Futurama: Bender’s Big Score Review
After being temporarily cancelled by Fox, Matt Groening and the team behind Futurama decided to release four movies straight to DVD. The first, and until now only one of them is “Bender’s Big Score”. Bender “Rodriguez” himself finds the best-fitted introduction: “We’re back, baby!”
After a short intro to subliminally (well, not so subliminal actually) show how stupid Fox was to cancel them, the movie quickly sets up some important basic story concepts. Hermes gets his body crushed after a limbo contest, Fry has a tattoo of Bender on his behind for some reason, and Bender’s “mind” gets taken over by evil scamming aliens after trying to watch Roborotica, and these same aliens trick Hubert Farnsworth into “selling” Planet Express to them. For free. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, Lisa falls in love with a guy named Lars, making fry sad and of course, angry. Yes, that’s a lot of things to keep track of. But it gets so much more complicated. As it turns out, the tattoo on Fry’s butt holds the key to time travel. Not too shabby, eh? From here on, story-wise, all hell breaks lose. I’m not even going to try to explain it, because that would take more time than I have to write, and you have to read this review. Just know there will be lots of unexpected twists, confusion, and a lot of explanation along the way.
The humor in Futurama is as excellent as it’s always been! Ranging from slapstick to satirical elements, “Bender’s Big Score” has all the funny elements that made Futurama famous. Just to give you one example of the ingenius dialogue the writers constantly come up with: When Bender returns from the past with the original painting of Mona Lisa, the Scammers ask him whether he had any trouble with DaVinci. Bender triumphantly replies: “Let’s just say he might not make it to the last supper.” If the series made you laugh, this movie will definitely tickle your funny-bone.
It’s a matter of course all the voice acting is performed by the original cast. John Di Maggio, Billy West and Katey Sagal are just some of the well-known talents making the lovable (or sometimes not-so-lovable in Bender’s case) cartoon characters come to life.
The familarities, of course, don’t stop there. You’ll not only see a lot of old characters like Santa, The Harlem Globe Trotters, or Fry’s beloved boss from the past Mr. Penucci, returning, but also recognize a lot of subtle or extremely obvious allusions to the series.
The movie actually has one problem. Since it was released about a half year later than “The Simpsons Movie”, both being created by Matt Groening and featuring very similar humor, you almost automatically compare “Bender’s Big Score” to its yellow equivalent. And to be honest, the Futurama title can’t hold up to that. But it’s still a higly enjoyable 88 minutes. So if you liked the series, my advice to you is to get the first of four Futurama movies right now, invite some friends over for the weekend and watch it together with a couple of beers. That’s how you’ll get the most out of a funny tale about an alcoholic robot. As the intro for Futurama once said: Presented in Double Vision where drunk!
IMdB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0471711/
January 23rd, 2008 at 8:00 pm
I love Futurama but this DVD stinks. It got maybe 2 laughs out of me. My wife and I both thought that it was boring but I did like the hypnotoad. We got drunk and showed some friends and they loved it too (hypnotoad that is). I would say it’s a renter, not for buying unless your hardcore which I even am but this thing stunk SOOO bad…