Hell Is Other Robots - Production

Production

David X. Cohen and Ken Keeler traveled to New York to work with the Beastie Boys for their role. They waited three days for the Beastie Boys to call and say they were willing to record but eventually gave up and returned to the studios in Los Angeles. The audio tracks were recorded later. Adam "MCA" Yauch was unavailable at the time of the recording so only Adam "King Adrock" Horovitz and Michael "Mike D" Diamond voice themselves in the episode, with Horovitz also voicing Yauch. The Beastie Boys perform their 1998 hit single "Intergalactic" and "Super Disco Breakin," the first track from their album, Hello Nasty. It was initially requested that they perform "Fight for Your Right" but they declined. The episode also contains Futurama's first original musical number. The lyrics to "Robot Hell" were written by Eric Kaplan and Ken Keeler and the music was written by Keeler and Christopher Tyng. When praised for his performance in the audio commentary, John DiMaggio, the voice of Bender, noted that the most difficult part of the performance was singing in a lower octave rather than keeping up with the song's fast pace.

The episode lampoons drug addiction and religious conversion. In the DVD commentary for the episode, David X. Cohen, Matt Groening and Eric Kaplan all agreed that they felt comfortable enough with each of the Futurama characters to begin to take them in new and strange directions. Cohen noted that Bender's addiction is a perfect example of something they could do with a robot character which they could not get away with had it been a human character. One person at the studio refused to work on this episode because they did not agree with the portrayal of some of the religious content. Cohen also noted that the writing team had begun to loosen up during this episode, which gave it a feel similar to the series' later episodes. Kaplan claimed that before editing, there was enough material to make a three-part episode.