When the streamer enlisted Groening to create a new series, he decided to take characters he’d been sketching for years and create a new world far removed from The Simpsons and Futurama. Groening is traveling back to medieval times for Disenchantment, which follows a foul-mouthed, partygirl princess who no longer wants to adhere to the rules set forth by her royal family. Abbi Jacobson (Broad City) voices Princess Bean, who finds friends to cause mischief with along the way: an elf named Elfo (Nat Faxon), and a demon named Luci (Eric Andre). “Working with Netflix has been a dream in part because they’ve been enthusiastic about every single thing we’ve mentioned,” Groening said during our roundtable interview at San Diego Comic-Con. “And they’re equally enthusiastic when we change our minds and go the other way. It’s incredible.”
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The writers’ room is able to tell stories in a new way with a shorter episode order, without being restricted by the half-hour format. Disenchantment executive producer Josh Weinstein, who had a long stint over at The Simpsons, said they wouldn’t have been able to abandon the cookie-cutter sitcom format on Fox or another broadcast network. Though they have free reign on Netflix, it doesn’t mean the writers gave in to their raunchiest of influences. “There’s certainly no censorship at all,” Groening said of Netflix. “When we originally talked about this, we thought maybe we’ll go a little more risque, a little dirtier, and we wrote a few jokes that way, and we said, ‘No, this doesn’t feel right.’” “This is very intentional, because we’re old farts,” Weinstein joked. “I think that there is a younger set of writers and animators who grew up on The Simpsons and shows like South Park. They’re already more evolved than us. They had a base. I grew up on Scooby Doo.” We’ll see if a new generation of streamers will connect with Bean, Elfo, and Lucci when Disenchantment releases on August 17th on Netflix. Read the latest Den of Geek Special Edition Magazine Here!
