‘Futurama’ flick has its faults

The story barely hangs together, which is a
disappointment.

By TED ANTHONY

AP NATIONAL WRITER

Pandas dumped on the streets by the truckload. Romantic nights at the pickled-head museum. The Harlem Globetrotters doing rhythmic math routines. A murderous robot Santa, extraterrestrial e-mail scammers and prime time with a mind-control show called “Everybody Loves Hypnotoad.”

It could all mean only one thing. After years in the big green room in the sky, Matt Groening’s “Futurama” is back with a burning question: Can a deeply unorthodox idea that worked wonderfully in a half-hour cartoon, no matter how sophisticated and textured, maintain interest for an 88-minute feature?

“Futurama: Bender’s Big Score!” — set for a straight-to-DVD release Tuesday — is as much of an animation accomplishment as the series that spawned it. The artwork is rich, the palette is varied and the intricate content always, as Groening has put it, rewards viewers who are paying attention. It’s frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

But as a story, it barely hangs together — a disappointment for fans who grew to adore its incisive social commentary.

Make no mistake: It’s an enjoyable ride, and it’s great to see the band of 31st-century misfits — time refugee Philip J. Fry, monocular mutant Leela, besotted and cantankerous robot Bender and their space-faring compadres — reappear with their lives as pathetic and misguided as ever. If “Gilligan’s Island” was set in the future, this would be your ensemble cast.

And yet ...

What made “Futurama” superior — and what made those who canceled it occupy a space on the food chain below lawyers, shock jocks, even critics — was its trademark blend of dada humor and sniperlike satire. Even more than Groening’s flagship series, “The Simpsons,” the David X. Cohen-steered show smartly skewered consumer culture, social mores and general early 21st-century obliviousness with wonderful parables possible only in the distant future.

As the series went on, the animation and the characters got more textured. By its final (fourth) Fox season, the cartoon was almost operatic in its absurdity — as if “The Simpsons” had been crossbred with “The Jetsons” and the best of the Warner Bros. Daffy Duck-Marvin Martian cartoons. But “Futurama” never caught the broader zeitgeist as “The Simpsons” did, and suddenly, in mid-2003, it was gone.