When Matt Groening was growing up in Portland, Oregon (with his father, Homer, his mother, Marge, his sisters, Maggie and Lisa, and his brother, Mark), he spent his fair share of time getting into trouble, staying after school (sound familiar?) and, in his spare time (for instance, when sent to his room), reading science-fiction comics and paperback books. He read serious stuff- works by such authors as Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. But he also read a lot of junk-stuff such as Startling Stories, one of whose enlarged covers (with assorted animals being loaded into a huge, futuristic space ark) hangs on the wall outside Groening’s Futurama production office, an unremarkable red-brick building in the industrial district of Los Angeles’s west side. It is here, surrounded by writers, animators and other like-minded subversives, that Futurama, Groening’s first new animated series since The Simpsons’ debut in 1990, has been painstakingly created: a satirical sci-fi vision of life in the year 3000, a world inhabited by mutants, aliens, remorseless robots and an evil, world-dominating corporation called Mom.

In Futurama (Fox; special preview Sunday, April 4, 8:30 P.M./ET, then in its regular time slot on Tuesdays, 8:30 P.M./ET), people travel in flying cars and pneumatic tubes, use coin-operated suicide booths and watch a TV show titled Mass Hypnosis Hour. (Although, Groening likes to point out, The Simpsons is still on the air in 3000.)

"The template for The Simpsons was a conventional 1950s sitcom, which we twisted around," says Groening, who, at 45, is still bearded, burly and only slightly less likely to be seen in a Hawaiian shirt than he was before The Simpsons made him rich and famous. "With Futurama, we’re taking the science-fiction melodrama and turning it on its head."

In the process, Groening, along with coexecutive producer David X. Cohen and more than 100 digital-animation whiz kids at Rough Draft Studios, has created a cartoon that is visually unlike any animated series ever produced-a mind-blowing maelstrom of traditional animation and computerized imagery, digital graphics that allow every frame to be filled with more detail than any human could possibly absorb.

"Most television does not reward viewers for paying attention," Groening says. "You’ve seen it once, and that’s often one time too many. On Futurama, we’re trying to make it so that you can’t get everything in one viewing. On both The Simpsons and Futurama, we have the idea of the freeze-frame gag. Which means the only way you’re going to get some of the jokes is if you tape the show, go back and actually freeze-frame [it]."

But it’s not just secret hieroglyphics and split-second sight gags that make Futurama different. Because most of the exterior background work is computer-embellished, there is a richness of detail to buildings, rocket ships and moving cars that other cartoons don’t have. The camera is able to pan around buildings and vehicles as if they were three-dimensional. The danger with all this high-tech eye candy is that, left unchecked, attention might be drawn away from the story and dialogue, which is why, although still impressive, the backgrounds have been intentionally toned down.

"One of the great things about animation is that you can cram a lot more quotes and references and plot twists in a cartoon than in live action, and we’ve taken full advantage of that. This show is so jammed with visual jokes that we’ve even got an alien alphabet that we’re not translating. We’re going to allow our fans to try to figure out what those things say."

"That’s the one thing we were afraid of when we were writing it," says Cohen, who began working full-time on Futurama more than a year ago and had tossed around character ideas and story lines with Groening for at least a year before that. "With all these fabulous three-dimensional shots of the city, who’s going to notice what our characters are talking about? We didn’t want people to be distracted by that."

"We spent a lot of time simplifying the look," says Rough Draft animation producer Claudia Katz, "so that you don’t notice what’s hand drawn and what isn’t. The two looks have to match. Otherwise it would be the equivalent of Kelsey Grammer acting against a blue screen with a computer-generated [David Hyde Pierce]. It wouldn’t work. "

The basic premise of Futurama, an idea that Groening has been mulling over for the last five years, is that a pizza-delivery boy named Fry (voiced by Billy West, probably best known as the voices of Ren and Stimpy) is accidentally frozen on New Year’s Eve, 1999, and is thawed out a thousand years later. He encounters a world where destiny is preassigned, so he becomes, once again, a delivery boy, this time for Planet Express, an intergalactic courier service where his best friends and co-workers are Leela (voiced by Married... With Children’s Katey Sagal, pictured at top), a beautiful one-eyed alien martial-arts expert; and Bender (voiced by stand-up comedian John DiMaggio), a hard-drinking, cigar-smoking, pornography-reading robot whom Groening describes as "totally corrupt" and the show’s most likely breakout character.

"The idea of a person without guilt is fascinating to me, and that’s what Bender is," says Groening, who admits to a sci-fi-generated childhood fear of robots. "You know, I’ve been criticized so often in the past for providing bad role models for kids. That’s the beauty of Bender. How can you get mad at a robot role model? You can’t. It’s a robot!" Leela, the beautiful cyclops who commands the delivery ship, is seen by Groening as a combination of Emma Peel and Xena. "I wanted a kick-ass heroine," he says. "And I also like the idea of a woman who is beautiful and doesn’t realize it. So I wanted a character who is really beautiful, but with only one eye." "I think of her as a lonely little cyclops, tough on the outside, soft on the in-side and looking for love," says Sagal, who admits to being a little intimidated by the voice-over process. "I think I’m getting better, and I’m assuming the producers are happy with me, ’cause I’m still there."

"One of the key things about this show, although it’s set in the future and has all this sci-fi stuff, is that it’s about these characters who have to stick together," says Cohen, whose credentials for his job are, to say the least, eclectic: He was a writer for The Simpsons and Beavis and Butt-head, and, before that, earned a physics degree from Harvard and a master’s in theoretical computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. He also spent a year at the Harvard Robotics Lab, wrote for the Harvard Lampoon and had an article published in the Journal of Discrete Applied Mathematics.

"Our goal as writers is to make the audience really care about these people," Cohen says. "Although I use the term people loosely, because some of them are robots, some of them are aliens and some of them are not quite sure what they are." The buzz about Futurama, particularly on the Internet, where there are already at least a dozen Web sites devoted to the show, has been intense since word leaked out last year that Groening was putting together a new animated show with a science-fiction theme. The rumor mills were kept busy-and anticipation was heightened-because Groening wanted to keep the project under wraps for as long as possible. Fox executives ordered 13 episodes without ever seeing a frame of film.

"When we went in for voice auditions, all we knew was that it was gonna be Matt’s next project, which automatically made it a big deal, and that it was going to be about the future," says West (pictured, top), who, in addition to Fry, does the voice of space commander Zapp Brannigan, a part originally written for the late Phil Hartman. "So we really had no idea what the show was going to be-other than it definitely wasn’t going to be The Jetsons."

For his part, Groening has as much, if not more, confidence in Futurama as he had in The Simpsons. "The difference is, this time we actually know what we’re doing," he says, pointing out that when The Simpsons began, the drawings kept changing from episode to episode, and half the characters were made up as the show progressed.

"It’s fun to create a universe," Groening says. "We have one episode in which Fry, our hero [whose unspoken first name is Phillip, a tribute to Hartman], goes to a planet where the denizens spend part of their existence in liquid form, and Fry accidentally drinks the emperor. I love that." Groening, having just seen the premiere episode with all its bells and whistles, is, in a word, giddy. He has visions of a Futurama movie. He has ideas for a theme park. He is even thinking about an animated version of Life in Hell, his long-running alternative-weekly comic strip, which he has been drawing for 19 years.

In some ways, though, Groening is still the kid he was in school, the smart, antisocial misfit, doodling in the back of the class. That’s partly why he loved all the complaints in the Simpsons’ early years about the show’s being a bad influence on children, undermining authority, mocking family values, making fun of religion, schools and nuclear-power plants. "It’s kind of sad that we no longer offend people," he says. "The Simpsons used to be the downfall of Western civilization."

But there’s always the future-Groening’s version of it, anyway-where delivery boys struggle with the meaning of existence while robots get drunk and watch porn. In a society where everyone’s life is programmed, Groening’s characters keep making trouble. "If there’s an underlying message in this show," he says, "it’s that the authorities don’t always have your best interests in mind. No matter what they say."