Futurama: The Beast with A Billion Backs
Friday, September 5th, 2008
If one is expecting, someday, for Matt Groening and producers to resolve the Fry and Leela love drama, don’t get your hopes up when it comes to the new Futurama DVD, “The Beast With A Billion Backs.”
The feature length episode treats a number of story arcs with the same theme: love. In the previous straight to DVD release, Bender’s Big Score, the issue of Fry and Leela came off with the standard science fiction time travel complexity. Basically, Leela falls for an older, balder man named Lars. But, as it turns out, Lars was just an older, more mature version of Phillip – the complexity of constant time travel caused for there to be a number of “clones,” each of which were “doomed” in the name of the Universe righting itself.
“The Best With A Billion Backs” basically starts where the previous DVD left off – there’s a tear and the space time continuum, but it abandons it for awhile. Phillip is in a relationship with a new woman, but the new gal pal actually lives with a bunch of other guys that she considers her “boyfriend.” In the end, Fry is crushed, and he decides to end it all by exploring the tear in space. On the other side, he finds an alternate universe, populated by a planet sized being with tentacles. Here’s where it gets a little goofy and convoluted. The being is romantically interested in humanity. And after a couple of “dates” with every member of humanity, the human race is likewise interested. Sound nefarious? Imagine of Lovecraft’s elder gods were actually hen-pecked nerds that used words like “honey-poo.” The rest can be left up for a viewer to decide and/or watch. Lets just that Bender gets jealous from the lack of attention people give him and tries to wreck the relationship.
On the whole: it’s funny, and it’s a new Futurama disc. Realistically speaking, it’s not as good as “Bender’s Big Score” or the episodes that were written towards the end of Futurama’s run. On a more positive note, one doesn’t have to wait a whole year for the third feature to be released.
One of the never ending debates, these days, is usually
Lets see, the possibilities here are both interesting and hard to imagine. 



You really can sort of measure the pop culture success of something by how much of it makes it into everyday speech. Shakespeare, for example, has given the English language a number of expressions that are still used today. So has The Simpsons. To be clear, however, I’m not necessarily equating the Bard with Groening’s creations. Beyond expressions and sayings, there’s also the ease for which people can use something, like The Simpsons, as a metaphor or explanation for something else. We’ve kind of seen it with The Taurus, recently. Now, however, it seems
Lately, it seems that Hillary Clinton has been have a rough go of things. She started out her primary campaign positioned as the presumptive “front runner.” She had a lot of money, as well as the media’s presumption of inevitability. Then, along the way, something happened. Barack Obama started gaining steam, and then, basically, Hillary started losing electoral contests, 11 in a row as of this writing. Clinton and her campaign, partly out of desperation, began throwing everything they could at Obama, including charges of “
According to 
Nancy Cartwright, the voice of Bart Simpsons and other Simpsons characters, is also a devout Scientologist. Over the past couple of years, Tom Cruise has garnered a lot of headlines for not only his loony behavior, but that he gave The Church of Scientology millions of dollars.
Crossovers can be tough, sometimes. In a way, they can be a lot like guest appearances in comic books. Sure, some people would like to see Wolverine beat the living snot out of Superman, or Batman square off against Spawn, partly because some pairings, like those mentioned, are unlikely. Two different characters, two different competing comic book companies – it would be hard to please everybody, including the fans and the business types. Still, the perspective storylines in such crossovers usually end up being tame. The creative types, behind the scene, end up not wanting to offend fans of each character or “universe.”
and The Simpsons, for example, share the same Matt Groening art style, as well as similar senses of humor. In a way, crossing the two the could work out very well. On the other hand, crossing The Simpsons with, say, The Family Guy wouldn’t be interesting, partly because the two shows having been already