Scammed by Futurama...

...And I must admit, I kinda enjoyed it!

You can probably guess, I've just watched the Futurama movie entitled (rather inappropriately) "Bender's Big Score". Bender does indeed score big. Huge, in fact. It's just that I feel the film should have been called "Three or four new episodes of Futurama with an overall plot-thread whose premise alludes to something which probably didn't happen". Actually, that's a bit long. "The Big Scam" would probably work just as well.

Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you the plot, or the specifics of the scam in question, but I will tell you a little about the opening. You see, the dialogue begins with Prof. Farnsworth terminating the employment of the Planet Express crew with the addendum "Actually, you were fired two years ago...". The dialogue continues and, with no great amount of applied logic, one can tell that the writers are essentially saying "Fox network cancelled Futurama two years ago, and that makes them really bad men, but those men have been fired, and we just got the call to make a movie for you guys. Oh, and we're going to do revolting things to the remains of those men throughout the film."

All well and good, and a good way to incite fellowship in fantown, except for one thing...

Slippy remembers the blurb just before Futurama first appeared on our screens. It went something like, "Hey yeah, we're the Simpsons guys. We're making this new thing, Futurama because, frankly we know you'll eat it up. Anyway, the thing is, we're not gonna make that many of them. That way, it'll achieve cult status almost immediately, and anything Futurama-related on this Earth will go up in value, exponentially, once the show runs it's course. That's it. When it's done, it's done."

Of course, Futurama then duly ended. About two years ago.

Incidentally, how long does it take to create a feature-length Futurama from Concept to Cinema? I'm guessing somewhere in the region of two years.

You get what I'm saying here, yes? 

So, back to the movie. The plot. It's about internet scammers. Alien internet scammers, obviously. It's about a scam. You get me yet? Yeah, thought so.

I believe the conversation went something like this: 
"Okay, well done guys, that's the last episode in the bag. Take a month off, then we start work on the movie."
***skip forward 2 years***
"Okay, well done guys, the movie's in the bag. What's the word on the street?"
"Well, the plan you and Joss Whedon cooked up worked perfectly, and the fans believe their voice has power now."
"Yes, in fact their cries for a Futurama Movie have just about peaked."
"Excellent. Smithers, release the hounds! Er, I mean announce the forthcoming release of the movie."

What? No, I'm not ranting. Not at all. I'm totally in favour. Brilliant sales tactic.

Anyway, I'm not gonna review the film here, just give you a few words on what I thought of it. Okay, so that's what a review is, but you know what I mean. It's a brief one...

Well, I must admit I was getting a little bored towards the end. So much so, in fact, that I started writing this post. The team obviously figured this would happen, so to try and alleviate the boredom, there's a lot of jumping about in flashbacks and the like. It doesn't work. On the plus side, I think they've managed to cram almost every single character ever featured in Futurama somewhere, at least once. Some several times. One or two even appear several times at once. There's lots of time-travel and, as always follows the use of time-travel, lots of time-travel-related plot-cheats, contrivances and get-out-of-jail-free-cards - except they do kind of wrap it all up fairly well.

All-in-all, if you're a fan you should see it although if truth be told, you probably already have. If you've never seen futurama, go and watch ALL the episodes, THEN the film. Trust me, you'll get a lot more from it that way! If you're not a fan, there's nothing for you here. In fact, if you're not a fan, why are you even reading this post?

I guess it only remains for me to say "Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!"