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Comedy Central gives Futurama new future

Posted Wed Jun 10, 2009 12:18pm AEST

It's back to Futurama for fans of the animated series.

Taking a page from the Family Guy resurrection guidebook, the cancelled Fox animated comedy is returning with an order from Comedy Central for 26 new episodes to run over two seasons.

Futurama creators Matt Groening and David X Cohen are already working on stories for the new batch of episodes of the sci-fi cartoon, slated to premiere in mid-2010.

Just as with Family Guy, whose improbable return was triggered by big DVD sales and solid ratings for the show's reruns on Cartoon Network, the performance of Futurama's repeats on Comedy Central and on DVD was key to its resurrection.

Futurama, which aired on Fox for five seasons - from 1999 to 2003 - centres on Philip Fry (Billy West), a 25-year-old pizza delivery boy who accidentally freezes himself on December 31, 1999, and wakes up 1,000 years later with a fresh start at life and a "diverse" new group of friends including Leela (Katey Sagal), a tough but lovely one-eyed alien, and Bender (John DiMaggio), a robot who possesses human characteristics and flaws.

When the series returns with original episodes in 2010, it will be seven years after the show's last original episode aired on Fox. That's a much longer hiatus than the three years Family Guy spent on the bench before being summoned back by Fox.

All key voice cast members are expected to return for the new episodes, along with the series' core writing team.