Comments on Bender’s Big Score

Ahem:

I saw it and you didn’t, sucker. Ha ha ha ha, haaa ha, na na na na na, na naaaaa; pbbbbbbbbbbbt.

It was really great to have an hour and ten minutes of new Futurama for my eyeballs to look at. It was like finding a letter your puppy wrote to you before it died. The gnashing of teeth at the beginning about Fox canceling the show was kind of meh, but I knew the rest was going to be good from the second Hermes got decapitated.

The writers are not manatees, and the background humor is alive and well. Cartman from South Park’s head has apparently made it into the same room as Charles de Gaulle’s, and there’s a great dig at Family Guy that you have to be on your toes to catch. The rest of the show’s more direct humor walks the line between Einstein, Curly from the Three Stooges, and Curly from the Harlem Globetrotters. My only complaint is that Bender’s Big Score was perhaps too self referential – I’ve seen every episode of Futurama multiple times because of the lack of budget/creativity at Cartoon Network, so I was constantly searching for syrup for my rofl. But anyone who doesn’t know who the hypnotoad is, or hasn’t seen the episode with Frye’s dog, Seymour, isn’t going to get as many laughs out of it. In being self referential, they also recycled a lot of schtick from the older episodes of the show.

I don’t have time to write a whole big thing about it, beyond what I wrote already, so here’s other great things about the movie in convenient list form.

– Narwhal subplot. How have those things not conquered us yet?
– Nude beach scene. Turns out Zoidberg is circumcised. Professor Farnsworth, not so much.
– Bender Bending Rodriguez. He’s great, and it’s like he’s in the whole thing!
– Lots of death. It’s the most simple solution to time paradoxes.
– Hanukkah Zombie/Kwanza Bot/Evil Robot Santa. There’s a delightful musical number between the three of them which almost seemed like it belonged in The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was beautiful and memorable, but that may be because of my strong feelings towards midgets.

Tell the boy to lay out your formal shorts, because Futurama is back.

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