[FUT] The Lost Adventure

TV Programme: Futurama
Season: 5
Episode: (Special)
Date I watched this episode: 02/08/2009
Time since I last watched this programme: 1 day.

The story behind this "episode" is a bit of a strange one. It was originally written by J Stewart Burns, who had previously written several episodes during seasons 1-3. The voices were done by the original cast. But the animation was largely done by a third party company. The episode was cut down into segments and used as cutscenes for a video game titled only "Futurama" and released toward the end of the 4th season (actually the 5th broadcast season: if you're confused then read my pre-season notification). Now the actual gameplay got pretty much panned by the crtics, but they still liked the actual episode which made up the story of the game. Thus the episode was re-composited together (apparently they had lost the original footage) and all references to in-game elements were removed. Spliced in certain places were gameplay footage to keep the continuity (although game user interface elements were still in place - these should have been removed in my opinion). The "episode" (now given an intro and titled "The Lost Adventure") was released on the DVD for "The Beast With A Billion Backs". Therefore it's hard to say whether this episode should be classed as being in season 4 or 5, though it really doesn't matter.

The episode contained another time paradox situation. However here, unlike Bender's Big Score, time seemed to cycle round and round. This gave the writers the situation where they were able to drop hints and then fully explain them later. For example, pretty near the start, Fry says "That's odd, mighty odd" as he gets some time-travel dejà-vu which isn't really explained until the end. The ship appears to be destroyed at the beginning and this is also explained by events which happened while time-travelling.

The re-animator was actually quite a funny element. There was certainly the opportunity for this kind of thing to fall flat on its face because it would have only made sense in the context of the game. However enough people "died" enough during the cutscenes to make it serve a purpose even within this format.

A couple of other cool things: first "Spaceship Earth", which was comical in terms of its execution and the entire concept, and perhaps even cooler and one of the best bits of the episode was the Sun City. This was a good idea to do, and is pretty much what I think of when I think about the episode. Even the "Sun God" (who was short-lived, as much of the actual action would have taken place in gameplay) was actually quite a cool character.

I think the best sequence though was the meeting with Adoy (a play on "Yoda") and Zoidberg's appearance. Done right, I think Zoidberg is the best character on this show, and he certainly held the show here. Also funny was the fact that this planet was stuck "in the corner of the universe" and Zoidberg is now seemingly stuck there.

Given the constraints they were working in for this, "The Lost Adventure" was a good episode. It's great how the story transitioned well from game to episode - I've seen a similar cut of 24: The Game (admittedly fan-made and rather crude) which didn't work quite so well, as many of the story elements relied too heavily on gameplay. But in the case of Futurama, it's great that people who couldn't be bothered to play the game, now get a chance to watch the episode contained therein anyway.