Good grief--losing the voice actors will completely kill the show. I can't believe they're moving forward with this.
Everyone needs to keep in mind that the whole thing is political.
Fox wants the actors to think they can be replaced and that Fox will replace them. If this were to work for Fox the obvious ideal for them would be that the actors would come crawling back to them.
Upon first glance that seems like a good strategy but it falls apart almost immediately:
For starters, like "The Simpsons" you have a cast of about 10 people (West, Sagal, Dimaggio, LaMarche, LaMarr, Herman, Tom MacNeille, Welker and Soucie) who do 95% of the voices on the show. The concept of cheaper VO talent falls apart when you have to employ two or three times that many people to do what the original 8 did.
Secondly, you have UNANIMOUS rejection on the part of the audience. I haven't seen one person who is not bothered by the idea of the parts being recast.
and again, this is the kind of thing that Fox didn't think through because the very basic idea makes sense for a few seconds and on one hand you can't really blame them for running with it because there are God knows how many millions of dollars on the line and they are in the business of making money but Fox has to know that this simply won't work.
What Fox needs to realize is that you can pay new people to go stand in front of a microphone and read lines off a script but you can't expect people to grow to love these portrayals and respect the performers behind them for overt 10 years and not notice and/or care, especially not on something like this where the fanbase is pretty savvy.
Take a character like Mickey Mouse or Fred Flintstone that aim wide to a pretty casual audience and few people will object to a voiceover change but to a significant and overwhelming portion of the "Futurama" audience these characters are associated with specific people. They appear at cons, on commentaries etc.
Ultimatelyreplacing these people is within the rights of Fox as the owners of all things "Futurama" but they're going to find that it's impossible in practice. I don't see re-cast "Futurama" episodes making it to the air, what we really need to worry about is Fox knowing "Futurama" can't exist without this cast and pulling the plug because they can't make the dollars and cents add up.
Hopefully it will all work out and the first episode of Season 6 will make light of the situation in the same way they made light of the cancellation at the beginning of the previous season in "Bender's Big Score".
