Will ‘Disenchantment’ Ever Return? Bosses Break Down ‘Futurama’ Crossover

Three years after Disenchantment said goodbye to Dreamland, the gang is back together — with one very confused Philip J. Fry (Billy West) along for the ride.

When Disenchantment ended its five-season run, Princess Bean (Abbi Jacobson) got her happy ending after finally defeating her mother, Queen Dagmar (Sharon Horgan), giving up the throne, and riding off with Mora (Meredith Hagner). Elfo (Nat Faxon), meanwhile, discovered the truth about his half-elf, half-ogre heritage, found love with Miri (Lauren Tom), and became Dreamland’s new king alongside his queen. Luci (Eric André) made the biggest sacrifice of all, giving his life to protect his friends before winding up in Heaven, where he used his one wish from God to resurrect Mora for Bean.

That seemingly definitive ending made the trio’s reunion in Futurama all the more surprising.

In Season 14’s “A New New York Yankee in King Elfo’s Court,” Fry becomes trapped sideways in time after the Professor’s latest time-travel experiment goes wrong. His dreams transport him to Dreamland, where he meets King Elfo and Miri before Bean unexpectedly returns, and Luci drops in on a day pass from Heaven. As Bean, Elfo, and Luci embrace, Fry hilariously observes, “This is a really touching reunion, and I don’t know who the hell any of you are.”

But the reunion doesn’t stay happy for long. Dagmar escapes and steals Fry’s time machine, hoping to travel back and prevent Bean, Elfo, and Luci from ever meeting. That sends Fry and the Disenchantment gang on a time-travel adventure that ultimately brings the worlds of science and magic together — and even gives Fry a chance to become a hero in Dreamland.

TV Insider spoke with Disenchantment and Futurama creators Matt Groening, Josh Weinstein, and David X. Cohen about bringing Bean, Elfo, and Luci back three years after their finale, why Fry was the perfect Futurama character to enter Dreamland, and whether this crossover really marks the last we’ll see of the Disenchantment gang.

Storyboard sketches from “A New New York Yankee in King Elfo’s Court” (Courtesy of Rough Draft Studios/Hulu)

Disenchantment ended its run in September 2023. Why is now, three years to almost the day, the right time to return to the series?

Matt Groening: We had such a good time making the show, and the fan reaction to it was so intense and lingering. We still hear about it all the time.

Josh Weinstein: They really wanted more. Even though we had planned the ending, it ended in a way where the three main characters are all in disparate locations. So there is a lot of fan clamoring for, “Oh, I want a reunion of them.” That’s part of it.

Groening: And in our minds, the characters’ lives did go on, and this was just a way of telling a little bit more of the story. And then, fan service. Having the characters hug was something that was demanded over and over again. The ending of the original series was pretty bittersweet.

And then the other thing about it was that Futurama and Disenchantment are basically the same team. It’s the same great animation studio, Rough Draft, and the same animators. And then virtually the same cast as Futurama were the cast of Disenchantment, except for Princess Bean, played by Abbi Jacobson, Nat Faxon as Elfo, and Eric André as Luci. But the rest of the cast was all Futurama actors.

Cohen: Both of them having Matt’s design style makes it a pretty easy crossover as crossovers go.

Weinstein: You’ve got the same actor who does Sorcerio as the Professor, and Sorcerio’s really just a medieval Professor. So there’s kind of the thrill of seeing those come together, not just as fans of both shows, but as fans of the actors as well. To see them act with themselves is kind of cool.

Disney/Matt Groening

When you brought the two shows together, did you have any rules you had to follow so you didn’t undo the finale that you created? 

Groening: Well, we did try to write ourselves out of a situation. Luci, the demon, was stuck in heaven, which is a good thing, I think, for all eternity. But he was able to make a deal with God.

Cohen: You get a day pass.

Weinstein: It was fun because we had to figure out how to bring them together in a realistic way, but we’re still saying their lives continued after the ending of Disenchantment. So we’re sort of touching base with them now.

Groening: And Disenchantment is full of little Futurama Easter eggs.

Weinstein: In fact, from the very first episode of Disenchantment, we put in Futurama Easter eggs. Fry’s hair is in the wig shop, and there’s a Bender puppet in the puppet shop. And then, of course, there’s the big one of all that really, I think, caused this episode to blossom: The time machine appears in the scene where we see the crystal ball going back somewhere in time. The time machine actually appears very briefly.

Cohen: In Disenchantment. Originally, yes. So that wasn’t added after the fact for any skeptical viewers. So the time machine was waiting, and now we’ve delivered it.

Storyboard sketches from “A New New York Yankee in King Elfo’s Court” (Courtesy of Rough Draft Studios/Hulu)

You guys were notorious for that, though, aren’t you? You used to do that in Futurama, where you would plant little things.

Cohen: We have the Nibbler shadow in the pilot and stuff like that. I mean, not that we always have the grandest plan, but you’re like, “This is interesting, and we’ll be able to do something with this someday and then claim to be geniuses.”

Weinstein: Yes, that’s exactly it. Fry immediately fits into this trio of Elfo and Luci and Bean without knowing who they are. What made Fry perfect to plop into this trio rather than, let’s say, Bender?

Cohen: Fry as the odd man out is very natural for us because he’s the guy from the past. He’s the one who’s used to falling into confusing situations that are overwhelming, and so for him, that’s a fairly normal scenario now, to just wake up in another universe, and he’s like, “Alright! I’m in for whatever’s going on now.”

So he’s the natural candidate. And I would say, from my point of view as the Futurama anchor of the episode, I talked a lot with Josh and Matt early on about how we want to make sure it plays as a Futurama episode, even if we have to go to the sets of Disenchantment. We thought Fry could be a good emotional anchor. If he went, and Leela was left behind, then it left you with this emotional situation.

Disney/Matt Groening

Weinstein: For people who don’t know Disenchantment but just love Futurama, it’s a fun time travel story, and it’s also kind of a Fry-Leela story. But then, for people who like Disenchantment, they’ll love it because they get to see their characters back, too.

Cohen: I think it makes it a fairly natural Futurama episode in the sense that our characters frequently go off to some other world, another universe, another dimension. So for Fry to visit Dreamland is well within the bounds of Futurama. I think it worked as a Futurama episode as well as a crossover.

Weinstein: It’s nice because Fry gets to be a hero. And he’s often kind of neglected at Planet Express, so it’s a little bit of that, too, in a way.

When you have two shows, they both have to follow their own rules. Futurama is very much dictated by science, and then you have Disenchantment that’s very much ruled by magic. Which universe’s rules kind of win? Is it Disenchantment because we’re in Dreamland?

Weinstein: That’s a really good question. Disenchantment has stience, whereas Futurama has science. But they fit because the characters all come from the same heads. And it’s also that magic is the science of the Disenchantment world. They just don’t know it.

Cohen: That’s exactly what I would have said if you hadn’t stolen it before I said it. The laws of that universe that Fry goes to visit incorporate magic and things like that. If we go to a world where gravity is reversed or something, we could go to worlds, I think, in Futurama, which have their own laws of physics. And I think that is the thinking here. Disenchantment has its rules, and if you go there, those rules are followed while you’re there.

Weinstein: Magic is science that hasn’t been discovered yet. So it kind of fits.

Cohen: That’s a good quote. I’m going to steal that quote.

Weinstein: I think I stole it from some writer 200 years ago. But they’re dead, so it’s fine.

Cohen: Help yourself. Once they’re dead, it’s fair game.

Was there a particular joke or something that happened when the two worlds collided that made you the happiest?

Groening: Well, I did like, Josh, your line when you had Fry saying, “I can’t believe I’m so touched by all these people, and I don’t even know who you are.”

Weinstein: It was a very realistic reaction. And it might be to half the viewers, too.

Cohen: As far as the characters meeting, I think the one Josh mentioned earlier of Sorcerio meeting the Professor was a very natural eye-to-eye meeting, since they’re the same actor.

Groening: And that’s by Billy West.

Weinstein: Yeah, Billy West meeting Billy West.

Cohen: They both control the science. They both are experts in the science of their world, so that was sort of the climactic moment of this episode, them coming together.

Weinstein: Yeah, and I also like to see the characters drink together. It’s fun because they really open up. You can see there’s a common ground that they share with each other.

Disney/Matt Groening

Cohen: The constant through history, from the ancient past to the distant future, is heavy drinking. The one thing that binds humanity together.

Alcoholism.

Cohen: Yeah, that’s right.

Matt Groening: You know, also, it was really fun to bring Disenchantment back because all three of us have worked on all three shows, Disenchantment, Futurama, and The Simpsons. Two of the shows are still going, and so it was fun to bring Disenchantment back, if only for a single crossover episode.

Weinstein: Yes, for 20 minutes, it was such a treat because we and a lot of the fans of the show just miss the characters and the world so much.

Groening: And I gotta say, Josh did the heavy lifting. He wrote the episode. This happened…do I have the timing right? During the wildfires?

So I had to move out of my house. I didn’t lose my house, but I had to move out for a month, and at the same time, I got COVID, so I disappeared, and Josh wrote the whole thing.

Weinstein: I’m slowly watching the fires come closer and closer to our houses, but they didn’t, luckily, hit. But it was fun. And it was Matt’s idea and the story as well. So it all just kind of came together, all three of us loving both these worlds.

Groening: And the other thing is, Disenchantment, the final season, came out during the writers’ strike. We weren’t allowed to talk about it, we couldn’t promote it, and so it went out, and we never got to wrap it up and talk about it. So this is that interview. Thank you for doing this.

Weinstein: Yeah, it’s true. And it’s just for the fans, too, because I think they’ll get some satisfaction. They’ll just get a little more taste of it while enjoying a great time-travel story.

Groening: It’s really fun to do. And again, Rough Draft did a phenomenal job. The show looks great. You know, Disenchantment was — I hate to say this; David’s the showrunner of Futurama, but I think Disenchantment looks a little better.

Cohen: I mean, we should discuss the actual production of this episode because it’s quite unusual and complicated from a producing point of view.  It was one of those cases where, at first, our animators at Rough Draft were saying, “For Futurama, we don’t have the resources to do the kind of backgrounds and the lighting and these things that were very much specially designed for Disenchantment.” They had extra people in the process at that point just to handle the lighting, things like that, and these very painterly backgrounds.

If given the opportunity, would we ever get to see a crossover with The Simpsons, or some sort of triple crossover between the three shows?

Groening: Well, I’ll have to talk with myself. Yeah, it’s possible. Crossovers are hard to do.

Weinstein: Also, a thing about crossovers that’s real tricky to pull off is, it still has to be a good story and a good story of that show. You can’t just go, “Why, look, it’s Andy Griffith coming here to Petticoat Junction,” or whatever. There has to be a story driven by the characters of that show. And we were just able to find, by the magic or science of time travel, that we could do it.

I guess my last question is: Is this going to be the very last that we see of Bean, Luci, and Elfo?

Groening: I know we’ve talked about this. We have more stories to tell, but no plans to do it right now, except in our fantasies, in our daydreams. But yeah, there’s a lot more to tell.

Futurama, 8/7c, Mondays, Hulu