I was wondering going in how thoroughly Futurama had worn out its welcome with me. I was also wondering if the plan to package the content of the DVD and its upcoming sequels as a series of episodes would make the finished product disjointed. The Family Guy straight-to-DVD feature had that problem. In fact, the three episode arc really brought the whole thing down. There just wasn't enough going on and it felt very stretched out, even for a show normally very light on plot.
Bender's Big Score is quite the opposite. It's an excellent, CGI-laden, feature with no obvious episode breaks. The A plot involves a trio of nudist aliens who use email scams to steal the Earth, eventually delving into time travel. The B plots include the Leela-Fry relationship and Hermes getting decapitated. Hermes' wife immediately goes back to Barbados Slim, which makes for a good series of jokes. So too the powder made from ground-up executives, which is apparently good for everything. After declaring that it's made from the execs that canceled Futurama (the "Box" corporation canceled their "delivery license") the Professor dumps a load of it down his pants.
The feature is littered with callbacks to one-off gags and episodes of the series. Fry's dog from the most depressing American animation ever shows up, and his frozen ex-girlfriend from 2000 makes several appearances. His family are featured, including his nephew. These references help carry the movie along through some weaker stretches. About a fifth of the show is a very long series of extended flashbacks that eventually pay off, but get tedious well before that. The writers are not subtle enough to make the parallelism they're trying to go for anything more than a bit grating, and I really don't think that Free Willy references are all that timely...or funny when they were timely.
Overall, the DVD isn't as good as the best of the Futurama episodes, but it's comfortably in the second tier. Without the Fry-Leela romance and the flashbacks, it would easily equal them. That's odd coming from me, since I generally liked the romance episodes of the series. The writers seem to know how to work it for good comedy and fun in a half-hour episode, but got profoundly lost trying to make it a focus of the feature. Fortunately, Zoidberg was not heavily featured. Unfortunately, neither was the Professor. Bonus points for having Al Gore exult in saving Earth with deadly lasers instead of terrifying a slideshow.
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I agree with you on the Fry-Leela romance. But over all, I felt this was a very strong DVD.
I laughed about the Zoidberg comment, as I've always found the character annoying.
The only real big issue I had with it, was the whole flashback sequence with Fry and the whale. Like you, I found it unfunny and dragged the story down.
But I'm a fan of in-jokes, and this "movie" had a plenty (like when the aliens destroyed earth from the pilot, Bender was who they were chasing). So, in a way, I could forgive them for the whale aspect of the story.
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