Bender's Big Score

"What's the secret

of time travel doing on Fry's ass?"

―Leela

Bender's Big Score is the first of the four straight-to-DVD movies based on the animated series Futurama, released on December 14, 2007. The movie is written by Ken Keeler and David X. Cohen. Established characters appearing include the Nibblonians, Zapp Brannigan, Morbo, Santa Claus Robot, Al Gore, the God Entity, Seymour Asses, and Barbados Slim. The plot also heavily involves several new characters: a trio of Nudist Alien Scammers, Head Museum technician Lars Fillmore, and a narwhal named Leelu.

Plot[]

An owl flies through a small hole into Planet Express Building, where Hermes gives out the staff roll call, but when they get to the Professor, he says that they're all fired. In 3005, the executives of the Box Network, an allusion to the Fox Network, canceled Planet Express' contract: no one told the crew for two years. Now those executives have been fired for incompetence and ground into a fine, pink powder, so Planet Express is back "on the air". They throw a party to celebrate, during which Hermes is decapitated by a saber sword and his body crushed by the Planet Express Ship. His head is placed in a jar while his body is repaired. The man that performs the procedure, Lars Fillmore, takes an immediate liking to Leela, much to Fry's chagrin. Meanwhile, LaBarbara goes back to her former husband, Barbados Slim, claiming that Dwight needs a father, not two half fathers.

During a delivery to a nude beach planet, Bender makes fun of Fry's "wiener" and Fry decides to leave to go deliver the package. When he finds the right person, he uses his penis as a pen to sign for the package. Leela finds a tattoo of Bender on Fry's ass, of which Fry was unaware. While on the beach, a trio of Nudist Alien Scammers use flimsy excuses to get the entire Planet Express crew to sign petitions and provide their e-mail addresses.

Upon returning to Earth, the entire crew receives hundreds of spam messages. The crew responds to the offers and Bender is infected with a virus. The scammers fool Professor Farnsworth into signing his business over to them and they show up to take over. Bender's virus compels him to obey the scammers without question. The scammers are drawn to the tattoo on Fry's buttocks, which is revealed to contain the code for a Paradox-Free Time Travel Machine. Bender reads this binary code, which summons a time sphere from the God Entity. Nibbler reveals his sentience, explaining that using the code even once could destroy the universe, but they ignore him. Nibbler calls in some Kitten Class Attack Ships to stop the scammers, only to be defeated by chairs.

Nudar uses the sphere to go back to last night, meeting his past self and they "ended up at my place, or shall I say, our place.", making out with his past self. Hubert states that he knows a paradox when he sees it and accidentally crushes "yesterday Nudar" with his Smell-O-Scope.

Because the time portal is only a one way trip and cannot bring anyone back to the present, the scammers have Bender use the code to steal valuable objects from Earth's past, waiting out the time in between in the limestone cave beneath Planet Express. They also have Bender replace the Professor's Spheroboom Doomsday Device, placing it with a rose with a tag that reads, "You've been scammed, Sweetheart". During this time, Hermes asks Bender to travel back in time and kill an earlier version of himself for a replacement body. However, Dr. Zoidberg unknowingly attaches Hermes's head the wrong way, making him facing backwards. The angry bureaucrat chases Zoidberg.

Meanwhile, the Professor and the Harlem Globetrotters analyzes the time-travel code. Though the Professor states that time travel is impossible, Ethan "Bubblegum" Tate figures out that paradox-free time travel is possible. The factor that corrects the paradoxes is the doom field, which, if raised exponentially, could destroy the fabric of causality, exactly what Nibbler was trying to tell them. Zoidberg and Hermes run in. The scientists are shocked about Hermes' duplicate body. The doom field results in all time-travel duplicates, including Hermes' new body, to be essentially doomed. Hermes doesn't care, as he will need the duplicate body only long enough to win back LaBarbara.

During one of his trips to the past, Bender steals the Noble Peace Prize and flies off in a ship. He is pursued by Swedish authorities and multiplies his ships and proceeds to destroy New York in his escape, while laughing manically. Fry is shown frozen while this is happening.

Once Bender has stolen everything of value from history, the scammers finally care if the universe gets destroyed. They decide to destroy the time-travel code by killing Fry (who may have memorized) and blanking Bender's memory. Tired of the scammers and jealous of Lars, Fry proclaims he hates the future and uses the time code to escape to January 1, 2000, the day he was frozen. The scammers initially decide to let Fry go until Bender tells them he is in the year 2000. As a result, Bender is sent back to the past to kill him. Bender travels back and creates a duplicate of himself when he needs to use the bathroom, going back nineteen seconds. Then another Bender in a tuxedo appears, claiming to be from "way at the end", putting a rub-on time code on Fry's butt. The second duplicate catches Fry as he appears in the past and attempts to kill him, only to have his feelings for Fry and his inability to urinate to cause an overload. Fry shoves him in a Cryogenic tube before he can explode. Fry leaves and the original Bender fails to catch him. He tries to commit suicide only to learn that he was in a 20th-century phone booth. He begins to search for Fry, going through a list of names in the phone book. He skips past a hobo named Phillip Fry and Fry's former girlfriend Michelle, making out with her new boyfriend, Constantine. Bender spends the next twelve years hunting Fry and causes Al Gore to lose the 2000 election to George W. Bush. After ending up at Yancy Fry, Jr's. house and mistaking Philip J. Fry II for his friend, he is directed to the North Pole. While attempting to stow aboard a boat, Bender spots a bearded Philip J. Fry I and chases after him, temporarily sidetracked by Al Gore, who can't control his Hybrataxi. Eventually, Bender blows up Panucci's Pizza when Philip I walks inside, also turning Seymour to dolomite.

Once Bender returns to report his apparent success, the scammers wipe his memory of the code, fifty terabytes of porn and the virus. Suddenly, Fry shows up at his own funeral. He explains that in the past, he couldn't buy pizza from Panucci's with his futuristic money, so he went to Applied Cryogenics for free pizza, but it had turned cold. He went back an hour to eat the pizza when it was still warm. He then met his time paradox duplicate, who became disgusted with the main Philip I's casual abuse of the time code just to eat pizza and takes the suggestion not to use the code. As soon as his duplicate was gone, Philip I realized that his frozen self still had 20th century money. Unfortunately, he accidentally touches his own frozen butt and slips on a chair, which caused him to fall into the tube and be frozen once again. Once his younger self got out of the tube, the 3007 Fry froze himself for 7.95 years. Bender tries to kill him again but the Professor stops him, informing him that when the time code duplicates a living thing, the copy is always doomed. Fry is amazed that his copy lived for twelve years and wonders what his life was like. What happened to the Fry Bender murdered is also explained. Taking the main Philip I's suggestion not to use the time code, this Philip I instead decides to live above Punucci's. He lives his 21st century life: delivering pizzas, spending time with his family, using his seven leaf clover against Yancy Jr. in basketball and hanging out with his beloved dog Seymour. However, he still longed for a non-existent Leela.

That night, Nibbler destroys the time travel tattoo to keep the scammers from abusing it further, as well as saving 40% of Fry's rectum. The scammers then burst into Fry and Bender's apartment, intent on vaporizing him, but as they check Fry's rear back at Planet Express, they confirm that the code is well and truly gone.

Eventually, duplicate Fry gets over Leela, deciding to find his own purpose in life. When he sees a poor narwhal named Leelu on television, he decides to be her caretaker, as he is the only one who can assist her in eating. When Leelu is released back into the wild, Philip I enlists Panucci's cousin Leroy to find Leelu and bring her back to New York. After two years and 108 narwhals later, setting them all free and eating nothing but sausage, they find her. Noticing that Leelu is interested in a male narwhal, Philip I regretfully decides to let her go.

Even during this depression, Leela and Lars decide to get married. Fry tries to stop the wedding by replacing a pen full of ink with a pen with no ink, but Lars had an extra. Meanwhile, Hermes was able to win back LaBarbara by zippering up her dress, which Barbados was unable to do. Leela accidentally hits Hermes with the empty pen, resulting in a chandelier slicing off his head and crushing his duplicate body. The Professor explains that he expected that, since all duplicates are doomed. Lars becomes agitated by this news and calls off the wedding. LaBarbara leaves Hermes again for Barbados, even though his original body is almost repaired.

Richard Nixon, President of Earth, is tricked into selling Earth to the scammers and everyone is forced to emigrate off the planet. The Planet Express crew moves to Neptune. After learning that Robot Santa was cheated out of his naughty list, Leela decides it's time to fight back and forces Santa to help them. Though they had enough ships to mount a rag tag attack, Nixon says that the scammers have a fleet of solid gold Death Stars defending Earth. However, Santa grants them access to his factory for weapons and calls in his holiday friends, Kwanzabot and the Chanuka Zombie. Zapp Brannigan arrives to take command, but before the fleet can link computers with the Nimbus, the Death Stars de-cloak and send it crashing to the ground: Leela then takes de facto command. Unfortunately, she can't coordinate so many ships, so Hermes offers his bureaucratic highly organised mind. He destroys all the Death Stars: this helps Hermes win back LaBarbara much to Slims annoyance. However, the scammers have one last trick, the Sphere-O-Boom doomsday device that Bender had stolen for them. The scammers demand their surrender, but Bender reveals that he stole it back after being released from their control. The crew fires the device at the scammers' ship, destroying it. On New Year's Day, 3008, Bender explains that while sawing off the Professor's hand with a dull saw, he figured that he needed the doomsday device for himself. Once he was out of the scammer's control, he "pulled the old switchoroo". Nixon awards him The Dirty Doublecross in light of his actions.

Fry sees that Leela is still unhappy that Lars left her at the altar and tries to get them back together. However, just as Lars is about to tell Fry something important, the reunion is cut short by Nudar, who survived the doomsday device through use of a doomsday device-proof vest (musing that he wished he'd worn matching pants). Nudar claims that the time-travel code still exists and is on Lars. Lars refuses to say anything and tells Nudar to "go ahead and shoot", but then he takes Leela hostage. Lars then tricks him into approaching the cryo-tube with Bender on overload: once that Bender is released, the explosion kills them both. The explosion singes off some of Lars' clothing, revealing the time-travel tattoo. A flashback explains that Lars is actually Philip I's duplicate, having survived Bender's attack in 2012, which burned off his hair and injured his larynx, deepening his voice. Upon realizing that he was Lars, the duplicate Philip I froze himself to return to the future and be with Leela, hitching a ride in Michelle's tube, arriving in 3002 and taking a job at the Head Museum. However, he realizes at the wedding when Hermes exploded that as a time duplicate, he too was doomed, so he left Leela at the altar to spare her the pain of becoming a widow.

During the funeral, Leela understands why Lars broke it off. Bubblegum and Nibbler state that nothing makes sense anymore, so someone will have to travel back and put the time tattoo on Fry in the first place: this job Bender did, by removing the tattoo from Lars and traveling into the past to place it on the Fry frozen in the Cryogenic tube. Upon returning, Bender reveals that he had convinced his time-travel duplicates in the cave to remain with him instead of emerging when they were logically supposed to. Then they all emerge together. Nibbler, horrified, shouts "Everyone out of the Universe!", before eating himself out of existence. Though Bender doesn't see the problem, the sheer number of time-paradox Benders spontaneously explode, causing a giant tear in the universe. and before the end credits song The Trinty is Going to War "Well, we're boned," says the normal, non-doomed, Bender. This tear in the universe leads into the next movie "The Beast With a Billion Backs".

Cast[]

• Billy West as Fry, Professor Farnsworth, Dr. Zoidberg, Various
• Katey Sagal as Turanga Leela
• John DiMaggio as Bender, Barbados Slim, Robot Santa Claus, Various
• Phil LaMarr as Hermes, Various
• Lauren Tom as Amy, Various
• Tress MacNeille as Lauren Cahill, Various
• Maurice LaMarche as Schlump, Various
• David Herman as Nudar, Various
• Frank Welker as Nibbler, Fleb, Various
• Kath Soucie as Cubert
• Dawnn Lewis as LaBarbara
• Mark Hamill as Chanukah Zombie
• Coolio as Kwanzaabot
• Al Gore as Himself
• Tom Kenny as Yancy Fry
• Sarah Silverman as Michelle

DVD Extras/Special Features[]

• Commentary by Matt Groening, David X Cohen, Billy West, John DiMaggio, Phil LaMarr, Claudia Katz, Dwayne Carey-Hill and Ken Keeler
• Futurama Returns: A live comic book reading by the Futurama Cast
• Everybody Loves Hypnotoad: "Amazon Adventure", A full length episode
• Deleted Storyboard Scenes
• A Terrifying Message from Al Gore, animated promo for An Inconvenient Truth, featuring Bender, Billy West and Al Gore
• Bite My Shiny Metal X, a Futurama Maths Lecture
• Script: First Draft
• New Character/Design Sketches
• Original 5-minute Comic-Con Promo
• Futurama: Beast With a Billion Backs, Trailer
• Easter Egg - Ken Keeler Sketch

Reaction[]

• The film got completely positive reviews and a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com.
• The film got a Score of 8 out of 10 at ign.com
• The film got a score of 7.6 out of 10 at imdb.com
• The film got an A for everything except extras (a B) at ugo.com

Ongoing Themes[]

Injury, Death, Dismemberment[]

• A Box executive punches himself in the face.
• Nibbler swallows Fry before the movie starts, regurgitating him in the first scene.
• Hubert narrates the news that the Box executives who cancelled Planet Express' license have been fired, beaten badly, most of them beaten to death and ground into Torgo's Executive Powder.
• Amy crashes her party board off-screen.
• Hermes receives a flesh wound while limboing under a sword.
• Hermes is decapitated while standing under a sword.
• Hermes' decapitated body is crushed by the Planet Express ship.
• A delivery customer signs paperwork using Fry's "pen".
• Leela falls to the floor when Bender blocks her karate kick aimed at Nudar.
• Nibbler devours a hamster alive.
• Although there is a brief military battle between the Nibblonians and the scammers in Hubert's observatory, there are no casualties.
• Nudar from last night is crushed to death by Hubert's Smell-O-Scope.
• Bender hacks off Hubert's hand with a hacksaw.
• Bender goes back in time, decapitates some unspecified Hermes and brings back the body, sans head.
• Nibbler is kicked across the room by Zoidberg, who is fleeing from Hermes, who crashes into a wall and collapses.
• A mini-golf robot is dismembered by Leela's putt.
• Lars and Leela are crushed by a giant boulder, Wile E. Coyote-style.
• Fry, at altitude in a giant soap bubble, pops his bubble and falls to the ground, off-screen.
• Fleb throws the Gutenberg Bible at random and hits Fry in the head.
• Fry kicks one of the Benders into a cryo-tube and sets the timer to one million years.
• Bender steps on a beachgoer's head.
• Bender is thrown impossibly far from Al Gore's taxi and lands finally on his head.
• Bender's attempt to kill Fry results in the fast-fossilization of Seymour.
• Bender punches Fry in the stomach to ensure that Fry is not a zombie.
• The time-code tattoo is removed from Fry's butt, "as painlessly as possible", destroying some 60% of Fry's rectum.
• Bender kicks Tinny Tim's crutch twice, causing Tim to fall to the ground.
• Hypnotoad forces an off-screen TV announcer to kill himself.
• Countless earthlings are thrown from the Planet Express ship when it lands on Neptune.
• Leela slaps Santa in the face multiple times.
• A napalm explosion in Santa's toy factory sets a Neptunian on fire.
• Three Neptunians are blasted in the face by Hanukkah Zombie's dreidel.
• A Neptunian is blasted in the face by an exhaust pipe full of Torgo's powder.
• The scammers blast the DOOP ship Nimbus out of the sky, sending it hurtling to Earth.
• All of the scammers except Nudar are killed in the space battle.
• Nudar, Lars, and a doomed Bender are killed when the Bender self-destructs.
• Bender rips a large chunk of flesh from the deceased Lars' butt.
• Nibbler eats himself after the anomaly forms in the sky.

Time-Travel[]

• The time-spheres are sent by the God Entity whenever anyone recites the time-code. They are an interesting echo of the chronotons from Time Keeps On Slippin', as the chronotons caused time to jump only forward, while the time-spheres can be used to go only backward in time.
• Nudar is the first to use the time sphere, going back to yesterday and seducing himself. The Nudar from last night is killed when Hubert's Smell-O-Scope falls on him. That is, the "original" Nudar, the one who used the time-sphere, is still alive.
• After Nudar, Bender uses the time-code uncounted times to go to the past, steal priceless artifacts and return them to his scammer masters. He suggests that he may have fatally harmed Leonardo da Vinci and it is shown that his flight from the Swedish authorities matches one of the apocalyptic scenes that was depicted while Philip I was in cryogenic stasis.
• Bender goes into the past and brings back a Hermes-body. Zoidberg attaches present-Hermes' head to the past-Hermes' body, but we know by now, from Nudar's experience, that this body from the past is doomed to destruction in order to correct for the time paradox.
• Fry, in the year 3007, escapes from Nudar by using the time-code to go back to Jan 1, 2000 at 12:30am. He fights with the self-destructing Bender, kicks him into a cryo-tube and goes to Panucci's Pizza, arriving at 1:00am. He then returns to the cryogenics lab and goes back in time one hour. He watches himself fighting Bender, argues with that self and falls back into the cryo-tube with the "native" Fry who is already inside and frozen.
• The Philip I who fights Bender while the first Philip I watches is the Philip I who becomes Lars. This Philip I goes to Panucci's Pizza one minute later than the non-doomed Philip I, at 1:01am. Rather than going back to the cryogenics lab for pizza, this Philip I goes on to begin his 21st century life by delivering pizzas, spending time with his family before pursuing, catching, and release a whale named Leelu. He returns to his apartment above Panucci's Pizza in 2012 and is injured by Bender's assassination attempt, losing his hair and damaging his larynx, before realizing at that moment that he's in fact Lars.
• "Lars" then heads for the Cryogenic Labs where, hitching a ride in his ex-girlfriend's tube, he returns to the future awakening in 3000. There, he works as a head in a jar feeder and waits for the fateful day to meet Leela.
• Bender, in the year 3007, goes back to Jan 1, 2000, at 12:28am, in order to assassinate Fry. There is no indication whatsoever how Bender knew to aim for that particular moment in time. It seems to have no significance to any part of the story. This same Bender goes back in time again, by 19 seconds, to ask the Bender at that time to stand guard for a restroom break.
• Bender from "way at the end" arrives while the other Bender is in the restroom. End-Bender chats briefly with the Bender keeping watch, tattoos "native" Fry's butt in the cryo-tube and then disappears silently, presumably to wait in the limestone cavern.
• Fry arrives at the cryogenics lab on Jan 1, 2000, at 12:30am, while Bender awaits him. This Bender goes into self-destruct sequence under the pressure of the conflict between his orders and his loyalty to Fry. Until nearly the end of the episode, A Bender is frozen in a cryo-tube after Fry kicks him into it.
• It is the original Bender, who after his trip to the restroom, spends the next 12 years tracking the (doomed) Philip I who becomes Lars.
• Non-doomed Fry appears during his own memorial service being held by his fellow crewmembers. He tells the tale of going back to 2000, going back again by one hour for warm pizza, chatting with his paradox time duplicate, falling into the cryo-tube and restarting the tube set for 7.95 years when the "native" Fry leaves it in 2999.
• At Lars' memorial service, Bender finally goes back in time once more to transfer the tattoo from Lars' butt to the butt of the Fry in the cryo-tube back in the year 2000. When this Bender returns to the present, he has convinced all of the Benders who have ever waited in the limestone cave to stay with him and come up into Planet Express all at once. This results in the rupture in space-time that sets the stage for "The Beast with a Billion Backs".
• Since the time-code tattoo originally belonged to Lars (a time-duplicate body), it was doomed to be destroyed as well.
• The process of the tattoo being put on the original Philip I's body, Philip I being split into a new person (Lars) and then Lars' tattoo making it's way back to the original Philip I can be considered a Stable Time Loop. The events in the past are responsible for the events in the future and vice versa, in an infinite loop.
• It can also be considered a Bootstrap Paradox because the tattoo simply appears without having any explainable origin. Nobody designed the tattoo, it simply is and always has been, until it isn't.

Fry and Leela[]

Their holophonor-inspired feelings apparently forgotten, Fry and Leela have returned to their usual relationship mode: Fry with immature feelings for Leela and Leela wishing Fry were more mature. Fry's emotional repertoire grows just enough to include jealousy. Leela falls in love with and almost marries Lars, a clear indication that it truly is only Fry's immaturity that makes her dislike him, as maturity is the major difference between Philip I and Lars. Another indicator of Fry's maturity is the fact that he was willing to give up his chance to be with Leela forever in order to make her happy.

Back in the 21st century, the Philip I who becomes Lars reconnects with his family and his life, but pines for Leela, until he starts a long relationship with Leelu.

At Lars' memorial service, Leela seems to have a new appreciation for Philip I, but she doesn't articulate it and Fry moves on to a different woman in the following episode. It could have something to do with her wanting to wait until he was more mature like Lars.

Hermes and Zoidberg[]

Hermes and Zoidberg argue over the spam email that Zoidberg has received, but there is no particular animosity in the conversation.

Zoidberg attaches Hermes' head backwards on Hermes' duplicate body and Hermes is understandably upset about it.

Nibbler[]

Nibbler reveals himself to the crew for the third time. It's a surprise to everyone, of course, because Leela and Fry, the only witnesses to his true identity, have both lost their memories of it. This time, he's not careful at all: he charges into Hubert's observatory on a hamster and begins pontificating to the whole crew and the scammers about the dangers of using the time-code. After this, Nibbler is rather quiet for the remainder of the episode, finally devouring himself in order to escape from the universe and avoid its apparently imminent destruction when Bender brings up all the other Benders from the limestone cave. As the crew mention in a later episode, Nibbler does not erase anyone's memory at this moment, so they all know his "secret", but no one talks about it.

Doppelgängers[]

• When Bender steals the doomsday device from Hubert, he leaves Hubert a bag with a rose and a mocking note inside. Per Nudar's command, Bender puts the other bag (the one with the doomsday device) in the safe. When Hubert throws his rose-bag out of Zoidberg's office, Bender catches it in his torso. Later, when Bender has been freed from the scammers' obedience virus, Bender recovers the doomsday-bag and saves it in his torso while putting the rose-bag into the safe for Nudar to find later.
• During his hunt for Philip J. Fry I, Bender encounters a drunk in the gutter named Phillip Fry, the same drunk in a house, an aide to Al Gore named Philip Joshua Fry, and Philip I's nephew Philip II. He also nearly mistakes Michelle's new boyfriend, Constantine, for Fry.
• Yancy Jr. refers to Bender as "some kind of trash can".
• Santa doubles as a beat box.
• Leela's Wrist LoJack-a-mater is also a tissue dispenser.

Hermes-isms[]

"Sweet yeti of the Serengeti!"

Character Arcs[]

• Hubert correctly pronounces the word "warned" twice in a sentence.
• Sal's speech impediment seems to have stabilized for the time being but it seems that he is passing his disorder on to Leela, as she begins pluralizing words when she is around him.