An infinitely self-replicating Bender threatens to turn Earth into food when Futurama returns Thursday.
Images courtesy Futurama/20th Century Fox Film

In an age of escalating atomization, few pop-culture productions prove death-proof. But somehow, sci-fi cartoon Futurama continues to outwit any Execu-bots determined to pull the plug on the long-running show.

“We try to die, but it’s gratifying not to,” executive producer David X. Cohen told Wired.com by phone, ahead of Futurama’s return to the airwaves with a one-hour special Thursday night on Comedy Central.

Fans have much to look forward to in the second half of Futurama’s sixth season.

Cohen is particularly stoked on “Benderama,” previewed at right, in which profane robot Bender gains the power — like the show itself, one could argue — to infinitely self-replicate. That puts Earth in danger of becoming nothing more than food matter for a quintillion Benders.

In another clever episode, previewed below, Bender massively increases his processing speed, takes on tremendous powers of computation, improves himself at an exponential rate and “passes the existential singularity and the concerns of mankind,” said Cohen.

“It’s pretty deep, but there are also a lot of flaming belches,” he said. “We pull you in with the mathematical theorems, and we keep you with the flaming belches.”

Another Cohen favorite is “Reincarnation,” also previewed below, in which the show is filtered through three different animation styles. The first is a black-and-white look reminiscent of Fleischer Studios, the second apes lo-res 1980s videogame style and the third evokes the tropes and traps of Japanese anime, including Bender’s proud proclamation, “Mighty Merchandise Robot!”

It’s a promising batch of new episodes for a show that, despite ricocheting between networks like a charged particle since its 1999 debut, has remained an inextricable part of the sci-fi universe. After the show was dumped by Fox and syndicated by culture vulture Adult Swim, Comedy Central finally saw the light and gave Futurama 26 new episodes in 2009, and another 26 last year, to be aired in 2012 and 2013.

For those keeping score, that’s nearly 70 new episodes — including 16 splintered off from four straight-to-DVD movies — of an award-winning cartoon once left for dead. Throughout the ordeal, a hard-core contingent of fans kept Futurama on life support while the industry snapped out of its soporific infatuation with lesser shows.

While it may come as no surprise to those hooked on Futurama’s brilliant hyperspeed merge of fringe science, uproarious comedy and occasional pathos, Cohen said this latest wave of success has caught him off guard.

‘Good things come to those with no expectations.’

“You’d think at this point that I couldn’t be surprised by the news anymore, but it still manages to surprise me,” he said. “Good things come to those with no expectations.

“When they ordered the first batch of episodes, I really thought Comedy Central wanted to hype the fact the Futurama had a new home,” Cohen added. “It really had the feeling of a one-off deal, so I had no expectations that we’d have more of them. But I was quite surprised. It just goes to show you: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me four times, shame on me.”

Futurama’s deathbed conversion has the evolution of entertainment economics written all over it. When the half-hour show appeared in 1999, network television still ruled with an iron fist, although cable was ascendant. Now that streaming media, itinerant downloading, viral marketing and decentralized taste-making have taken hold, fragmentation is paying the bills just fine, thanks.

“The renewal definitely says something about the changing model of entertainment,” Cohen said. “When Futurama was on Fox, we had a contingent of hard-core fans that annually put us on the borderline of renewal. Each year, we had to find out whether we were back or not. Cut to years later, we’re on cable television, and we have that same number of hard-core fans, but for cable that’s a big audience. Combine that with the fact that audiences are generally fragmenting, and we’re in a good position. If we hold on to the same number of fans while every other show’s fan base is eroding, then our relative stature creeps up every year.”

Capitalizing on the misfortune of other shows, and their bloated networks, isn’t the only way Futurama has had the last laugh. It has also capitalized on the diverse funding opportunities that have arisen in the wake of the once-monolithic entertainment industry’s collapse. Where it once had to strictly rely on Fox for funding, it has since shown that it can create revenue streams from a variety of sources. And thanks to its consistently geeked fan base, it has market share to spare.

“We’ve shown that you can get by on cable money, plus DVD money, plus international money and now perhaps a few hundred extra dollars in iTunes money,” Cohen said. “And that also gives the fans a bit more control. So I’ll give them 98 percent of the credit, and we’ll take 2 percent.”

Cohen said Futurama’s seventh season, due in 2012 and 2013, is still in a formative stage. But given next year’s noxious odor of apocalypse, he admitted the show might venture where few toons, dead or alive, have gone before.

“We have a presidential election coming up, so we’ll probably need another Richard Nixon episode,” he said. “He’ll be running as the liberal candidate.”

Futurama airs Thursdays at 10 p.m./9 p.m. Central on Comedy Central.