Conan O'Brien's Massive Head Caused A Massive Headache For Futurama
Comedian, talk show host, and papery-white buffoon Conan O'Brien stands a massive 6'4" tall, and his head weights 35-40% more than an average human's. He's a large, pale man and has a big head. O'Brien was always happy to withstand jokes about his size and appearance, as evidenced by the conversations he would have with Martin Short on "Late Night." "There's nothing wrong with being pasty," Short would say. "You're paler than any human being that has breath going in and out of them."
In the "Futurama" episode "Xmas Story" (December 19, 1999), the Planet Express crew took a brief holiday outing to a ski resort in the Catskills and began their vacation by taking in a comedy show headlined by Conan O'Brien's Severed Head (O'Brien). Recall that "Futurama" takes place in the 31st century, a place where all modern-day celebrities have survived as severed heads in jars. O'Brien makes a stale joke about Y2K (a crisis that had been averted 900 years ago) before talking about walking to work. Bender (John DiMaggio) heckles that a severed head cannot walk.
O'Brien confronts the heckling robot. "Listen, pal," he says, "I may have lost my freakishly long legs in the war of 2012, but I still have something you'll never have: a soul." Bender doesn't care about not having a soul. "And freckles," Conan yells. Only then does Bender begin crying.
On the DVD commentary track for "Xmas Story," show co-creator David X. Cohen and director Rich Moore comment on the animation of the episode and how realizing Conan O'Brien was a difficult process. Mostly, it was because Conan's head is so large and he tends to comb his hair up, making it even taller. One might note that O'Brien's animated head extends above the liquids in which it is floating.
Conan O'Brien Can't Stop having a big head
Moore commented that, in terms of animation, Conan's upstanding cranium cause headaches. "His head sticking out of that jar was a big technical problem," the director explained. Cohen noted that it was important to have Conan's head extending out of his jar ("Well, we called for it because he has a giant head. In real life, he does have a giant head"), with Moore then stating:
"Those jars, digitally, are a bunch of layers of transparencies. And just the fact that it was sticking out at a level of water that was ... it made our technical guys' heads hurt."
Transparencies, as the name implies, is about what elements of a single animated element have opacity and which ones don't. Picture a jar with a human head in it, filmed from a static camera. A viewer should be able to see the rim of liquid in front of a jarred head, but not behind it. The rim of the jar itself, meanwhile, should be seen in the front, and it should overlap with the rim in the back. With Conan's hair sticking up out of the liquid, however, one would have to figure out which elements of the jar rim would be in front of it, as well as how the edge of the liquid AND the edge of the jar would disappear behind it. It looks like it would be simple, but animating O'Brien's noggin required a lot of retooling.
Writer Bill Odenkirk quipped that, "It's only marginally more difficult to actually get a live head to live in a jar than to animate it."
Why not simply put Conan's massive head in a larger jar instead? Because that's less funny.