Feature-length adventure with Matt Groening’s TV series characters
Voices of: George Takei, Rich Little & others
Studio: Fox Home Entertainment [Release date: Nov. 4, 08]
Video: 16:9 color
Audio: English DD 5.1, 2.0
Subtitles: French, Spanish
Extras: Commentary by Groening, animators & writers; Storyboard Animatic; “Futurama Genetics Lab” – crossbreed your favorite characters; “Dungeons & Dragons & Futurama;” “How to Draw Futurama in 83 Easy Steps;” 3D Models featurette; Deleted scene: Cup or Nozzle?; Blooperama 2; Bender’s Anti-Piracy Warning; Sneak peak at next Futurama feature for 2009
Length: 88 minutes
Rating: ****
We don’t bother much with reviewing TV series, but since I like Futurama even better than The Simpsons, I had to see this one. It’s packed with Groening’s snarky satire – sometimes silly but often right on the mark, as is The Simpsons. For example, you must see Bender’s Anti-Piracy Warning in the bonus features – a trenchant and hilarious parody of the hard-hitting copyright alerts on many DVDs and Blu-rays today. This is actually the third of four feature-length installments with the crew of the Planet Express cartoon-version of Buck Roger’s spaceship.
The current high prices of fuel stimulated the story line this time around, as well as the popular role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Since in this future-world dark-matter is what the spaceships run on, the Planet Express crew departs on a mission to infiltrate the world’s only dark-matter mine – owned by a powerful old lady known as Mom, and Prof. Farnsworth turns out to be her former lover. They discover a strange world, but not as strange as the alternate reality they somehow fall into in which they become various knights, vassals, centaurs and wizards in a Dungeons and Dragons world. It’s all because Bender wanted to join a group of kids playing Dungeons and Dragons, but since robots have no imagination he had trouble fitting in. Bender becomes a knight and king, which is why it’s Bender’s Game. In one section he is confined to an asylum for insane robots, with plenty of Stoogy slapstick on that subject. There’s also a lot of satire of the Lord of the Rings series. While a bit heavy on the scatological – after all, it turns out dark-matter is really…well, never mind – there is much to savor of the iconoclastic Groening humor thruout, and some of the extras such as the discussion amongst three of the Dungeons & Dragons players are very funny. The transfer is fine, as it usually is with animation – don’t really need Blu-ray hi-res for that (although there is also a Blu-ray version available, and it boasts DTS-HD lossless surround).
– John Sunier
