Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs

Cafe Society
61

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
That’s one of the things that’s consistant with Futurama, though. One of the recurring themes of the show (either intentionally or unintentionally) has been that horrifying monsters aren’t always that horrifying and that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. The horrible Cthulu/mindflayer/crustacean alien? Oh, he’s the ship’s nebbishy doctor. The 1950s type movie alien who wants to destroy humanity? He’s the TV news reader. The tenticle blob that easts people? He’s just a harried blue-collar husband and father. Melvar? He’s a loser who lives in his parents basement. The horrible sewer mutants? They’re really Leela’s loving parents.
[/QUOTE]

But Morbo does want humanity to suffer.

The tentacle blob does eat people in addition to being a harried father.

Melvar did imprison and enslave a group of people for his own selfish wants.

The recurring theme seems to be that aliens are freaking scary and will kill you, but that’s normal now. When Yivo turned out to be Melvar v2.0 (but with extra lame!), I was let down.

62

I enjoyed it. Laughed quite a bit and was entertained all the way through.

Favorite bit was Bender throwing his first-born into the lake of fire and the Robot Devil’s reaction. I was in hysterics.

63

[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]
When Yivo turned out to be Melvar v2.0 (but with extra lame!), I was let down.
[/QUOTE]

Well, Yivo is less lame than Melvar. Melvar is a nerd who lives in his mom’s basement. Yivo is an almost omnipotent nearly divine planet who’s alone in the universe and wasn’t able to have any contact with any other living thing until the rift between universes opened.

64

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
Well, Yivo is less lame than Melvar. Melvar is a nerd who lives in his mom’s basement. Yivo is an almost omnipotent nearly divine planet who’s alone in the universe and wasn’t able to have any contact with any other living thing until the rift between universes opened.
[/QUOTE]

But Melvar is funny because the Futurama crew just mutated the standard Trek nerd cliche onto a scary alien that would be right at home on Trek. That’s gold.

Yivo is…

a) voiced by David Cross, the weakest link of Arrested Development and an actor I can’t stand almost on principle.
b) the cause of ruining a perfectly good movie with this “let’s date a planet” nonsense.

Q.E.D… Yivo is more lame.

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[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
Melvar?
[/QUOTE]

I’ve been to enough sci-fi conventions to know that Melllvar is spelled with three Ls.

66

[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]
I thought Bender’s Big Score was decent . . . Although I only watched it once.
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Try again. I was pretty let down after I saw it, but it improved drastically on subsequent viewings.

67

[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]
The first hour was awesome. I thought it was going to be a great aliens versus humans plot like “War is the H-Word”. But no, it turned into some crap about alien dating and alien heaven (although the Mattress Isle joke/orgy was hilarious).

These Futurama movies are almost worse than no new Futurama.
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Pretty much agreed here. Instead of getting it the instant it came out, I Netflixed it, and am glad I did. The first 20 minutes or so had me laughing left and right, but the instant that Yivo showed up it turned into total suck until the bitter end-I think I cracked a weak smile a couple of times in the last 60 minutes. The whole Yivo thing seemed like something they’d come up with when all the writers were drunk during their weekly brainstorming meeting, but when the sobered up they’d immediately toss the idea into the nearest garbage can. Except that this time they didn’t. Okay rant off.

68

[Damned board lag and 5 minute edit window…]

Overall about even with BBS. The plot in the latter was better but there’s a few more good gags to be had with BwaBB. I hope they just chuck all the touchy-feely BS in the next film because all this weepy sentimentality causes my blood sugar level to skyrocket.

69

[QUOTE=Marley23]
That’s actually what I liked the most about the plot. The tentacle portion was a great, classic sci-fi plot, and then I felt they took it somewhere really new and weird. When they got to “heaven” Leela kept expecting some Twilight Zone-y dystopian twist where there was no free will or no real fun or anything. Nope. Yivo was really offering paradise.
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Along the same lines, the creepy mind controlled zombies talking about how great it is to be “loved” by Yivo aren’t being mind controlled. Yivo really does love everyone, and it really does feel great.

Still, over all I was disappointed. Bender’s Big Score was a much better movie, but neither is nearly as good as the best Futurama episodes. I still enjoyed them both quite a bit, though.

70

O.K.
On repeat viewings I still laugh so hard at this line that it makes the entire movie worthwhile, one of the best lines in all Futurama history.
Officer URL coming to The Professor and Wernstrom cell at Fulcrum County Prism to inform them they have a visitor:

URL: Look alive, death row! Your saggy asses got a visitor.

Professor: Regular or Conjugal?

URL: She looked like a freak to me.

71

About the same as BBS, for me. I don’t need them to be classics, though–I need them to amuse me for 90 minutes.

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[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
Well, Yivo is less lame than Melvar. Melvar is a nerd who lives in his mom’s basement. Yivo is an almost omnipotent nearly divine planet who’s alone in the universe and wasn’t able to have any contact with any other living thing until the rift between universes opened.
[/QUOTE]

Anyone else wondering how sklee was able to project an image of sklershelf into the minds of anciend Earthican artists (or how sklee was even aware of them)?

73

Well, whether you liked it or not, you watched it. You can’t Unwatch it.

What’s interesting to me is that most people seem to like BBS or BwaBB much more then the other. The different styles of the two movies are just a sample of the range of plots explored in the series. My favorite episodes are Roswell that Ends Well and The Farnsworth Parabox, so it should be no surprise that I liked Bender’s Big Score more then BwaBB.

After seeing The Beast with a Billion Backs a second time, I must say it is better then I first thought, but I was bored by the end. I don’t think it has much replay value. The third act was by far the best (“I love the tentacle!”), but the ending was still anti-climatic. I did pick up more of Bender’s loneliness, so his side-story made more sense, but it still felt as though it was forced in with the rest of the movie.

A bit off topic, but I want to address something from BBS. With all the time travel shenanigans, I don’t think the movie affected the endings of Luck of the Fryish or Jurassic Bark at all. Seymour and Phillip Jr. only interacted with the doomed-Fry (who became Lars), and so became doomed copies as well. The REAL Seymour still waited for Fry for his entire lifetime, and the REAL Phillip Jr. was still named after his uncle, “to carry on his spirit.” It’s difficult to understand why, since they never traveled through time, but they each became a paradox once their fates were altered indirectly by the time code. It’s the same reason all those copies of Bender blew up and caused the anomaly: “Bender from the End” invited them to “stick around instead of coming up when they were logically supposed to,” thus altering their fates and making them all doomed copies.

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Previously, Futurama adhered scrupulously to a “single consistent timeline” model of time travel. Bender’s Big Score abandoned that for something much less coherent. That was unforgivable.

75

What, no love for Bender’s deal with the Robot Devil? That had me in tears.

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I liked BWABB better than BBS, but neither are anything special. I’ll shell out my 20 bucks for them, but that’s about as ringing of an endorsement as I can offer.

The reason is, every DVD movie has to be a “BIG” event for some reason. Well, the series already had episodes with “big events”, but was able to deal with them in 22 minutes.

That is the problem with these DVDS. The events are too stretched out.

Think about it. In 22 minutes, the crew has witnessed: Fry father his *own * father **and ** get back to the Future, Bender and Fry be planetary emperorers (each on seperate occassions), twice tangle with the evil Robot Santa, and create/destroy an entire civilization of Bender-worshippers.

In addition, they have skewered full length feature films in 22 minutes. They have mocked/parodied:

Armageddon/Deep Imact
Titanic
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Shining
Fantastic Voyage
Total Recall

and probably several more I’m missing.

The point is, Futurama feel thin if it uses 88 minutes to tell a story that previously would have only used 1/4th the time.

It feels like there is a lot of padding in the story and that drags things out. It is kind of like how the show Lost got better when they told them an end date-certain. The episodes got to where there wasn’t any extraneous fluff.

Here, I’m getting the same feeling. The movies are being padded to stretch it out to DVD length.

Family Guy’s DVD was better.

(Heh. I just restarted a long settled war!)

77

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]
What, no love for Bender’s deal with the Robot Devil? That had me in tears.
[/QUOTE]

That was cold, nay even vicious, even by Bender’s standards. Tears of a much different kind.

[Since we’re dispensing with spoiler tags here goes]

I don’t recall the ep where Bender had a “son”. In any event him chucking the kid, after he obviously was glad to see Bender, into the vat of boiling lava just appalled me, and I didn’t find it funny at all.

78

[QUOTE=John DiFool]
I don’t recall the ep where Bender had a “son”.
[/QUOTE]

There wasn’t one. They made up the character for that joke.

79

[QUOTE=John DiFool]
I don’t recall the ep where Bender had a “son”. In any event him chucking the kid, after he obviously was glad to see Bender, into the vat of boiling lava just appalled me, and I didn’t find it funny at all.
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My wife and I cracked up. We love our kids, heck our sons were playing in the floor as we watched, and we couldn’t have laughed harder.

Remember, he was just a robot. And as we all know, robots cannot go to heaven.

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[QUOTE=middleman]
Remember, he was just a robot. And as we all know, robots cannot go to heaven.
[/QUOTE]

Robot spirituality is a total rip! They can’t go to heaven, but there’s a real robot hell with a seriously twisted Robot Devil. Man does that suck for them!