Rating:

Oh my god! Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod! OH…MY…GAWD! Futurama’s back in a big way! Compared to this, Family Guy coming back is like a turd coming back when the toilet overflows. I’ve perhaps never been so excited in my life. Holy cow do I love Futurama; I’m even prepared to call it a better show than The Simpsons.

Bender’s Big Score is the first of four direct-to-DVD Futurama movies, and if the quality of this one is any indication of what’s to come then we’re all about to add the four greatest DVDs in history to our collections. For fans of the TV series, it’s got just about everything you could want. We get to hear funny words like “handjob” and “twaddlecock” and all our favorite characters make reappearances, including the Hypnotoad, Seymour, the Harlem Globetrotters, Hedonismbot, Barbados Slim and Leela’s luscious asscheeks.

But it isn’t just Leela’s asscheeks we get to feast our eyes on, Lord no. The plot of this thing focuses a lot on asses. Hermes’ ass gets plenty of screen time and Fry’s ass is a major plot device (a major, smelly plot device). The non-ass related elements of the plot center around a race of greedy, bare-assed aliens who manage to take over the Earth. In the process they manage to turn Bender into a blindly obedient slave and send him traveling through the past stealing all of Earth’s greatest treasures. Our valiant Planet Express crew (even Scruffy! Yes!) is forced to take back Earth from the jiggly clutches of the diabolical spacemen.

And on top of all that, Hermes needs a new body to save his dignity and his marriage. Leela finds love and Fry finds a Narwhal. The Professor gets a chance to show off more of his doomsday devices. Zoidberg gets to wear a crown! Everyone gets to do everything and it makes me cry out to the heavens: “Dear god do I ever love Futurama! Can you please amend the Bible so it is acceptable for me to get married to a TV show?”

I couldn’t be more pleased with the way this movie turned out. Unlike The Simpsons Movie, this plays like an actual movie, rather than an overlong episode, bloated and thin at the same time. It never feels padded out just to be feature-length; every moment is justified. And the jokes…oh, the jokes. The comedy in Bender’s Big Score is every last bit as great as it was on the series; it’s as though the four and a half year break never happened and the writers have been going strong on this show the whole time. It feels natural, like it should have happened, and that’s perhaps the best thing about it. Direct-to-video movies and returns after long hiatuses are all too often misguided efforts. But not this time, baby. This time, everything comes together just great.

One of my ten million favorite quotes: “Just because you don’t have a body, you don’t want anyone else to be the king of Nigeria!”

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