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Beaming Star Trek: The Next Generation with Family Guy Showrunner David Goodman
by Troy Rogers
 After the geeky success of the all Star Wars Family Guy episode, Blue Harvest, creator Seth MacFarlane and Family Guy executive producer and showrunner David Goodman are boldly going where few have gone before since the series finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation back in 1994. On Sunday March 29 at 9pm on Fox, Peter and the Griffin family head to the annual Quahog Star Trek convention where an angry Stewie hatches a plan to create a transporter in his bedroom and beam the entire Next Gen cast into the house to get up close and personal with Picard, Data, Jordie, Worf and the rest of the '90s Enterprise crew.
Leading up to the premiere of the special Trekkie episode of Family Guy, "Not All Dogs Go to Heaven," we beamed ourselves into a conference call with Family Guy executive producer David Goodman to get the goods on bringing the original Next Generation cast back together and why they chose to do Star Trek: The Next Generation so many years later.
THE DEADBOLT: Why do an episode now with The Next Generation cast? Is it sort of a tie-in to the film?
DAVID GOODMAN: That was actually the intention. Actually, you could ask last week, 'Why did we do a Back to the Future reference when the movie is 30 years old?' I think we’re fans, especially Seth and I are huge fans of Star Trek, and we realized that although there had been plenty of episodic television that brought back the cast of the original series, there, in fact, had not been. In fact, I wrote one of them for Futurama, "Where No Fan Has Gone Before," where we reunited the original cast.
But Seth and I realized that nobody had really reunited The Next Generation cast and many of them had already appeared on our show. Next Generation was a hugely popular show in its day. I think they got 10 million or 12 million a week, I think we only get like 8 million, so it was a popular show. We’re not necessarily going to reference the most current, although we do that, our stock and trade is our own memories of shows we watched when we were younger.
THE DEADBOLT: You guys did the Star Wars episode, Blue Harvest, and now Star Trek. Is there any talk of doing something about Terminator?
 GOODMAN: We’ve done occasional sort of Terminator gags. We got one, I think, coming up. But, no, our big movie thing's coming, we did The Empire Strikes Back. We did - eventually down the road, that’s just gone into production is Return of the Jedi. So we’re doing all three of the Star Wars films and then we occasionally do movie parodies within the course of an episode. We have a episode that’s very reminiscent of Tootsie coming up next year, but no plans at the moment to do the Terminator.
THE DEADBOLT: Just a quick favor; Can you do some more Facts of Life references?
GOODMAN: Sure. It’s a favorite show of Seth’s and I think eventually you’ll be seeing some more Facts of Life coverage. Although we’ve done two or three at least, right?
Other Conference Call Highlights:
David Goodman on his favorite scene in the Star Trek episode:
"I think probably my favorite scene is the one that I’m in. I’m a huge Star Trek fan, so the artists do a version of me and then I voice the character dressed as a Star Trek, some might say fan, some might say geek, and asking a question at the convention. And then I have a little bit of a run-in later with Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes, so that’s probably my favorite scene."
Goodman on Brian’s role in the episode:
"There’s two stories going on in the episode. One story involves Meg and Brian. Meg finds God and she finds religion and is giving Brian a hard time for his atheism. So that’s one story. When we developed that story, we sort of saw that Stewie didn’t have a big role to play in that story, so we then also developed a story to go with it. And the two stories tie together at the beginning when the family goes to the Star Trek convention and Stewie doesn’t get to get his question answered, so he finds plans for a transporter and beams the cast into his room.
"But the other story that’s going on is Meg and Brian and it’s them finding religion and it’s a subject we’ve done before in different ways, but this one has a new twist on it. We were struck by the fact that in America atheism is considered worse by some people than Muslim extremism so that was an interesting subject for us, we thought. And we’ve always said Brian is an atheist, so it seemed a natural."
David Goodman on whether it takes longer to produce an episode with many guest voices:
 "No, not really. You’re on a schedule and you have to get the voices recorded before the show can be animated. So our production team is just really excellent at organizing and the artists are very flexible in terms of they can work on something if we’re waiting for voices on other characters, they can start drawing other things. It’s a very talented group of artists and production people who make sure that we stick to schedules. Sometimes we fall a little behind, but this episode was not more difficult than others.
"A show like Blue Harvest, on the other hand, where you have complicated action sequences and computer generated effects, that can take a lot longer. But in terms of guest cast, it’s actually the easiest thing, assuming that we get them in to record, it takes them five, ten minutes to record all their lines and they’re done and we can then move on."
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