Futurama: Bender's Big Score

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Futurama: Bender's Big Score
Directed by	Dwayne Carey-Hill
Produced by	Lee Supercinski Claudia Katz
Written by	Teleplay: Ken Keeler Story: Ken Keeler David X. Cohen
Starring	Billy West Katey Sagal John DiMaggio Tress MacNeille Maurice LaMarche Phil LaMarr Lauren Tom David Herman Dawnn Lewis Kath Soucie Frank Welker
Music by	Christopher Tyng
Editing by	Paul D. Calder
Distributed by	20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Release date(s)	United States: November 27, 2007 United Kingdom: April 7, 2008 Australia: March 5, 2008
Running time	89 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Followed by	Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs

Futurama: Bender's Big Score is an Annie Award-winning direct-to-video film based on the animated series Futurama. It was released in the United States on November 27, 2007. Bender's Big Score, along with the three follow-up films, will comprise season five of Futurama, with each film being separated into four episodes of the broadcast season. Bender's Big Score made its broadcast premiere on Comedy Central on March 23, 2008.^[1] The movie was written by Ken Keeler, based on a story by Keeler and David X. Cohen, and directed by Dwayne Carey-Hill.

Special appearances include Coolio as Kwanzaa-bot, Al Gore as himself, Mark Hamill as the Chanukah Zombie, Tom Kenny as Fry's older brother Yancy, and Sarah Silverman as Fry's ex-girlfriend Michelle (reprising her role from "The Cryonic Woman").

[edit] Plot

Two years ago, the executives of the Box Network canceled Planet Express's contract. Now those executives have been fired, so Planet Express is back "on the air". They throw a party to celebrate, during which Hermes is decapitated and his body crushed during a freak limbo accident, prompting LaBarbara to leave him. His head is placed in a jar while his body is repaired. The man who performs the procedure, Lars, takes a liking to Leela. Leela reciprocates, much to Fry's annoyance.

During a delivery to a nude beach planet, Bender discovers a tattoo of himself on Fry's right buttock. A trio of scammer aliens dupe the crew into signing petitions and providing their e-mail addresses. When the crew returns to Earth, the scammers send them numerous spam messages. After they respond, Bender is infected with an obedience virus and Professor Farnsworth is tricked into signing over his business to the scammers. By a process known as "sprunjing," the scammers detect Fry's tattoo, which contains the code for paradox-correcting time travel. Nibbler reveals himself and explains that using the code could destroy the universe, but the scammers ignore him.

Bender destroys New York while being pursued by Swedish authorities in 2308, one of the many moments of continuity with the previous episodes.

Since the code only allows travel into the past, the scammers have Bender steal valuable objects from Earth's past and pass the time in a cave beneath Planet Express. Hermes has Bender obtain an earlier version of his body as a replacement to save his marriage. The Professor discovers that duplicates created via time-travel paradoxes, including Hermes' new body, are doomed to die. Meanwhile, Leela and Lars begin dating, making Fry depressed.

After Bender steals all of history's treasures, the scammers decide to destroy the time code by killing Fry and erasing it from Bender's memory. Fry uses the code to escape to January 1, 2000, the day he was frozen. Bender is sent to kill him, arrives in the cryogenics lab and creates a duplicate of himself when he needs to use the bathroom. The duplicate ambushes Fry and attempts to kill him, but an emotional crisis initiates a self-destruct sequence. Fry shoves the Bender duplicate in a cryo-tube and sets it for 1,000,000 years. The original Bender spends the next twelve years hunting Fry, eventually destroying Fry's apartment when Fry walks inside, also revealing Fry's dog Seymour, and what really happened to him (from the episode Jurassic Bark).

Bender reports his apparent success, and the scammers erase the time code and the obedience virus. During a memorial in his honor, Fry shows up. He explains that he created a duplicate of his own; his duplicate confronted the Bender duplicate and remained in the past while he accidentally fell into his own cryo-tube. When Fry (plus the Fry that has already been frozen) awakes in the tube 1,000 years later, one walks out (as shown in "Space Pilot 3000") and the other freezes himself for a near decade to the current year. Flashbacks show the duplicate Fry spending the twelve years before Bender's attack working at an aquarium, caring for an orphaned narwhal named Leelu.

Nibbler destroys the time code tattoo to keep the scammers from further abusing it. However, everyone lives in poverty thanks to the scammers, while Leela and Lars decide to marry. A chain reaction at the wedding leads to Hermes being decapitated again and his body being crushed by a chandelier. Farnsworth explains that Hermes's duplicate body was doomed; Lars unexpectedly becomes agitated and cancels the wedding.

The scammers trick Earth President Richard Nixon into selling Earth to them, and everyone leaves the planet. To reclaim Earth the population assembles a fleet with the aid of Robot Santa, Kwanzaabot, and the Chanukah Zombie. With his bureaucratic brain wired into the battle computer, Hermes leads Earth to victory over the scammers' fleet of remote controlled Death Stars and wins back his wife. The scammers threaten the crew with a doomsday device Bender stole for them earlier, but do not realize that Bender stole the device again for himself. Leela fires the device at the scammers' ship, destroying it. Everyone returns to Earth to celebrate the New Year 3008. Bender is commended for his deeds and Hermes is returned to his original body.

Leela remains heartbroken after being dumped. After failing to entice Leela, Fry decides to do what he feels is best for her and arranges a reunion with Lars at the cryogenic lab. Having survived the doomsday blast, Nudar, the lead scammer, ambushes them. Nudar claims that the time-travel code still exists on Lars. Lars tricks Nudar into approaching the cryo-tube with the Bender duplicate on overload and holds Nudar against the doomed duplicate who explodes, killing the three of them. The explosion singes off some of Lars' clothing, revealing the time code tattoo. A flashback explains that Lars was Fry's time-travel duplicate; after releasing Leelu into the Arctic wild, he returned to his apartment and survived Bender's attack in 2012; the fire and smoke changed his appearance and voice. Realizing that he was Lars, the duplicate Fry froze himself to return to the future and be with Leela. Learning that time travel duplicates were doomed, he cancelled the wedding to spare Leela the pain of his death, as he explains in his video will. Leela forgives Lars and gives Fry a kiss.

During the funeral, Bender removes Lars's tattoo and travels into the past to place it on the frozen Fry to make sense of everything that transpired. He then meets many of his duplicates from his stealing spree, and invites them to emerge with him all at once instead of when they were supposed to give their artifacts to the scammers, causing them to explode. Terrified of the paradoxical consequences, Nibbler urges everyone to evacuate the universe and escapes by swallowing himself. The Bender duplicates explode and cause a tear in the fabric of space.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Production

In February 2007, Futurama co-creator Matt Groening addressed speculation as to whether Futurama had been revived in episodic or feature-film form, explaining that the crew is "writing them as movies and then we're going to chop them up, reconfigure them, write new material and try to make them work as separate episodes".^[2] A preview of the film was shown at Comic-Con 2007.^[3] It was also reported at Comic-Con that once the movie is "chopped up" it will be reconfigured into four episodes that will be broadcast on Comedy Central on March 23, 2008. The same will be done with the succeeding three movies, creating a sixteen-episode fifth season.^[4] The voice recording finished on July 3, 2007.^[5] An official trailer was released on October 10, 2007.

Futurama: Bender's Big Score is the first carbon-neutral DVD to be released by 20th Century Fox.^[6] The studio worked to reduce the carbon impact of DVD manufacture and distribution. It also features "A Terrifying Message From Al Gore", an animated short produced to promote guest star Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, a discussion on the use of mathematics in Futurama, full length audio commentary by cast and crew members. There is also a 22-minute full length episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad.^[7]

It was released in 16:9 widescreen format.

[edit] Broadcast and reception

Bender's Big Score made its broadcast premiere on Comedy Central on March 23, 2008.^[1] The film was broken into four separate episodes which served as the first part of Futurama's fifth season, followed by The Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender's Game and Into the Wild Green Yonder.

In the broadcast premiere, the extended opening from the film is placed before the scene where Hermes is decapitated as opposed to after it. The first two scenes in the montage of Leela and Lars' dates were cut. The original opening subtitle "IT JUST WON'T STAY DEAD!" is kept as the opening subtitle of the first part. The three additional opening captions are: "Watch, Rinse, Repeat", "Apply directly to the foreclaw" (a reference to HeadOn), and "Last Known Transmission of the Hubble Telescope". The billboard scene in all four is identical to the single scene in the film, a snippet from "Space Pilot 3000" where Fry gets frozen.

Overall the film was well received. It won the 2007 Annie Award for Best Home Entertainment Production.^[8] The movie received an "A" rating from a review at UGO noting that its two musical numbers are "hilarious" and that the quality has not decreased from the show's original run.^[9] Dan Iverson of IGN gave the movie an 8 out of 10, stating that "it is easy to recommend Bender's Big Score to fans of the series and those new to the show alike." They also gave the DVD a 7 out of 10, praising the extras but lamenting the quality of the video transfer.^[10] It has been given a 9/10 by Movie Power magazine and a 'B' by The Washington Post. Rotten Tomatoes overall rated it 100% as the users rated it 82%.

In its first week, the DVD sold 222,036 units, for a total of $3,994,428.^[11] As of July 24, 2008, www.the-numbers.com reports DVD sales stand at 920,023, for a total of $16,662,212.^[11]

The TV movie is being screened in the United Kingdom on Sky1, which started airing Bender's Big Score on the 26 October 2008. After being aired in four separate episodes, the next three movies will be aired, with each of them being broken up into four episodes; creating a fifth season comprising of 16 episodes overall.

Bender's Big Score aired in Canada on October 12, 2008 on the Global Television Network.

[edit] Torgo's Executive Powder

Torgo's Executive Powder is an elaborate running gag throughout the film in retaliation against the Fox Network for its alleged mishandling and eventual cancellation of Futurama.^[12] The product is said to have "a million and one uses" and consists of ground-up executives, including those of the film's thinly veiled Fox Network parody (the Box Network), and makes repeated appearances due to its miraculous utility in such diverse tasks as seasoning, surgery, delousing, feeding heads in jars, cosmetics, bomb disposal, artillery, and the care of head transplant patients. In the Everybody Loves Hypnotoad episode released with the film, Torgo's Powder is advertised as a parody of HeadOn, stating "Torgo's Powder: apply directly to the buttocks" three times in the same fashion. The name of the product is a reference to the horror film Manos: The Hands of Fate and the character Torgo within it. Manos: The Hands of Fate had been made famous by the 1990s cult TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000.^[13] When the film was aired on Comedy Central, a fake commercial was shown preceding the first break in which a woman dumps some of the powder in a toilet. It appears once in Bender's Game on Fry and Bender's kitchen counter, when Bender is washing a pot and is about to jump out of the window.^[14]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Bender's Big Score

• Official website
• Futurama: Bender's Big Score at Allmovie
• Futurama: Bender's Big Score at the Internet Movie Database
• Press Release
• Bender's Big Score at The Infosphere.