Futurama: Bender's Big Score

I have just watched this, and was a fan of the original show and am being completely honest here when I say this is not just one of the best animated movies I have ever seen but in fact one of the best movies of any genre I have ever seen.

Unlike the previous Family Guy and Simpsons films (both shows I am a fan of by the way) Benders Big Score seemed to have something extra in it separating it from these two films.

The jokes are great, the music and songs are great, the animation is absolutely superb (the 3d animation looking much better than when the show originally aired) and the story is very smart and also quite touching.

The writing was absolutely superb, cramming in a lot of past characters but not in a way that it felt they had been thrown in for the sake of them being there (as can be noticed Mom does not make an appearance at all) and also adding new call-backs to well known parts from the series.

All in, just superb and make sure you see it one way or another.

It was a sad day in 2003 when I learned that Futurama had ended. I remember watching the first episode and being hooked straight away. It's not very often humour and genuine sci-fi have been balanced so expertly. But thankfully, like Family Guy before it, Futurama has now been given a new lease of life in the form of 4 direct to DVD movies (to be split into 16 episodes to make up a new season).

When something this great is brought back, there is always the lingering fear that it won't retain the "magic" of the original. But I can confidently say that the magic is back! When Family Guy released Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, I feel it suffered the problem of seeming too much like an over-long episode, a problem I think that the Simpson's movie also suffered (though both were not without their fair share of laughs). However,Benders Big Score, the first of these new Futurama features FEELS like a movie.

I feel it should appeal to old fans (who will be spoilt by many in-jokes and call backs, as subtle as they may be) and those (and shame on them) who have never encountered Futurama before. The story kicks off with a quick introduction of the characters, and within 5 minutes, old fans will be in familiar territory, and newcomers will be brought up to date. What follows is nearly an hour and a half of laughs, sci-fi action, and romance.

This is a film I would definitely have paid to see at the cinema over the Simpson's movie. I hope that the DVD sales of this and the next 3 films do well, as it was sorely missed.

Welcome back Futurama!

I must admit i had huge fears about the reincarnating Futurama...in retrospective, i don't know why. It hasn't been that long after all, and the team has stayed pretty much the same. From the very first scene i felt right at home. No neat hyper modern animation tricks, no bullet time camera spins, just the familiar Futurama, which is all i wanted.

Bender's big score is a surprisingly plot-driven movie, reminiscent of the few more serious episodes. Have no fear, though, the gross humour is still present. Even with the horrid singing numbers (i was looking for anti-depressants) and the obsessive re-introduction of nearly every character that ever appeared on the original series, this is a rewarding event for sure, especially for us die hard fans who waited so long. It could have been better as a movie, but i don't want to get too critical, i'm just glad futurama is back! It just won't die!

I'm not that familiar with this show, but the full length movie came on this morning, chopped up into four half hour sections, so I thought I'd give it a try.

It's pretty original stuff from Groening and company, and all of the time travel allows some good twists and turns in the plot. It is basically about three members of a not so clever species of nudist digital age scammers who end up defrauding the owner of Planet Express, stealing the company and downloading an obedience virus into robot Bender.

For some reason the employees don't leave and instead reluctantly assist the scammers in their efforts. The presence of a time portal allows the scammers to send Bender into the past, looting the earth of all that is valuable and returning it to the scammers, since a robot has no mortal life expectancy. As a result the current population of the earth becomes destitute with everything being owned by the scammers.

Meanwhile, Leela falls in love with Lars and even becomes engaged to him while Fry looks on.

The part about scammers using pretty obvious methods to steal is still pretty timely, but Fry being willing to use dirty tricks to get in the way of Leela's happiness has not aged well. The guy is a stalker. Leela's not avoiding Fry because there is some kind of animal attraction ala David and Maddie in Moonlighting going on here that her brain tells her is not good for her. She's simply not into Fry. But I imagine this will all work out to Fry's benefit because the nerdy guy always gets the pretty girl. As for the reverse situation happening? That is an infrequent occurrence.

I honestly thought this show was dead and would never come back. I only watch the episodes once a year because I don't want to wear out my favourite animated show. To hear of the comeback was great. To have to wait quite a while, not so much. Seeing the final product, a real joy and pleasant surprise.

To be sure, they're a little rusty in places. Some of the lines, especially in the initial third of the film, are questionable and would not have made the final cut under the regime that provided us with the standard series. Hermes, only occasionally an entertaining character, gets too much screen time in a somewhat superfluous side plot featuring his equally unentertaining wife and his irritating enemy Barbados Slim. The villains - the scammer aliens - are disgusting when they should be fearsome. These are the things that lose the film a perfect rating, and are the sorts of niggles I would have expected after such a long hiatus - after all, much of Family Guy's comeback season (number four) is terrible when stacked up to the classic old episodes and a fair few new ones.

But I marvel at what they did right. It retains much of the trademark dynamic writing, taking in some of the same unbelievable and jaw-dropping spins on science and human/alien relationships and making us laugh when explaining away the continuity errors the writers were aware were needed to create an engrossing story.

It makes good use of screen time and never drags it heels which I felt both the Family Guy and Simpsons features did. In the end, both of those other features were such a plot compromise, where you ended up had so little bearing on where you started you had to laugh unintentionally. With this Futurama feature although the plot is bombastic in the greatest sense of the word (like a Queen record for example) it ties up everything I wanted to know in a timely fashion using classic storytelling techniques - and where necessary awesome, seamless and not gratuitous 3DFX - throughout.

Now I've covered the good and the bad, it is time to address the ugly - the backlash. Some have moaned that there isn't enough humour in this feature. To be honest, one of my favourite features of the original series was getting us away from the old cliché which seems to doom a lot of animated shows, namely: Cartoon = Funny. Yes it has several moments of great humour - a nice fifty-fifty of building set pieces and incisive one-liners - but it balances them well with a poignant story which I think they pull off as well as 'The Devils Hands Are Idle Playthings' if you consider that they had to pace it out over nearly ninety minutes which is over four times the length of a standard episode. It's a tall order for almost any script writer used to cramming in the jokes in thirty minutes or less, but these writers don't have a lot of trouble with it.

Another point of contention with the hardcore fans has been what a few of them have called a hopelessly complicated plot. This makes me laugh because the hardcore brethren praise the show constantly for intelligent post-geek humour then with the same breath criticise this new installment for breaking out of the shows comfort zone to use that same intelligence to create a mind blowing story. They must have been watching a different movie because I stuck with almost every twist and turn with awe, and the few I haven't resolved yet will - like all great works of art - reveal themselves with further observation.

In closing - to you hardcore fans who say this isn't a patch on the original episodes, get off your soap box and think yourself lucky there's anything new at all and secondly, I bet you only grew to love those episodes through repeated viewings so stop being so hard on what is a logical continuation of a great premise! 8/10

(NOTE: For those new viewers who missed a lot of the in-jokes that spilled over from the original series and who aren't sure why there is such an abundance of characters, go and buy the Season 1-4 box set from Amazon or eBay and it'll all make perfect sense.)