Futurama Season 5 Blu-ray Review

• 28th Dec 2011

Yes, Bender is back and he’s great baby!

I don’t even want to think about how many years Futurama was off the air. It’s too depressing a fact to face. Although we did get four direct to DVD features in the interim – thanks to their success, we now have this new season of 13 episodes!

Futurama is back in its original format and you’d never think it was gone as everything is essentially the same. The style, the voice talent, the characters; the production team is largely intact.

It’s a relief then that, for the most part, these 13 episodes retain the high quality of bizarre story-lines, offbeat humour, delicious characteristics and mind numbing attention to sci-fi movie detail. Part of Futurama’s charm isn’t the fact that it makes so many references to films (which many shows do so lazily) but that they do it in such a clever way.

So you can expect Bender to be running a whole multitude of scams, the professor to lose his marbles in all that good news he brings, Fry being dumber than ever and so on. But there is also room for the supporting players and Zap Brannigan is on top oozing form. The usual work and love issues are forever bounding around stories of time travel, parallel this and that – all in the name of making a delivery or a date on time!

And what’s this? A few dandy extras! Stretching from video compilations to commentaries for the shows.

If there are any bum notes it’s the musical Christmas show at the end. Futurama (like The Simpsons) likes to throw in a show tune from time to time, but their batting average for this isn’t good. Neither is it when it comes to segment episodes – and this special consists of both. The segments and the songs reek and it’s a bit of a downer to go out on this episode. But the bright news is that there are 13 more episodes in existence (which I suspect will be coming to disc next year) and another 26 have been commissioned to air. Futurama still has a bright future ahead of it.

Steven Hurst