Good news, everyone ! On Thursday night, the animated comedy “Futurama” emerges from suspended animation to resume its chronicles of a 31st century populated by irreverent aliens, beer-swilling robots, mad professors, one-eyed mutants, lobster-doctors, hypno-toads and one very perplexed pizza delivery boy stranded from the 20th century.

“Futurama” was created by Matt Groening (of “The Simpsons” fame) and David X. Cohen for Fox. There it ran for four seasons before Fox (which has a history of prematurely canceling its animated cash cows ) pulled the plug. But when its reruns were a hit for Cartoon Network, the show was revived first in a series of DVDs, and now in new episodes that will be shown on Comedy Central.

That’s not only good news for “Futurama” fans but for the actors who perform the voices for its above-mentioned menagerie. In the following interviews, the “Futurama” stars Billy West, Katey Sagal and John DiMaggio discuss how they became part of this modern space-age family, and share the back stories of some of their best-known character voices. (You can also catch up with a seven-minute recap of every “Futurama” episode to date , as narrated by the galactic hero Zapp Brannigan.)

Billy West: I was always one of those kids that did voices and noises. That was my gift, I guess. I don’t know how to do anything else, by the way. If worse came to worse, I could play professional guitar.

I got into radio around 1980. There was a contest to see if you could sound like Mel Blanc , I called in and wised off, and then they asked me to come in. In 1985, I got sober, moved to New York and I wound up on “The Howard Stern Show,” doing anything when they pointed at you. Whoever was in the news, I would just pipe in.

I wound up doing “Doug” in ’91, and then “Ren and Stimpy.” I’d work on the Stern show three days a week and I’d come out to Hollywood to do “Ren and Stimpy” for three more days, which gave me one day to fly home and start it over again. It was kind of a scattered existence, but it all makes sense when I look back. My heroes were radio stars, like Mel Blanc and all those guys. They were radio stars while they were doing cartoons, so that’s my background.

John DiMaggio: I grew up in Jersey. I was doing children’s theater as a kid. I was in Irvington with the Peppermint Players. Then I studied at Mason Gross [School of the Arts] at Rutgers, and dropped out and started doing stand-up comedy and some voice-over stuff.

The same people that cast “Mad TV” cast “Futurama.” I had auditioned for “Mad TV.” And I got it, but I was told not to take it by my agent and my manager. [Laughs] Because the money was bad and the contract was bad. But they were the ones who cast [“Futurama”], so I went back in and I did the [Bender] voice. And David and Matt liked it, so it stuck. I lucked out. There were 200, 300 people that went out for that role. They were looking.

Katey Sagal: I had known Matt from the “Married With Children” days, because he and I were both there when the Fox network had nothing but rabbit ears on top of your television. We had some history, and I just went in and read for him, and he gave me the job.

Philip J. Fry
West: Originally I had auditioned for Dr. Zoidberg, Bender, the Professor and Fry. But I didn’t get Fry — it went to Charlie Schlatter, who’s a heck of an actor and a great voice guy, but they just changed plans. They said to me, “Fry’s 25, so bear that in mind.” It became a high-pitched version of me, trying to remember the dumb innocence of being 25. At that age I had no idea where I was going, I was working for U-Haul shoveling dirt out of trucks, I was washing dishes at nursing homes. I always thought I had this whiny, complaining voice — this plain vanilla voice, but I guess if you’re in neutral, you can go anywhere.

Leela
Sagal: I didn’t know this till years later, but there was a previous Leela [Laughs]. They’d already cast somebody, and then they wanted to make a change. I don’t want to know who — I think it’s better that way.

Leela was the tough-exterior, heart-of-gold, mushy-on-the-inside captain of the ship. I loved how she looked. I loved that she was sexy and feisty, but she didn’t feel that way about herself. It’s great to play a hot, sexy cartoon person who doesn’t really see herself that way. That’s what makes her fun and interesting.

I work with all these amazing voice actors that do a kajillion voices. Now I bring to the party, basically, just me [Laughs]. Leela is a little bit higher-pitched than I am. She definitely is more in a younger, higher register. So I bring her up a little bit. But that’s about all I do, really. My voice seems to work for her. There’s a different process to what I do on “Sons of Anarchy.” Gemma has a killer instinct that we all have in our core. Everybody has that piece of them — she just is able to access it. She’s very demonstrative, and then she’s secretive at the same time — it kind of depends on the situation.

Professor Farnsworth
West: He was 147 years old. So I saw the character, and it was basically a diseased skin wrapped around barely any bones or muscle. And he’d have a little bit of the shakes, so it was a combination of all the wizard-type characters you heard when you were a kid, Burgess Meredith and Frank Morgan in “The Wizard of Oz.”

Bender
DiMaggio: On paper, he was described as a robot who drank, smoked, stole, performed petty crimes, drank again, kept on drinking. Just a really gregarious and way-out-there character. I was like, this sounds like so much fun. I had that kind of a voice in my arsenal.

It’s the trifecta: It’s the drunk at the end of every bar in the Northeast. Just a sloppy drunk. It’s a little bit of Slim Pickens . “What in the hell in the wide, wide world of sports is going on?” And then there’s a character that Ralph Columbino, my buddy from college, did, a character called Charlie the sausage-lover. And we would go back and forth: “Sausages! Sausages! You can have all kinds of sausage! German sausage! There’s all kinds of German sausage! There’s wurst – there’s brats. You can have a bratwurst. There’s all sorts of Italian dry sausage, Italian sweet sausage, Italian hot sausage. Sausages, sausages, sausages.” It was an amalgamation of all three of them.

I read for the professor in that voice, too, but it wouldn’t have worked.

Zapp Brannigan
West: When Phil [Hartman , for whom the role was originally intended] was alive, I was working in New York on the Stern show. Then I’d spend my whole day doing commercials. I was on my way home, and I could hear the gates of hell clang shut after I’d leave, and my wife called and said: “You know who just called here, and he wanted to talk to you? Phil Hartman.” And I just started laughing and said, “Do you realize how many people I know could pull an elaborate joke like that?” No, it was Phil Hartman. He was working on “NewsRadio,” and he just called me out of the blue to say he was a fan. I’m still not sure how he got my number.

In the ’50s and ’60s, we grew up with these big dumb voices where you could tell the announcer, more than anything else in the whole world, was in love with the sound of his own voice. So I did [Zapp as] a combination of a couple of disc jockeys that I came up in radio with. Overconfident, a lot of hubris: “The way to a woman’s bed is through her parents. Sleep with them and you’re in.”

Dr. Zoidberg
West: Matt [Groening] came to our table reading the other day. He was in France, and he wanted to announce to the room that in France, Zoidberg is hailed, like the cartoon Jerry Lewis .

With Zoidberg, they showed me a picture of him, and he looked like a “Simpsons” character, but he had a mouth that looked like a glove hanging down. So I started to think of the classic marble-mouth performers in show biz history. One of them was a vaudevillian named George Jessel , and there was an actor named Lou Jacobi who was just solemn and deliberate. You fuse the two of them or you super-collide them, and it became Zoidberg: “Young lady, bring me a sandwich from the Dumpster. And leave the maggots on it.”