Futurama: Bender's Big Score
B+
DVD
The year is 1999. The Simpsons has recently begun its slow descent into a frequently unwatchable shadow of its former self. Whatever mojo it's losing suddenly begins appearing in Futurama, another Matt Groening satire--this one set in the year 3000.
Over four seasons, the show--an even more violent mix of low and high culture, thanks to frequent gags involving quantum physics and pi--only got better and better. Then in 2003 it was canceled.
Of course lackluster ratings due in part to merciless Fox rescheduling (a phenomenon that never, ever happened again) also smote Family Guy, which came back like new in 2005. Meanwhile the infinitely superior Futurama had to wait (and wait, and wait) for what it could get: four feature-length direct-to-video movies. (All will eventually be sliced down into episode-length partitions and slipped into syndication as a pseudo fifth season.)
The first Futurama movie out of the gate, Bender's Big Score, while not a complete return to form, is an almost seamless transition--as though a week, not four years, has passed. Score may get off to a rocky start, taking a while to return to the breathlessly paced, arcane, gag-heavy madness of the show. But return it does, despite a spam scam plot that seems even more dated than the show's last episode.
Fortunately things quickly give way to what the show did best: time-travel tomfoolery, with alcoholic, larcenous robot Bender--at the behest of a virus that makes him obedient to a trio of thieving nudist aliens--jumping through wormholes to loot for history's treasures. (That includes the Colonel's secret recipe: chicken, grease and salt.)
Eventually the story, like some Futurama episodes, gets tied up to the point of head-implosion, all while squeezing in plenty of nerd humor ("I don't want to go to Neptune! I'll be cold--and heavy!") and making room for recurring characters like Nixon's head, the math genius Globetrotters, Al Gore and Hypnotoad.
It'd be nice to have more Zapp Brannigan or a premise as physics-obsessed as the one in "Time Keeps on Slippin'" or "The Farnsworth Parabox." But just try to hold back after again hearing the Professor's favorite exclamation: "Good news, everyone!"
Bring on the other three.
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