Sturgeon's Law

...of the new Futurama DVD movie, Bender's Big Score.

Well, I wasn't as disappointed by this as Jeannine evidently was. It wasn't great, but it came across to me like a lesser episode with extended running time, which isn't a terrible thing.

The two main flaws to me were (A) it spent so much time on the convoluted plot (where did the Bender tattoo with the time travel code actually come from?) that the attention to humor lapsed at points, and (B) they were obviously trying to cater to hardcore fans, but gratuitously throwing in 90% of all the bit players from 4 seasons without bothering to make any jokes connected to them was not a good idea ("Look, it's Hedonism Bot! Hey, Fry just said Slurms McKenzie's catchphrase!"), and I'm sure the whole thing would be utterly inexplicable to a newcomer.

Still, there were plenty of funny moments (lots of smiles and several laughs for me), and the main storyline did a good job with the potentially overused Fry/Leela storyline (whose ending I figured out midway, but no big deal).

Big-picture good things:

• It felt completely genuine to Futurama, which gives me hope for the other movies getting the humor content back up to par.
  
• The glee with which Bender took to obeying his evil masters.
• The Al Gore parts.
• The digs at Fox, including Torgo's Executive Powder.
• The character time traveling to do totally trivial things like go to the bathroom and eat pizza before it got cold.
• Very little Amy.
  

Little good touches:

• Fry saying that his expertise was (slight paraphrase) "showing animals how to eat things."
• The "Screaming Skull Garden" as a relaxing date destination for Lars and Leela.
• Everybody Loves Hypnotoad.
  
• The fleet of solid gold Death Stars.
• Zoidberg reattaching Hermes' body backwards (even if Spaceballs did it first).
• Zoidberg flipping up his angry fin because Leela slept in his dumpster.
  

The bad:

• The scammer aliens were not really worthy enemies, and their humor was hit-or-miss.
  
• The Hermes subplot by-and-large was completely tacked on.
  
• Having a narwhal version of Leela and naming it Leelu was just creepy.

Anyway, on my arbitrary scale of 13 slices of pizza, I give Futurama: Bender's Big Score 7 1/2 slices of pepperoni and onion, plus an order of garlic cheese bread. I am eating pizza tonight.

This could be my last post over the long weekend, but regardless, happy holidays to everyone!