Like most restaurant owners, the Belchers are taking a break from serving burgers during the pandemic, but the team behind Bob’s Burgers has been hard at work. In fact, the show “never stopped being in production,” show creator Loren Bouchard revealed at today’s San Diego Comic-Con panel.
That doesn’t mean covid-19 won’t loom over season 11, in its own way. New episodes will include “Worms of Enrearment,” an “accidentally timely episode, written before covid,” according to Bouchard. Scripted by Nora Smith, it’s about an epidemic... of pinworms. “There’s a lot of hand-washing,” Smith said. “I’m hoping that people think of it as an escape to a more fun pandemic.”
Before the worms... season 11 will premiere September 27 on Fox with “Dream a Little Bob of Bob,” which is “in the spirit of the ‘Flu-ouise’ episode,” according to Bouchard. “We’re inside of Bob’s dream for a lot of that episode. In a way it’s an epic quest.” For Halloween, Bouchard teased, the show will finally visit “that hotel at the end of the street that sharp-eyed fans will have seen since season one. We finally get to go in there; the kids try to deliver a burger to the hotel on Halloween night.” (Later, he mentioned the Thanksgiving episode is titled “Diarrhea of a Poopy Kid.”)
This season will also include the show’s 200th episode, “Bob Belcher and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Kids,” which is “a little bit of a Rashomon story, [but] not really,” according to the creator.
The panel, which you can watch in full below, features cast members H. Jon Benjamin, John Roberts, Kristen Schaal, Eugene Mirman, Dan Mintz, and Larry Murphy, as well as producer Janelle Momary. There are clips from “Worms” (starts around 14:30), as well as “Copa-Bob-Ana” (24:30), in which we see Bob swooning over... a kitchen, as only Bob can.
Bouchard also took the time to discuss the ongoing “conversation about representation in animation,” which for Bob’s Burgers tends to mean a lot of its female characters are voiced by men. The creator read off a list of women who’ve guest-starred on the show just since season nine, noting that several will be back for future episodes, and also addressed the divide behind the scenes too. “The animation industry was a bit on the white, male side, I would say, until very recently. You know, historically. But I think a lot of us are actively trying to change that. Rough math... 50% of the Bob’s writers are women.” (Schaal jumped in to suggest that Bob’s Burgers could try creating some male characters voiced by women.)
The long-awaited Bob’s Burgers movie—originally set to come out on July 17—got just a quick mention in this panel, with the gang scheming about inevitably showing it at a drive-in and waxing about how great its animation looks. As of now, Bob’s Burgers: The Movie is slated for release in theaters April 9, 2021, but there was no mention or confirmation of that date.
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