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Click here to return to the main site. DVD Review
Join the crew of Planet Express as they body swap, get hooked on Mom's new eyePhone, jump into a time machine that can only travel forwards into the future and fight off alien invasions from evil space cats and the inhabitants of Omicron Persei 8... I don't know why there seems to be such a problem releasing animated shows in their correct season order when it comes to DVD. The UK releases of Family Guy are all over the place and Futurama appears to be the latest victim. While this is indeed the show's fifth season as originally intended (although Fox messed everything up when it originally broadcast the show - so if you follow the messed up broadcast order this is season 6). What we have here are the first 13 episodes of the show's fifth season as originally planned of which there are 26 episodes - either way this is certainly not a complete season as the packaging would have you believe. However, for those who don't care about such things, and are just glad to have the episodes available on DVD, this collection represents another 13 episodes of quality animation. This season kicks off with the episode Rebirth, which follows on from the Futurama movie Into the Wild Green Yonder. It opens with the death of all of the characters, with the exception of Professor Farnsworth. The professor then sets about reanimating the corpses of his colleagues so that Planet Express can get back to normal. However, Leela can't be reborn and so a robot version of her is created. As you'd expect everything is resolved by the end of the episode so that all of the characters are back to normal. Highlights in this collection include: Attack of the Killer App, in which the whole world gets suckered into buying Mom's latest gadget the eyePhone. As you'd expect there are evil plans afoot as Mom tries to control the population of the world once again. Lethal Inspection, which is my personal favourite episode in this collection, sees Bender trying to track down the inspector who passed him through quality control when he was created. Bender has a terminal manufacturing defect, which pretty much makes him mortal, and he wants to know why. The Late Philip J. Fry sees Fry being given a hard time because he's always late. He's late to work and for his romantic lunch engagement to celebrate Leela's birthday. He promises to change his ways, and plans to make good to Leela by joining her for a candlelit birthday dinner. However, the professor wants Fry and Bender to accompany him on a time travel experiment in which they will travel one minute into the future. This is a time travel machine that can only go forwards in time, so when the professor travels too far Fry has no way of keeping his promise to Leela, not that it matters, as they travel so far into the future that everyone they know is long since died. The Prisoner of Benda, in which the professor's new mind switching device causes problems when it's revealed that once two people have switched minds they can't switch back - instead they have to switch with others in order to eventually get back in their own bodies. To be honest though, I enjoyed almost all of the episodes apart from the series's 100th anniversary episode (The Futurama Holiday Spectacular) which is just a collection of rather poor short stories in a similar vein to The Simpson's Tree House of Horror episodes. Extras include audio commentaries for every episode; Deleted Scenes (10 min, 21 sec); Behind the Fungus: Makin' a Hit Song (4 min, 59 sec behind the scenes of the making of the 'Shut up and Love Me' song with Billy West); Previously on Futurama (1 min, 22 sec segments with various characters intros where they say: "Previously on Futurama"; The Adventures of Delivery-Boy Man (7 min, 14 sec spoof animated comic with optional commentary); Bend it Like Bender (2 min, 41 sec 'Bend It' song set to clips from the show); and The Prisoner of Benda: Live Table Read (35 min, 10 sec table read with animatics). 8 Darren Rea Buy this item online
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