Futurama: Bender’s Big Score (2007)
Genre: Animated Comedy
Format Viewed: DVD
Filmography links and data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database.
Bender’s back, baby … and I think that’s a good thing…
So it’s been four years since Futurama was pulled off the air after five seasons of futuristic fun that simply couldn’t compete with the scheduling conflicts of Major League Baseball and a group of executives who couldn’t understand why a show just like The Simpsons couldn’t perform at The Simpsons-like levels when given the worst timeslots on the schedule and pre-empted for just about anything else worth airing. I’ll admit that I was pretty bitter about Futurama getting cancelled because it was so much like The Simpsons, but in SPACE, which added a whole new geeky dimension to it! Matt Groening may not have had the same super-grand-slam-homerun with Futurama that he had with The Simpsons, but seriously, who can compare themselves to such a phenomenon anyways?! The Simpsons is an amazing success in all of history, but that still doesn’t mean that its little brother Futurama can’t do well in its own right…
Needless to say, I was pretty excited to hear about the straight-to-DVD movies in the works and even the possibility to see new episodes on Comedy Central in 2008, however at the same time I just couldn’t help but wonder if Futurama would do any better at surviving the revival than another popular cartoon that recently returned from the dead. You might remember this familiar story from when Family Guy went through it the first time – FOX cancelled the show, then proceeded to bring it back after making a killing on DVD sales, however I think many of us will admit that the show isn’t quite the same as it was back in 2002. Sure, many of the scenes still have the same style and feel to them, but it many cases it’s gotten a lot edgier, almost as if it needs to impress or continue to shock an audience that it didn’t necessarily care to the first time around. Mind you, I still watch the show every week and I still enjoy most of it, but more and more I do find myself saying, “What the…?!” and it didn’t use to be like that.
Unfortunately, I kinda felt the same way about Bender’s Big Score.
I really enjoyed the last season of Futurama, but one of the most obvious differences about this season is that they really started playing up the romantic tensions between Fry and Leela. And this worked, actually, because of the way that the series ended – with Fry writing an opera to show his love for Leela and the credits closing on a fairly touching moment, at least for Futurama, anyways! Of course, I think this later proved to present some problems because for the first four seasons, Fry’s interests in Leela were very sporadic, only to have them brought out into the spotlight for the show’s final hurrah … but then what happens when the show comes back? Suddenly that touching cliffhanger has to be revisited and it seems like that’s all they’ve got to work with – anything and everything is woven to be about Fry’s love for Leela, and frankly it sort of took away from a lot of the fun that I used to realize from Futurama. I put Bender’s Big Score into my DVD player thinking that it was going to be a big adventure in which Bender ends up getting himself into a mess of trouble, and instead I got a love story that simply didn’t end up being as fun as it could’ve been.
I now find myself a little worried to see the next DVD that comes down the pipeline bearing the Futurama name because Bender’s Big Score gave me the feeling that they really weren’t staying true to what the show used to be about … maybe a feature-length production simply isn’t the best format for the show at this point. I mean, The Simpsons Movie was amazing this summer, but they went through eighteen seasons before making the jump to the big screen. And I know that I previously mentioned that I don’t necessarily think that it’s fair to compare anything else to The Simpsons, but I think we can still take a lesson from their history – they really put in a lot of work before jumping to a new medium and thus it really felt like The Simpsons belonged in a movie. Family Guy even managed to pull it off because they basically wrote several stand-alone episodes that could be strung together into a single movie, and that worked well for them. Bender’s Big Score just feels like it tried to do some sort of mash-up of the two, and that’s didn’t work for me.
Ultimately I think I enjoyed parts of this movie not necessarily because they were great but simply because I loved Futurama so much that I really wanted to love Bender’s Big Score, too. A lot of the callbacks to previous episodes were, in fact, great, but then again there were also some parts that I just blatantly felt shouldn’t have been there at all (a la new Family Guy syndrome) – namely our actually seeing Hermes’ body after it had been severed (it had been done on the show, sure, but the animations were always arranged so we never had to see any “gore”) and even more so the very introduction, in which the gang all rants and raves on their “business” being cancelled by FOX. It was funny when Family Guy did it, but they get the only points for this one because their punch line was quick and witty, whereas Futurama’s just seemed to go on and on and on. So while I can appreciate the need to take a little stab there, it wasn’t well thought out at all…
Final verdict – I just hope the next movie that they do is better than this one. Whoever is in charge needs to go back and watch the first four seasons of the show to help remind themselves what Futurama is really all about because I’m sure there’s a larger-scale story to be told there, but it can’t be created by grabbing bits and pieces of what other shows have been successful with over the years. Give us a movie Futurama fans will enjoy and then we’ll talk.
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