Cartoon Corner- Futurama: Bender's Big Score

In a way, sometimes I wish Futurama hadn’t gotten that Comedy Central revival.



Because this?  This is the finale.  I mean, it’s not really considered one of the finales written for the show, by the time it was made they already had the other three films at bare minimum.  But it’s the ending that makes sense.  They use everything, reference everything (Nibblonians, Santa’s Neptune workshop, the satellite that collided with God, almost every character of real relevance except I guess the Robot Devil…), it’s structured like a grand finale in terms of scope.  And it’s the only resolution to Fry and Leela’s romantic arc I’d place above The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings.

That’s the big one really.  Futurama is a show that would often blindside you with its’ ability to gutshot you in the feels, but the flashbacks to Lars are the stuff where you know it’s coming and it still gets you.  I can think of about one other instance of that in all the shows we’ve covered here (about 110 at time of writing… good lord), which was a scene I quoted verbatim back in the Avatar Book 3 writeup immediately before giving it a 10/10.

Now, on the whole this isn’t quite that good.  Rewatching it for the writeup for the first time in… god, 5 years?  More?  I was largely struck by being utterly impatient through the first half of the movie.  The setup for the scammer aliens and the discovery of the Time Code takes ages, and the only real good bits before then are all the piss-taking of Fox for cancelling the show originally.  And those might not actually have been funny, just cathartic enough to fake it.

It feels weird to not talk about Bender in a movie named after him but… it’s not really his movie?  The third one is to much larger extent.  We’ll get there.  Y’know, someday.  Probably.

I’m not entirely sure why they elected to have some musical numbers.  I guess to some extent maybe they felt it was tradition for that to happen in the movie versions of TV comedies?  But certainly they don’t really land as particularly funny.  Fortunately enough happens around them I don’t care.

Rating- 8/10.  In syndication this turns into I believe four episodes.  And if we think of the movie in those terms, the first two kinda outright suck while the third is good buildup and the fourth is high in the running for flat-out best episode in the series.  So this roughly balances all that out I guess.