Futurama: Bender's Big Score

Futurama: Bender's Big Score
Directed by	Dwayne Carey-Hill
Written by	Teleplay: Ken Keeler Story: David X. Cohen Ken Keeler
Produced by	Matt Groening David X. Cohen Lee Supercinski
Starring	Billy West Katey Sagal John DiMaggio Tress MacNeille Maurice LaMarche
Edited by	Paul D. Calder
Music by	Christopher Tyng
Distributed by	20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Release dates	United States: November 27, 2007 Australia: March 5, 2008 United Kingdom: April 7, 2008
Running time	89 min.
Country	United States
Language	English

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. 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, friend of the show 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.

Plot

Two years ago, the executives of the Box Network canceled Planet Express's contract. Now those executives have been fired and ground into a fine, pink powder, 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 limboing accident with a saber. His head is placed in a jar while his body is repaired. The man who performs the procedure, Lars, takes an immediate liking to Leela, who reciprocates, much to Fry's chagrin.

During a delivery to a nude beach planet, Fry discovers a tattoo of Bender on his buttocks, of which he was unaware. While on the beach, a trio of scammer aliens use flimsy excuses to coerce the entire Planet Express crew into signing petitions and providing their e-mail addresses. When the crew returns to Earth, the scammers send them hundreds of spam messages, which they respond to; while browsing the spam, Bender is infected with a virus, and Professor Farnsworth is tricked into signing over his business to the scammers, who show up to take over. Bender's virus compels him to obey the scammers. The scammers are drawn to the tattoo on Fry's buttocks, which is revealed to contain the code for paradox-correcting time travel. Nibbler once again reveals himself and explains that using the code could rip the very fabric of 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 time code only allows travel into the past, the scammers have Bender steal valuable objects from Earth's past, waiting out the time between in a cave beneath Planet Express since, as a robot, he can last for tens of thousands of years. During an interval of Bender's stealing spree, Hermes asks Bender to travel back in time and obtain an earlier version of his body as a replacement (although Dr. Zoidberg puts his head on backwards). The Professor analyzes the time code and discovers that all duplicates created via time-travel paradoxes, including Hermes' new body, are doomed to die. Meanwhile, Leela and Lars begin going out on several dates, making Fry bitter and forlorn.

Once Bender has stolen everything of value from history, the scammers deem the time-travel code too risky to use any further, so they decide to destroy it by killing Fry and blanking it from Bender's memory bank. Fed up with everything that is happening, Fry uses the time code to escape to January 1, 2000, the day he was frozen. Bender is sent back to kill him and arrives in the cryogenics lab where Fry was frozen. Bender creates a duplicate of himself when he needs to use the bathroom (for the first time in his life). The duplicate catches Fry as he appears in the past and attempts to kill him, only to have an emotional crisis—and his need to badly urinate—cause an overload, so Fry shoves him in a cryo-tube. Fry leaves and the original Bender spends the next twelve years hunting him down, eventually cornering him at and blowing up Panucci's Pizza when Fry walks inside.

Bender returns to report his apparent success, and the scammers erase the code and the obedience virus. While the crew holds a memorial for him, Fry shows up out of nowhere. He explains that while in the 21st century, a series of events involving Fry's further use of the time code led to the creation of a time-travel duplicate of his own, which confronted the Bender duplicate and remained in the past while the original Fry accidentally fell into his own cryo-tube again and returned to the future. Nibbler destroys the time travel tattoo to keep the scammers from abusing it any further. However, everyone is now living in poverty thanks to the scammers, while Leela and Lars decide to get married, making Fry despondent. Unfortunately, a chain reaction at the wedding leads to Hermes being decapitated again, and his body gets crushed by a chandelier. The Professor explains that, as a time-travel duplicate, the body was inevitably doomed. At this point, Lars becomes agitated and inexplicably calls off the wedding.

Earth President Richard Nixon is tricked into selling Earth to the scammers and everyone evacuates the planet. In an attempt to reclaim Earth, the population assembles a motley yet resourceful attack fleet and defeats the scammers' fleet of solid gold Death Stars, achieving victory thanks to Hermes' bureaucratic brain wired into the battle computer. In a last-ditch effort, the scammers threaten to kill the crew with a doomsday device Bender had stolen for them earlier, but fail to realize that Bender has double crossed them and stolen the device again for himself. The crew fires the device at the scammers' ship, destroying it. Everyone returns to Earth to celebrate the New Year 3008, where Bender is commended for his deeds and Hermes is returned to his original body.

Fry sees that Leela is troubled after her breakup with Lars. After failing to entice her, Fry decides to do what he feels is best for her and tries to get the two back together. The reunion is cut short by Nudar, the lead scammer, who had survived the explosion of the doomsday device thanks to his radiation-absorbing vest. Nudar claims that the time-travel code still exists on Lars. Lars tricks him into approaching the cryo-tube with the Bender duplicate on overload; once that Bender is released, Lars holds Nudar against the doomed Bender duplicate, who explodes and kills them both. The explosion singes off some of Lars' clothing, revealing the time-travel tattoo. A flashback explains that Lars was actually Fry's time-travel duplicate, having survived Bender's attack in 2012, the fire and smoke of which changed his appearance and voice. Upon realizing that he was Lars, the duplicate Fry froze himself to return to the future and be with Leela. However, once he realized that all time travel duplicates were doomed, he cancelled the wedding because he didn't want to cause Leela to bear the pain of his death, as explained to everyone in his video will, especially the empathetic Leela.

During the funeral, Bender removes the tattoo from Lars' body and travels into the past to place it on the Fry frozen in cryo-sleep to make sense out of all that has transpired (this process was actually portrayed earlier in the film, when the original Bender duplicate met himself from "way at the end"). Upon returning, Bender has met many of his own duplicates created during his stealing spree, each of which he invites to emerge with him all at once instead of when they were supposed to give their artifacts to the scammers. The Bender duplicates begin exploding one after another, and cause a huge tear in the fabric of space.

Cast

Actor	Character
Billy West	Philip J. Fry Professor Farnsworth Dr. Zoidberg Lars Fillmore Zapp Brannigan Richard Nixon
Katey Sagal	Turanga Leela
John DiMaggio	Bender Rodriguez Robot Santa Barbados Slim
Tress MacNeille	Additional voices
Maurice LaMarche	Kif Kroker
Phil LaMarr	Hermes Conrad Ethan "Bubblegum" Tate
Lauren Tom	Amy Wong
David Herman	Nudar Scruffy
Dawnn Lewis	LaBarbara Conrad
Kath Soucie	Cubert Farnsworth
Frank Welker	Nibbler
Coolio	Kwanzaa Bot
Al Gore	Himself
Mark Hamill	Chanukah Zombie
Tom Kenny	Yancy Fry, Jr.
Sarah Silverman	Michelle

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." A preview of the film was shown at Comic-Con 2007. 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. The voice recording finished on July 3, 2007. 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. 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. It also features an Easter Egg (accessible by highlighting the Bender icon on the second page) as well as a full length episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad.

Broadcast and reception

Bender's Big Score made its broadcast premiere on Comedy Central on March 23, 2008. The film was broken into four separate episodes which will serve as the first part of Futurama's fifth season, followed by the other three expected films. The extended opening from the film is cut in the broadcast premiere, and 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 is "IT JUST WON'T STAY DEAD!" This is kept as the opening subtitle of the first part. The three additional opening captions are: "Watch, Rinse, Repeat.", "Apply directly to the foreclaw" 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. 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. 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. 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.. As of July 24, 2008, www.the-numbers.com reports DVD sales stand at 920,023, for a total of $16,662,212

The TV movie will be screen in the United Kingdom in Autumn 2008 on Sky1 along with the other 3 tv movies. Each movie will be broke down in 4 episodes each, creating a fifth season, with 16 episodes in total.

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. 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 Torgo, a character in the horror film "Manos" The Hands of Fate, which had been made famous by the 1990s cult TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000. 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.

External links

• Futurama: Bender's Big Score at IMDb
• Press Release
• Bender's Big Score at The Infosphere.