Back to the 'Futurama'
Seth MacFarlane's "Family Guy" used home video to revive itself and get back on network TV, and now its old Fox rival "Futurama," the labor-of-love sci-fi cartoon created by "The Simpsons'" Matt Groening, charts the same course with the movie "Bender's Big Score."
"Futurama"-philes will already know that "Bender's Big Score" was released on DVD last November, just in time for the gift season. (It reaches a holiday climax involving Robot Santa, Coolio's Kwanzaa Bot and Mark Hamill's new Chanukah Zombie.) Yet now it comes to TV on Comedy Central, the current home of "Futurama" reruns, at 7 p.m. Sunday. "Bender's Big Score" and three more planned upcoming movies will eventually be divided into half-hour episodes to create what amounts to a fifth season of the series.
In this, it aspires to mimic the success of "Family Guy" perhaps a little too much, in that screenwriter Ken Keeler dumbs down its humor and wallows in scatological yuks. The main story involves an image of the morally challenged robot Bender embedded with a time-travel computer code and tattooed on the rear end of Billy West's Fry, the main character originally transported into the year 3000 in the pilot that set the series going. ("It's like looking into a smelly mirror," Bender says in checking out the tattoo.) There are also groaning puns, such as references to "barstool softener."
Yet, through it all, "Futurama" can't disguise its intelligence. The two-hour movie gets off sharp little jabs at the Fox network that canceled the series and, yes, even at "Family Guy" (lampooned in a "12 laughs a year" calendar, which is actually a generous accounting). At the peak of its powers, "Futurama" wasn't just far superior to anything Seth MacFarlane has ever done, it was every bit as good as "The Simpsons" -- if not better for being Groening's pet project -- and while "Bender's Big Score" doesn't find it at the top of its game, it's nonetheless a delight to have it back on TV with fresh material.
After a few opening jabs at Fox, Professor Farnsworth announces, "Good news, everybody! We've got a delivery to the Nude Beach Planet." There, Fry reveals his previously unseen tattoo. Then, in a plot device that reveals it's been years since the series was up and running, the cast falls victim to a series of alien E-mail scams.
Jokes about spam in the far future? Talk about going forward into the past.
The aliens also succeed in planting an obedience virus in Bender, and armed with the time-travel code from Fry's tatt they send the robot back in time to pillage great artifacts from history (including the "Mona Lisa," which Bender unfortunately steals before Leonardo can finish painting the face).
Fry goes back to the past in an attempt to undo what's being done, but while pursuing Fry through Florida in November 2001 Bender blasts a basket of Al Gore ballots into smithereens and leaves the Bush ballots untouched. (So that's what happened! Gore rewards the show with a voice cameo.)
In spite of the amusing if inevitable references to "The Terminator," "Bender's Big Score" bogs down in all the time back-and-forth, as well as in the romance between Katey Sagal's one-eyed alien LeeLa and a mysterious stranger. Yet it recovers in time to bring things home in a stirring finish involving the three holiday entities and, get this, an attack on an armada of solid-gold Death Stars.
The element that has always made "Futurama" special is the way it mixes "Simpsons"-style satire with a genuine fondness for classic sci-fi like "Star Wars" and classic comics, such as those created by the great Wally Wood. The new movie doesn't quite have the devotion to animated beauty the original series had -- they're clearly dealing with a cable budget -- but you still have to love the opening sequence following the flight of a bird, as well as the fine details, such as the heat waves in the exhaust of the Planet Express spaceship.
Groening doted on "Futurama," and he obviously felt betrayed by Fox's cancellation, in addition to no doubt being irked by the pandering success of "Family Guy." It's great that he's found a way for "Futurama" to rise again, but I hope he doesn't stoop too low in trying to pursue "Family Guy." In the generations to come, even the year 3000, I have no doubt it will be "Futurama" that will be considered the greater cultural resource.
In the air
Austen 'Masterpiece'
For those who want a more traditional "Emma," complete with bonnets and empire-waist dresses, Kate Beckinsale stars in the title role in the 1997 British production airing as part of PBS' "Masterpiece" series at 8 p.m. Sunday on WTTW Channel 11.
'Frontline' burns Bush
PBS' investigative series "Frontline" rehashes its coverage of the Iraq invasion and lays the seemingly endless conflict at the feet of the president in "Bush's War," a two-part analysis airing at 9 p.m. Monday and Tuesday on Channel 11.
Spears chuckler
Britney Spears steps out of the tabloids and attempts to revive her acting career when she guest-stars as a doctor's receptionist smitten with Ted in CBS' "How I Met Your Mother" at 7:30 p.m. Monday on WBBM Channel 2. Let's hope the curiosity factor doesn't overshadow the show's usual sparkling comedy.
Waste Watcher's choice
"Clueless" is, without question, the best, the cleverest, the sharpest and, in many ways, the most faithful of the Jane Austen updates. Reworking "Emma" and resetting it in contemporary El Lay, it keeps the story's foundation, but builds a lovely satire upon it, with Alicia Silverstone as star. It's at 2 p.m. Saturday on TBS.