Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs Talkback (Spoilers)

FYI, I've turned this into the official talkback thread for the movie and my Toon Zone News review of it.

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So, yeah, pretty much everything I thought is all in there. Funny but not hilarious, felt more like 4 episodes stitched together than a movie, and more schtick than story. Still enjoyable, but not their best effort.

-- Ed
 
I agreed with the review. The film wasn't terrible or anything, but they really needed to fine-tune the plot so that it flowed better. I hope this wasn't a case where the writers were burned out by making the first film and will continue to be burned out for the third. Hope this was just a fluke.
 
Well I watched it... and I have to echo some of the previous complaints.

Why Fry and Leela's relationship had to die 5 minutes after the end of the first movie (in relation to time line events in the acctual program) and Matt's rationalization that's it's been "6 months in real time" when it's only been 31 days according to the news broadcast before we meet Fry's "new" girl.

And honestly... hasn't Futurama done the joke with Fry's "girlfriend" hooking up with someone else at the end of the episode atleast 3 times already?

I mean the whole "Fonfon Ru" thing really didn't go anywhere, not to mention they blew it off half way through the movie. I mean it's good for the upcoming third movie which will probably sew the seeds to have it fully resolved in the 4th.

The whole "tentacle" thing was ok...but it really really needed more time to make it work. if they forsaked the relationship thing at the start and simply had Leela's rejection from the first movie be the catalyst for fry's leaving... Then it would've been good and we could've shaved almost 5 minutes off the first episode and really expanded upon the whole "take over" thing later.

The whole "Coleen" thing really needed a kick in the head. I mean first she's just some person...then she's revealed she's Chief of Police without any backstory or exposition to atleast let us know about it!

Also the whole "heaven" thing is laughable as well. I know I'm starting to get into "fanboy" territory here. Really the explanations and such were way too much Deus Ex Machina in way too little time. I mean if they had taken a couple of minutes...maybe....but literally they took 2 minutes to do it all and it really sucked. Perhaps if they ended the movie after all the humans left the 3rd movie to be about them coming back due to teh robots much the same as they had in the last like 5 minutes. There is so much that could've been "stretched' to make it work better... but they just went for the cop out to get to the 3rd movie without keeping the underlying story arround.

I'm a fan of DnD (however I've never played due to college classes being scheduled when my friends scheduled their games)...but sacrificing a potentially good story just to have a movie based arround it... really bad idea
 
I'm probably the odd one out, but I was very disappointed by this movie.

1. What the heck happened to continuity? Apparently Leela and Fry have completely forgotten about the Lars drama from the last movie and we're back at square one again (or, really, nothing at all). Fry is dating another woman, and Leela shows absolutely no emotion or any kind of jealous reaction towards it. So, the fact that Lars was Fry and you claimed he was the only man you'd ever love meant nothing? You know, if he married that girl, future-mature Fry whom you madly loved would not be yours. Ever think of that?

2. And Fry, what about you? In Big Score you were desperate to win Leela's heart. After you broke up with Colleen I assumed you'd go right back to that, like always. No, it didn't even occur to you. You just put on a space suit and left the universe. If he's going to completely lose interest in Leela, at least tell us WHY.

3. Despite the fact that Nibbler was freaking out at the end of Big Score, and there came a huge rift in the space-time continuum in the sky, it took them weeks before they even started to investigate it!? Besides which, Leela didn't seem to care or notice that Nibbler had run away. Isn't he supposed to be her beloved, spoiled pet?

4. We have some kind of creepy "lonely" monster who suddenly decided he was going to mate with everyone on Earth literally behind their backs. Then when everyone found out what was REALLY happening, he says they should all be friends, sends them giant flowers and candy, and DATES everyone on Earth? The heck?! That's not funny, that's just incredibly weird and skeezy :/

Granted, there was some really funny stuff in there, and I enjoyed it a lot for the first half hour or so, but towards the end I was actually FForwarding. It was all "Shouldn't it be done?". The Bender and robot league thing got boring fast and I think it was just an excuse to give him more air time. It was rather pointless.

I really hope the last two movies will be better :( This will probably be rewatched the least once all four are done.
 
I thought it was entertaining.

It just didn't entirely feel like a sequel to Bender's Big Score.

Or wasn't as "epic", IE: The whole time traveling deal in BBS which was interesting and the whole thing with Leeyla and Fry which was a nice romance part of it. I did like the whole Hell taking over Heaven reference thing though.

Billion Backs was more like a really long episode than a BBS continuity.
 
Well, this is the second act in a four act performance, so although we can't write the whole show off, I agree that the Beast With A Billion Backs was perhaps lacking some of the sharper wit and humour that I have come to expect from Futurama. Like some others have said, the main characters were a bit out of whack; allowing secondary characters to play a bit more. Now, one of the criticisms I've levelled at the Simpsons Movie is that we saw too much of the family and not enough of the townspeople. It appears that the balance has yet to be found. The plot itself was a bit plain, but I found it more coherent and logical than BBS, which at times was jumping about all over the place. Bender disappointed me the most though. He was nowhere near as funny or wicked as he normally is. Here's hoping the next movie is an improvement.
 
Well we don't know for sure it's the final word from Futurama. David Cohen as said he'd like to do an actual Futurama movie for theaters, and other things in the future whether it be actual new episodes or anything like board games. Although in the unfortunate case that this is the final word then I have to agree with you here. Hopefully Bender's Game will be a step up.
 
He sold his son to the robot devil and then threw him into a pit of Lava!!!, i dont rtemember him being more wicked than that, even the robo devil thought so.
 
Touche, although that scene seemed to be an isolated incident. I thought that over the course of the series, his schemes were of a similar caliber, but were more grandiose and devious in their nature.
 
Funny you should mention "isolated incident", since Bender's subplot seemed to be full of those that were much funnier than the whole. I couldn't even fully grasp his motivation to begin with - maybe if we'd actually seen the "League of Robots" TV show that Bender believed to be real, we'd be able to identify with it better. And Bender's emotions are all over the map throughout the film, leaping from confident to suicidal to enthusiastic to snooty to enraged to lonesome to uncaring to vengeful to loving in mere seconds. Even though it offered lots of good lines, Bender's entire story felt artificial and forced.

Wow, the more I look at this movie, the more it sucks. This is the type of laziness I'd expect from the "Family Guy" crew, not the math and physics majors of "Futurama".
 
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The movie is making its Comedy Central debut tonight. It started at 8 PM, but if you missed it due to watching FOX's animation lineup(or other stuff), it repeats tonight at 11 PM Eastern.
 
It also repeats, Saturday, October 25th at 11:30 PM Eastern and Sunday, October 26th at 12:00 AM Eastern. Just throwing it out there.
 
BBB has all the elements that bugs me about Futurama. With Futurama, the story is always more important than the characters, and the characters are bent, folded and twisted to fit the story no matter what. Thus, when the characters are thrust into wildly improbable situations (not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with that, this being a cartoon and all), we, the viewers, have no reference point from which to be either amused or astounded. We have no one character to identify with, since none of them, for the most part, act even remotely believably human. I think that one identifiable character is essential for any work of fiction, cartoon or otherwise. In The Simpsons, that one character is probably Marge. In King of the Hill, that one character is probably Hank. In Fairly Oddparents, that one character is (or should be) Timmy. Of course, ideally, all the characters in a given cartoon should have some aspect we all recognize, identify with or sympathize with. Spongebob has three such characters: Spongebob himself, due to his innocent, childlike optimism; Squidward, due to his dour attitude towards his unfulfilling grunt job and his equally unfullfilled dreams; and Mr. Krabs, because of his kindly but practical "Stop-dreaming-and-work-for-a-living" credo. All 3 have some human quality we the viewers recognize. But nobody in Futurama really has those qualities. They're all very superficial. Even Leela seems rather cold and distant, although she's easily the smartest and most competent of the bunch.

Really, you'd think that, given his fish-out-of-water persona, Fry would be the identifiable character in the Futurama universe. But he's just as off-kilter and puzzling as the rest of them. The only thing that makes him remotely sympathetic is his obsession with Leela. And sadly, that aspect was completely left out of BBB. Because of that, while watching Fry, I felt like I was watching a stranger. And I don't think the idea behind the special, and the jokes it generated, really made up for it.

Didn't mean to write an essay here, but anyway, that's my take on BBB.
 
I didn't hate it but I was underwhelmed by it. Although, for some reason I lmao when the robot cop says "She looks like a freak to me". Was that John DiMaggio?
 
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