How Futurama Created Hypnotoad's Horrible Yet Hilarious Sound
When it comes to making fun of a TV-obsessed culture, Matt Groening's shows are pretty great. His first animated sitcom "The Simpsons" would frequently feature its characters sitting around watching lazy television, from the over-alarmist Kent Brockman to the absurdly-inappropriate-for-kids "Itchy & Scratchy Show." The first layer of this running joke is that TV is bad and it rots your soul; the second layer is that this criticism is coming from a TV show itself, which we're watching. We can laugh at Homer and Bart as they amuse themselves over a braindead "When Buildings Collapse" documentary, but we can't judge them because we know we're guilty of the same thing.
Groening's next sitcom "Futurama" takes place in the same basic world of "The Simpsons," but a thousand years in the future. The world here has all the same problems as our current one, but they're taken to their logical extreme after centuries of rampant consumerism. Not only is a lot of the TV in "Futurama" casually written and produced by robots, but most of it is absurdly lazy even by "Simpsons" standards. The prime example of this is "Everybody Loves Hypnotoad," a show that is literally just footage of an alien toad staring at the camera, hypnotizing its viewers into sitting there and watching him forever.
It's a cynical TV producer's wildest dream: A show that requires zero writers and a shoestring production budget, which keeps its viewers glued to the screen without ever needing to provide them any genuine entertainment. In today's landscape where shows and films are often over-filled with spectacle, designed to prevent its viewers from ever being bored for any second, a TV show that literally forbids its viewers from feeling boredom (or anything else for that matter) would be a soulless studio's dream come true.
But where does Hypnotoad's noise come from?
The reason Hypnotoad works so well as a running gag is not just because of the social commentary; it's because the noise that plays over the Hypnotoad's stare is genuinely unsettling and trippy. While we the viewers aren't put under the toad's spell, no suspension of disbelief is required to understand why it works so well for the characters. That's an impressive, difficult trick for the show to pull off. To do so, the editors had to go back to a sound recording one of them had made back in 1992, seven years before the show itself premiered.
"I was in Fort Wayne, Indiana doing this music video and, during some downtime, I was in this cavernous water treatment plant with this great, echo-y sound to it," explained Danik Thomas in a 2022 oral history of the Hypnotoad. "I had this old analog signal generator that made all these different noises, so I hooked that up to my bass amp and recorded it with my microphone. It was the most obnoxious sound ever." The result was a sound that feels like it's frying your mind, melting away any independent thought you might've once had.
Thomas explained how, "for years" before the show itself began, he would use this noise to prank people. "It particularly seemed to annoy Paul Calder, who I worked with on 'Futurama,' so I would get him with that a lot," he said. "I labeled it 'Angry Machine,' which just seemed appropriate."
A joke that will always be relevant
"When it came to Hypnotoad, I put 'Angry Machine' in as sort of a temp sound, hoping they'd stick with it for the actual episode, which they did," Thomas continued. "Futurama" writer Jeff Westbrook, who penned the first episode where Hypnotoad made an appearance, said that the sound was an immediate hit with the writer's room: "Once we heard this giant, droning buzz, it was just hilariously perfect. It was fantastic."
Although Hypnotoad was intended as a one-off gag, it's since gone on to star a minor role in at least 19 episodes since. It's latest appearance was in the recent Hulu revival, over twenty years after the toad's first-ever episode. There are a lot of reasons for the character's success, like how it lends itself well to the meme formats of the 2010s, and the fact that the subject its satirizing has not gone away at all in the past twenty years. One could even argue that the Hypnotoad is no longer just a metaphor for TV but for social media in general; as apps like TikTok seem designed to keep users in a zombie-like trance while they mindlessly flick their thumb up and down, the joke behind Hypnotoad feels more timely than ever.
"I didn't really know that Hypnotoad had this huge online life," writer Eric Kaplan explained, "But I will say, the notion of an attention-leech that monopolizes our attention to pursue its inhuman goals is a pretty good metaphor for the internet. So, the internet kind of is Hypnotoad." It's a bleak observation, but hey, it could be worse. If the internet really is the Hypnotoad, then at least we have the comfort of knowing that we're being controlled by a benevolent leader, beloved by all. All Glory To The Hypnotoad.