Futurama: Bender's Big Score

Futurama returned yesterday after a two-year hiatus in the form of a straight-to-DVD movie, Bender's Big Score. Roxanne and I watched it last night and I was pleased, although not blown away. The movie got off to a pretty slow start but I did enjoy the extended opening title sequence. After a long set up, the movie got into the meat of the story in the way that only Futurama could pull off. Without spoiling too much, just imagine lots of time travel and potential space-time paradoxes. It was interesting, but they seemed to shoehorn in a few too many of the favorite characters from the series just for the sake of putting them in the movie. They also interwove too many call backs to the series, again for the sake of putting them in the movie. It had some very funny moments in the middle but began to sag a little towards the end. There is a cliff hanger ending which I can live with knowing that another such direct-to-DVD movie will be coming soon to resolve it. Because the plan is to split this and the next three movies into twenty-two minute episodes for TV, I think it sort of damaged the continuity of the story. Rather than one long story, it had more of a mutli-part episode feel. All in all, Bender's Big Score is good, but not great. I'm sure it will grow on me as the rest of the series has and I won't complain too much because good new Futurama is better than none at all.

Notable extras on the disc are a feature length commentary by Matt Groenig, David X. Cohen, Billy West, John DiMaggio, etc. as well as a full length episode of "Everybody Loves Hypnotoad." I fast forwarded through the episode of Hypnotoad and let's just say it was funny at that speed. I haven't listened to the commentary track yet but those of the series episodes were very entertaining and insightful as I'm sure these will be.