to work with the voices of Michael Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, and the cast of 'Star Trek.' It's great, you know; it's great to work with such talented people.
I may be biting off more than I can chew, but with 'The Simpsons' and with 'Futurama,' what I'm trying to do in the guise of light entertainment, if this is possible - is nudge people, jostle them a little, wake them up to some of the ways in which we're being manipulated and exploited.
'The Simpsons' basically - and 'Futurama' - are really smart shows. They're kind of disguised as these goofy animated sitcoms, but the references within the shows, if you're paying attention, are pretty smart and pretty sophisticated.
The nice thing about 'Futurama' for me personally was that it was a way to honor some of the traditional ideas in literary science fiction, not so much movie or television science fiction - although we have that too, obviously. Our situation, a workplace comedy, led to all sorts of stuff.
Once a poet always a poet, and even though I haven't written poems for a long time, I can nonetheless say that everything I've ever learned about writing lyrical fiction has been informed by three decades of writing in lines and stanzas. For me the real drama of fiction is almost always the drama of the language.
The thing about a cartoon is, you can do whatever you want. The tightrope that we are walking on 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama' is 'How do you continue to surprise the audience, but make them good surprises?' Not every surprise is good, but you want to continue jolting people.
The thing about a cartoon is, you can do whatever you want. The tightrope that we are walking on 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama' is "How do you continue to surprise the audience, but make them good surprises?" Not every surprise is good, but you want to continue jolting people.
There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.
Real life was messier than fiction, and in it you didn't always have time to do or say the right things.
I think fiction can help us find everything. You know, I think that in fiction you can say things and in a way be truer than you can be in real life and truer than you can be in non-fiction. There's an accuracy to fiction that people don't really talk about - an emotional accuracy.
Basically, we used to have a rule at 'Saturday Night Live' that you're not allowed to bring up 'The Simpsons' at the rewrite table, because 'The Simpsons' has done every joke there is. Every week there would be guys going, 'The Simpsons did that.' I go, 'C'mon.' And 'South Park,' too.
The Simpsons and Futurama are such big projects, going on for years and working in different media, that everything involved with them, promotion and merchandise and online presence and all the rest, deserve to be scrutinized, so that's part of it. I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone at the core of a multimedia juggernaut, even if you might not care for the specific pop-culture invasion of your brain. The people who do it work really hard.
I always knew I wanted to write really imaginative fiction - fiction that was very different from my real life.
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