Futurama The Beast With a Billion Backs [SPOILERS]
- Thread starter Darth_Daver
- Start date
Too much of the story was in the game sequences? The five sequences combined was no longer than a minute! They were nice transition moments to show what the game was like. As for the animation, it was pretty top notch for a video game of that time. Looking past the animation, I thought the episode was on par of a solid regular episode of Futurama.
Like that's stopped anyone from returning in Futurama.
Watched it last night. Better than the first one. Started off really funny but then ran out of steam about halfway through. The whole Fry/Colleen love affair fell flat, and the story got weird when the universe was dating Yivo and then went to Yivo "heaven". The Amy/Kip stuff was funny but ended predictably. Got a kick out of Benders antics though (he's my favorite anyway). And I want to go the the St. Asimov's Day Parade.
The funniest part is the extra content showing the talent doing the voices in the recording studio. Hilarious!
The funniest part is the extra content showing the talent doing the voices in the recording studio. Hilarious!
I'd love to see more of that -- footage of recording sessions, on-camera interviews with the actors, etc.
I've never played the game, but I followed the story just fine and never felt like something was missing. The gameplay sequences seemed to show the action bits.
Haven't seen this new one yet, but it's looking more and more like Futurama just doesn't work as well in a movie-length format. The weird, off the wall stories and nutty characters are only really effective in small, 30 minute doses.
I started to get bored with the first movie about halfway through and had to turn it off. Yet when I came back the next day to finish it off, I found it to be as fun and hilarious as ever.
I'll probably have to do the same thing with this movie too.
I started to get bored with the first movie about halfway through and had to turn it off. Yet when I came back the next day to finish it off, I found it to be as fun and hilarious as ever.
I'll probably have to do the same thing with this movie too.
It's not a question of comprehension, it's a question of narrative flow. There are huge gaps. Bender is battling some generic machines, then we cut to the defeated Walt in a totally different machine, saying "You've won but you haven't seen the last of me," just before it blows up. Leela is riding in some gondolas and then we jump to some defeated sun god in the temple, and then the temple collapses for no clear reason. The gameplay sequences didn't include enough of the key moments of the action, the climactic portions of each level.
In the producers' defense, they say on the commentary that their efforts to recover the original animation files were unsuccessful and they had to reconstruct it by actually playing the game and using the cheat codes to unlock the animation sequences. Apparently the only way to get to the climactic portions of each level in order to record them for this compilation would've been to play the game well enough to reach them, and maybe they weren't able to achieve that in the time they had. So I'm not blaming anyone for this. I'm just saying that, totally unsurprisingly, the cut scenes don't entirely work as a self-contained story because they were never designed to. If anything, the "episode" format is more coherent than I would've expected, but it's still very obvious that it's just edited excerpts from a game.
I've never played the game, but I thought it flowed very well. They were obviously more interested in telling the story via the cinematics. Gameplay footage, beyond the simple montages we got, would have gotten dull and repetitive. They made a wise choice ignoring it. In fact, most of the narrative gaps were caused by gameplay footage they could have left out in the first place, such as Walt's defeat.
The collapsing temple bit is probably better without knowing why it collapsed. Temples and castles are supposed to collapse for no apparent reason when their owner is defeated. It's tradition.
Agreed. I didn't have a problem with the narrative flow either.
There were a number of things I did like, mainly in part one:
The '30s-style cartoon opening.
The Fonfon Rubok scene.
The Barb-o-Mites.
St. Asimov's Day and the 2D Tunnel of Love.
"I didn't know I could do that."
Deathball!
The apartment building.
"Stowaway Hatch 35: Unauthorized Access Only."
I was going to fast-forward through the whole thing to look for other bits I liked, but I lost interest early in part 2.
I can only find one Easter egg on the DVD so far.
The preview for Bender's Game looked promising. One interesting bit:
The '30s-style cartoon opening.
The Fonfon Rubok scene.
The Barb-o-Mites.
St. Asimov's Day and the 2D Tunnel of Love.
"I didn't know I could do that."
Deathball!
The apartment building.
"Stowaway Hatch 35: Unauthorized Access Only."
I was going to fast-forward through the whole thing to look for other bits I liked, but I lost interest early in part 2.
I can only find one Easter egg on the DVD so far.
On the second Special Features menu, if you go left from the "Back" button at the bottom, it highlights the term "Grope-o-Scope." Clicking on that will send you to a still image of the Old Farmer's Wikipedia. However, any button pressed after that, at least any button I tried, just sends you back to the menu. Pretty pointless, unless I'm missing something.
The preview for Bender's Game looked promising. One interesting bit:
In the demolition derby sequence, there's a shot of what appear to be the preserved heads of Shatner (?) and Takei battling it out in Enterprise-like ships. I wonder, is this a purely visual gag, or will we have actual Trek guest stars?
^Takei, according to Wikipedia.
The Old Farmer's Wikipedia was seen in the movie, but not closely enough to make out much of the detail on the cover.
The Old Farmer's Wikipedia was seen in the movie, but not closely enough to make out much of the detail on the cover.
Leela was reading from it in the scene where Amy recieved the pickle jar of liquified Kif.
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I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. Like Bender's Big Score it wasn't perfect, and most likely would of been better as four individual episodes, but I found most of the movie funny and well paced. I did start to feel bored when they were actually on Yivo though, but luckily that was pretty much the end of the movie (I also found the middle part of BBS to be pretty boring, but luckily they were able to pull it together for the last act).
I thought he just left the universe somehow (Didn't he say something like "Quick everyone leave the universe"?) I would imagine he would be back in the next film now that Yivo is gone.
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Go Kif! I could watch that all day.
Go Kif! I could watch that all day.
"Everyone out of the universe! Quick!"
He makes a sort of chomping sound as he begins to vanish, but it looks more like he's compressing himself rather than swallowing himself.
Couldn't agree less. I wasn't the hugest fan of the latest one (although its still funnier than most of what passes for comedy on tv, and had great moments) but Bender's Big Score was great - probably not the funniest 90 minutes of Futurama ever, but they already had a lot of episodes under their belt, they're unlikely to keep topping their classic episodes we've all seen a dozen times and the time travel plot was brilliant and, miraculously, doesn't unravel when you think about it too hard.
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