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3ACV05: The Birdbot Of Ice-catraz
First UK airing: Sky One, 8:30pm, 18-3-01
"You can do this! It's just like
murdering a little butler!"
Let's face it -- how can anyone resist an episode
with killer penguins?
'Birdbot' got off to a slow start, with some fairly
laboured environmentalist jokes (although I did like the '6000
hulls' gag, and Fry's follow-up), but once it got to Pluto it
took off. The place has obviously changed since its most recent
TV appearance on Starship Troopers: The Series, but I guess that's
3001's programme of terratmosphering for you.
'Birdbot' was hardly a classic, but once the episode
reached full speed it raised the laughs. There's something about
the sight of a robot vomiting a stream of mashed-up fish into
a baby penguin's mouth that just exemplifies comedy. Plus there's
the fact that penguins are intrinsically funny, especially when
they're being wrung out or having sound effects added to lessen
the tragedy. Naturally, once 'loveable dictator' Bender get in
on the act, nature's little butlers turned psychopathic killers,
and their being pitted against mental tree-huggers made it all
the more amusing. Come on, admit -- Leela's line about if it's
fun, it's not environmentalism rang true, didn't it?
For the rest of the episode, were we in a parallel
reality? After all, the Professor's using the Finglonger! Plus
(grrrr) there was no Amy, which I understand will be a recurring
untheme for the next few episodes. Don't they understand that
Amy's as essential to Futurama as
Seven is to Voyager? (Okay, that may be a slight exaggeration.)
Some music and sound effects notes -- the music just
before Bender rebooted in penguin mode sounded a lot like Danny
Elfman's penguin music from Batman Returns, and his reboot sound
effects were (guh) from Star Trek. The bit with all the penguins
squashed against the window was also Futurama's
version of 'The Mark Of Gideon', which even though it came from
the much-maligned third season (Fred Freiberger, you can try
to justify it all you like, but season two of Space:1999 and
the fact you wrote MST3K's giant grasshopper flick The Beginning
Of The End prove you suck!) was actually half-decent.
Despite this, I'm only giving the episode three pellets
of Dark Matter overall. Hey, life is hilariously cruel...
Rating: 
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