Rann:  I caught this Futurama movie on TV last night, and thought I’d take a few moments to throw my thoughts on it out there. Nothing in-depth, since I don’t have a DVD to go through again as I review it, but maybe a kind of general “heads-up”… and possibly a warning for when Futurama really does return to the airwaves in its upcoming whole new season. (And one or two minor spoilers.)

The first, and possibly for many the only, question is this: Is it funny? The answer: Yes it is. It’s the quirky brand of humor you’ve come to know and expect from Futurama in many a rerun, refined in some ways and degraded in others. There are a fair number of decent chuckles in there, and if that’s all you want or expect out of this, then you’re good to go.

The major problem is that especially with this movie, Futurama seems to have become… well, Family Guy post-uncancellation. Which isn’t about politics… that, mercifully, seems to have been almost completely left out of the movie. (Well, unless you count the constant low-key axe to grind they have with Nixon, which I doubt anyone would. It’s just kind of a trademark of anything related to a Groening property.) Rather, it’s how self-referential and almost self-parodying Futurama has become.

When Family Guy returned to the airwaves, it referenced itself almost as much as it referenced stuff from the eighties and other random pop-culture. McFarlane and crew knew that the whole reason the show was back was the massive amount of fondness people had acquired for the show and certain pieces of it in the constant reruns on Adult Swim and Comedy Central. And so we were inundated with references to them, putting the Greased-Up Deaf Guy in there at every opportunity, having another random fight with the Coupon Chicken, all that. Characters, already rather thinly characterized beyond their quirks, started being there pretty much to make jokes about how people were aware of those quirks. Hey, everybody, Joe’s in a wheelchair! Let’s point that out, because we know how much you liked all the funny stuff we did with that before! Also, his wife’s still hugely pregnant! Let’s say how long she’s been pregnant, that’ll be good for a laugh! And Quagmire’s horny! Oh god how horny Quagmire is!

Beast With A Billion Backs really gets into this territory more often than I’d like, considering Futurama‘s imminent return to the airwaves in episodic format. At one point, Nixon stops an important speech so that he can repeat the “Charleston Chew” gag from an episode of the series. Seriously, they do the exact same gag out of nowhere, and the only way it would even be really a little bit funny is if you were going to laugh at it being a callback to the earlier episode that had Nixon shilling for sponsors in the midst of important speeches. The Smelloscope gets a workout at every opportunity, since it was such a quirky and favorite fixture of the series. At one point for a gag, Farnsworth even outright says “You know how I always say ‘Good news, everybody!’ when I’m about to send you on an incredibly dangerous mission?” WHY GEE, PROFESSOR, NO I HADN’T, THANKS FOR THAT REMINDER. It’s not as bad or annoying as the allcaps might make it seem, but it is an example of how the humor has gotten into that area where they’re actually explaining their old gags so that they can build gags off of them. It’s getting into a very Ctl+Alt+Del level of explaining jokes and wall of text, and I think we can all agree that if there’s anything Futurama doesn’t need, it’s Tim B^Uckley’s brand of suck.

The characterization thing is pretty heavy, too. Yes, guys, we get it, Fry and Bender are sort of like a gay couple. We know. We get it. You can get another joke now. What, Fry is an idiotic loser that makes bad decisions, you say? And Zoidberg’s creepy and dumb? And Leela’s bitchy? Wow. I never would have known if you didn’t have Fry doing the absolute most idiotic things possible, Zoidberg jabbering about naked men thrusting against cake, and Leela being the only person in the universe who finds things to bitch about in Heaven.

Bender gets it the worst, though. The series had it well established that yes, Bender is evil. He is amoral and selfish and really only cares about other people for how they make him feel or what they can do for him, and that he’s at least semi-serious about wanting to kill all humans. He’s a jerk and a sociopath, but he was regularly given his little “pet the dog” moments so that he stayed at least marginally inside the “lovable jerk” area. I don’t know why the writers decided to take these mannerisms to an extreme. Considering who it is, it’s possible that they’re trying to teach us a lesson and/or make some kind of point about how someone like Bender shouldn’t be lovable no matter how many dogs he pets, and possibly so that they can sneer and feel superior when a lot of people love him anyway or even love him more; it’s equally possible it’s just horrible character writing.

So we know that Bender often takes disproportionate insult to small or imagined slights, and that he’s pretty uncaring about who he hurts to get his way. Alright. So why not have him… oh, I don’t know, decide that the time has come to actually kill all humans just because Fry didn’t want to go get a beer with him, and when the Robot Devil demands his first-born son in return for an army of the damned to do so, have Bender go retrieve said firstborn son and cheerfully violently slaughter him?

I’ll tell you why not. Because regardless of whether or not people should like Bender, they do. And a scene like that is either going to make them stop liking him, or they’re going to like him even more, so what have you accomplished by trying to make that statement? (Well, other than straining your elbows patting yourselves on the back, but hey, Hollywood.) But putting aside all issues of what the fans will think, since it’s unlikely anyone involved with Futurama actually cares… where do you go from there? You had Bender go retrieve his own child that he ran out on, just so that he could hum happily while tossing him into a vat of molten metal to kill him. Then you had him destroy the universe’s chance at eternal life, peace, and happiness just so he could have Fry back. Where do you even go with him after that? What’s left to do? The Futurama movies had already partly moved from being about Futurama and closer to being about The Bender Show as it was, all about what new depravity Bender could giggle with sociopathic glee as he committed it… so where do you go from there?  We’ve had him happily try to kill his best friend, happily kill his own child… what do you even have him do to top himself?

Where is there for Bender to go in future movies or the series? Rape? Robot kiddy porn? Having a stomach and anus installed just so he can projectile spray diarrhea on people? More than that, Fry arguably hit his lowest point ever in this movie, with the woman who treated him like a collectible and broke his heart and then went off on a self-righteous rant on him… she’s the only one who gets to stay in Heaven after he and Bender get everyone else kicked out. What do you even do to the poor bastard after that to play the “lol Fry is a loser” card for a laugh? Have his dick fall off? Have him contract a space-disease so that every woman who punches him in the face tastes chocolate? Have Bender rape him?

As usual, I’ve pulled a Yahtzee and wound up focusing almost totally on the negative stuff, mostly because that’s what stuck with me. (I guess you could add that to the negatives… there weren’t any laughs well and truly big enough to stick out and be memorable, while the annoying bits are seared, SEARED into my memory.) There are lots of little bits that I did like about it. While there were a lot of “lol future technology” gags, I actually approved of the proliferation of those… one of Futurama‘s problems is that it often came off less like the future and more like just some weird alternate dimension of present day. (Even going so far as to have gags about “satellite versus cable”, which was probably supposed to be the point, but I digress.) Actually having more common everyday stuff with futuregadgets in it instead of just randomly throwing in wacky goo-beings and whatnot made it more of a “year 3000” and less of a “Flintstones a la the Jetsons” thing. They fiddle with the status quo a bit, too, which is always nice… in some ways they do revert it to keep things from moving ahead too much, in other ways they tease that yes, things have changed. (After Fry’s latest crush gets into Heaven, he asks Leela if she’d like to give it another try. She’s bitchy as usual, since how dare he have dated someone else after her long years of not giving him the time of day, and he just kind of shrugs and grins and blows her off.)

Beast With A Billion Backs is likely to make you chuckle, but it’s unlikely to make you laugh out loud. It also serves as a bit of a warning… don’t get your hopes up too high for Futurama‘s imminent return to the airwaves with new episodes. It’s entirely possible that, like with Family Guy, you’ll find yourself wondering why you ever wanted this show back in the first place.