DVD: Futurama: Bender's Big Score
Submitted by Eichisan on Mon, 2008-03-10 03:41.
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DVD Reviewed by Eichisan
Starring: Billy West, Katey Sagal, John Di Maggio
Spamming, alien, nudist scammers hell bent on world domination are stealing valuable artifacts from the past by exploiting a paradox correcting time traveling binary code tattooed onto someone’s arse.
And who’s going to stop them?
Well the employees of the Planet Express delivery company of course!
Yes, Futurama is back.
After a long hiatus, that prodigal second cousin of The Simpsons has returned in the form of a straight to DVD film titled Bender’s Big Score, itself the first of four films to be released this year that will eventually be themselves split up into 16 episodes forming what many Futurama fans thought they’d never ever see… Season Five.
And does it hold up, especially since we’ve seen the likes of Family Guy and The Simpsons release their own successful special extended episodes (you can’t call them films no matter how hard you try…)?
Well… yes.
So what happened to the characters since we last encountered them? Well the Planet Express team had their delivery ‘contract cancelled’ by the mindless morons of the ‘Box Network’ (cough… Fox Network). But after those execs were ground into an endlessly useful pink powder with a “million and one uses” (good for genital rash…) the team are back on the ‘air’ (flying that is).
Okay so the only thing we didn’t see was Rupert Murdoch’s head in a jar…
It’s not long before Fry, Leela, Bender and Co get themselves involved in another spasmodic galactic farce. The crew get conned into giving up their personal details to a bunch of wrinkly pink aliens who were born to scam. After accepting an obviously dodgy robot porn spam, Bender gets infected by an ‘obedience virus’ and helps the scammers achieve their evil time traveling schemes by exploiting a mystery code tattooed onto Fry’s arse.
What proceeds from here is an epic concoction of alternate timelines and time travel gags the likes of which we’ve seen in the Back To The Future series and perhaps beaten to the joke by the Family Guy straight to DVD film Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story.
Yet Futurama is the better series to sell these bizarro technological futuristic insanities, all the while serving up a heavy dose of action with an obvious homage to the Star Wars death star battle sequence (sorry… Family Guy beat you to it again guys…) Also, diehard fans of Futurama will be pleased at all the familiar side characters and references from past series put in for good measure.
So ultimately, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before but anything better than the current writing woes of The Simpsons is a breath of fresh air in my book. And simply, Bender kicks ass.
