ANI-MOVIES, *Futurama: Bender's Big Score

After four solid seasons of sci-fi sitcom gold, “We’re back, Baby!”, Futurama returned with the first of four made-for-video movies(or OVAs)which on its own made for the beginning of the unofficial Season 5 of the series. This was also a major payoff for hardcore fans of the series.

Set about two years where Season 4 ended, Hermes gets his head cut off, and then put in a jar like most of the other long-dead celebrities. At the hospital, Leela meets the heads’ attendee, Lars, who starts dating her. After the Planet Express crew accidently give all their personal info to some alien Scammers, they take over the company. Its later shown that Fry has a tattoo of Bender on his butt that contains a code which opens a time travel portal that can take anyone to anytime in the past. The Scammers get control over Bender from a virus, and use him to go back in time to steal treasures from Earth’s history, and then waiting out in an underground cave until the future/present. Fry gets sad with being rejected by Leela, so he uses the code to go back in time to 2000 just after he was frozen. The Scammers send Bender back to kill him to make sure the code can’t be used against them, and several other time-duplicates are made of Bender and Fry in the process. Bender eventually believes he kills Fry, and then becomes free of the Scammers control in the future. The Scammers then swindle everyone on Earth, and they all have to move to Pluto. The outcast Earthlings team up with Robot Santa and his holiday army to launch an assault on the Scammers gold-plated Death Stars to take back Earth. Bender’s old switcheroo of one of the Professor’s doomsday devices defeats the Scammers, although their leader Nudar survived. He is later killed by Lars, who sacrifices himself with an exploding Bender duplicate. It’s revealed that Lars was really Fry from the past who spent several years in the 2000s before finding out that he Lars from when Bender attacked him, and froze himself to wake up two years before fry was first let out. Bender then lets out all the other duplicate Benders from the cave, which causes a tear in time and space. This leads directly into the sequal,The Beast Of A Billion Backs.

This was a really good movie. It played on alot of small things from the original series, and blended it together wonderfully in a single story. Granted, the first musical number is kinda bad, although the “Holy Trinity” one with Mark Hamill as Chanukah Zombie was great. I really enjoyed this release, and the full episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad included with the DVD/Blu-Ray is hysterical. Granted, if you’re not a fan of Futurama and haven’t seen anything of the series prior to this, then you’ll really be lost. Although, that alone should be an incentive to go out there and get the last four seasons.