(Twentieth Century Fox)

“Welcome. I am the pickled head of Stephen Hawking on a way cool rocket.”

The second of four feature-length Futurama DVDs has landed, this time thrusting (ahem) the Planet Express crew into an inter-dimensional romantic entanglement with a planet-sized being called Yivo (voiced by Arrested Development’s David Cross). Distraught after a broken romance with new character Colleen (Brittany Murphy), who believes that an open relationship means sharing her apartment with five boyfriends, Fry enters a rift in space-time and meets Yivo. As he later tells Bender, “I went to another Universe and fell in love with a giant octopus; and now I’m Pope of a new religion.” As Yivo proceeds to ‘date’ the entire population of Earth (in a thinly veiled satirical riff on hentai tentacle weirdness) Bender is meanwhile plotting with the League Of Robots, headed by robot celebrity Calculon, to take over the planet because he’s annoyed that metal beings can’t visit Yivo’s dimension, which is essentially ‘heaven’.

All the rest of the Futurama cast get plenty of screen time in this outing – Amy and Kif get married (that is, before Kif gets temporarily splattered in a military assault on Yivo), Dr. Zoidberg is his usual Zoidberg-ian self, and Leila, Professor Farnsworth and Hermes all get one-liners aplenty. Yes, it’s Futurama as usual, albeit with the more-gags-than-decent-story approach that seems to afflict the longer outings. It’s as though when the creators find themselves freed from the half-hour show format, they go a bit crazy trying to cram as much as possible into the larger sack, tossing story and character out the window in favour of a kazillion ‘aren’t we so clever’ moments. It’s like somebody let the interns loose at the scriptwriting workshop, which luckily still makes for a passable 75% strike rate on gags in this case.

***½

TOPHER HEALY

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