Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs         

Here I go again on my own…(Whitesnake 1987).  Just seems an appropriate way to start out our review of the new Futurama episodes packed into a DVD for a movie length feature.  This will eventually air on Comedy Central Network as a bunch of 30 minute episodes, and we can only hope that it will get picked up for some direct to TV shows as well.  If you are unfamiliar with Futurama, it is a Matt Groening creation of a man (Fry) who is frozen in 1999 and thawed out in the 31st century.  Futurama gives all the people that lived through the 1980s nice Easter Eggs of funny things to watch for when Fry deals with the many situations at hand.

Review of the movie storylines

I am going to pick up some of the story lines and sub story lines and comment on them without hopefully spoiling anything for the viewers.  We start a bit after the last movie (see the continuity) and there is a big ‘ole tear in the universe.

One of the first storylines we get is of Colleen and Fry, who are dating (we can see a whole dating theme throughout the movie).  Unbeknownst to Fry though, the future must look upon polygamy in a different light as Colleen has boyfriends from all corners of the world as well as walks of life.  Fry is really digging her (what happened to him and Leela) and tries to make it work, but Fry cannot take the sharing of his girlfriend for that long.  This lends itself to some humorous moments but it is really only a setup for the central plot of the movie with the big ball of tentacle loving that Yivo puts on the planet.

Sprinkled in the storylines we have a neat little one about Bender and his fascination of what he originally believes to be an imaginary League of Robots from his robot youth.  Nice spoof concept here as well as being a necessity for Bender’s climactic act at the end of the movie.  It is a great setup, even if it is originally a solid storyline from the get go. Hang on ‘cause it makes the movie in my opinion.

Professor Farnsworth and Doctor Wernstrom, as always, get to competing with each other on who gets to  encase the world in their version of some clear crystalline structure.  Having a nemesis is awesome, and the back and forth between both of the characters works as usual.  A nice cameo voice from Stephen Hawking flesh this part of the movie out as well.

Ok, so back onto the central concept of the movie, which can be summed up as “dating”.  The previously mentioned big ball (think planet or so sized) of tentacles comes to earth and wants to spread his love to the people of Earth by sticking his tentacles into their necks.  Fry, who was the first to meet Yivo, soon becomes Pope of the tentacle shenanigans with most everyone on Earth being ass-imilated (intended).   But as Leela escapes she comes to find out the tentacles are genitals or genticles and everyone now feels disgusted.  So is that it?  No, Yivo feels bad that he/she pretty much raped the inhabitants of Earth and now wants to go on a date with the people of Earth.  Some funny dialogue ensues with some answering machine messages and the Head of President Nixon pulling out some quips from behind his ear.

The inhabitants of Earth figure they will go back to Yivo’s Universe and what they come to find out is that it is a pretty good approximation of Heaven and everything is pretty satisfied. 

This is Futurama though and here comes Bender being Bender.  While everyone is loving the Yivo life, Bender brings his robot army he got from the robot devil which he used to take over the League of Robots and “rescues” all the humans from Yivo.  Bender is a friend to a fault and I love that about the character.  His trying to save them actually ends up taking them away from the perfect life, and to Bender it is all in a days work.  This is by far the climax of the movie and stays true to character.

There is one storyline in the movie that really for me was the reason I knocked it down a few notches,  and that is that Kif Kroker asks Amy to be his Fon-Fon Rue and have the ceremony on his home planet to make the union.  I never really like the Kif character and his role to begin with, but this just seemed forced and out of place.  Then to top it all off *spoiler* we have the Kif resurrection at the hands of Yivo. Come on, I for one would have been pleased to see him go.  The Amy and Zapp sex may have some future implications going forward and that I do enjoy.  Switch out this story line and come up with something else and this is then in the top notch halls of Futurama.

Extras

Let us not forget the extras of this DVD because they are pretty solid.  I am not a huge fan of extras, and had this not been for a review I probably would have skipped them.  I would have been a darn fool to do so though.  We have the norm, with some commentary by Matt Groening, David X. Cohen, Billy West, John DiMaggio, Maurice LaMarche, Michael Rowe, Claudia Katz, Peter Avanzino and Lee Supercinski.

Futurama The Lost Adventure, which are the cut scenes from a long lost video game.  The commentary on the top of the computer scenes are really funny as well. There are two audio tracks, one with the creative people commenting and then the actually audio for the cut scene episodes. It is almost worth watching twice, one for each audio track.  The characters are cell shaded 3-d models and it looks pretty good actually, the robots may even look up to par with the cartoon.  The scenes all together add up to an extra long episode of Futurama.  The Professor’s project the Re-animator is pretty funny, and seeing Devastator in his cameo (hey as well as Zoidberg) was also nice.  So this extra is actually more than an extra but really like a second episode.

Also in the bonus features is a story board of the movie, which is neat to see how things are laid out and pitched.  There is also a section that has some bloopers while the actors are doing their audio voiceovers.  Meet Yivo allows us some insight into the voice actor (David Cross) who does Yivo.  It is always really cool to see the real actors doing the voices of cartoon characters, even though it can be weird at the same time.  The Deleted Scenes are always a nice touch, even if some of them never made it past the story board phase.  Geek feature where the 3d animators show us how their job works worked for me as well, it always interesting to see how these things are done.  The Deathball background was one of the weaker parts of the extras as I really was not fond of that portion of the movie anyway.  And now on to the second best extra.  A preview of the next movie, which is a Dungeon and Dragons spoof called Benders Holiday, which we should be able to check out Holiday 2008 (Christian and Jewish Holiday I would assume if anyone is keeping track).   Obviously with our fantasy reading background this is on the super hype meter for me.

Summary and waiting for next one

The thing I enjoy most about the Futurama characters is the consistency of their actions as well as the overall tidbits that get carried over from one episode to the next;  why hasn’t any company made a Slurm drink yet?  TBWABB seems like it might have had too much closure on the story, which at this point we cannot tell if it is a good thing or not.  A Beast with a Billion Backs may not be the best episode(s) of Futurama that has ever been produced by Matt Groening, but being very cliché here, a good episode of Futurama is still better then a great episode of most other comedy television.  We had one storyline bomb in the Amy/Kif one, and we had a little bit of a lull in the latter parts of the DVD, but Bender saving them all really upped the ante.  Even though the scene was at the end and didn’t seem like a huge thing, from the Futurama standpoint and the character of Bender it was just brilliant.

Futurama is my favorite cartoon sitcom, passing the Simpsons, King of the Hill, American Dad, and Family Guy (which I feel has gone too far in some of its humor).  Bring this show back into the regular rotation with a regular season Fox, it is missed.  I haven’t watched the Simpsons in ages, but I have re-watched every Futurama at least 10 times and it still is on my DVRs schedule.

Since I got to watch this one early it means an even longer time before I get to watch the third part, as Bender would say “Well I’m boned”.