REVIEW: FUTURAMA “FUN ON A BUN”

A sausage-making accident claims Fry as a victim during the crew’s visit to Oktoberfest.

Spoilers Below

Farnsworth feels that he doesn’t know his own crew all that well and decides to take everyone out into a more social setting where they can get to know each other. Enter Oktoberfest, a German festival that celebrates the best in sausage, beer, and dressing like an idiot. Unfortunately, all those things aren’t nearly as great as Fry and Bender remembered them as beer isn’t nearly as celebrated as Fry remembers it and just bringing your own hog to a sausage fest isn’t nearly as cool as bringing used angel wings or 3000 year old pork.

As a result, Fry and Bender decide to go into the barren terrains of NW Germany on a quest to find Woolly Mammoth meat. Weirdly enough, Bender and Fry don’t spend a lot of time looking for a carcass as they pretty much get one that is fully intact pretty much when they land. Then, Bender puts the Mammoth in a meat grinder which takes said meat and turns it into sausage. However things go bad when Fry get stuck in the machine and gets turned into chopped meat without Bender even noticing! So much so, that when he starts sampling his sausage at the fest, Leela and Amy are the first ones to notice that not only is Fry missing, but Bender grinded the poor bastard in the vat of meat!

Everyone back at Planet Express HQ is pretty depressed about the fact that Fry is’t there but most of all Leela. To help with her troubles, Leela goes to a doctor that zaps all of her memories of being with her ex-boyfriend and to help everyone else at work tries their best not to bring up Fry at all. Back in North West Germany, we learn that Fry hasn’t been mashed at all, just some of his hair and all his clothes. It turns out, Fry actually fell out of the grinder and into an ice hole where he gets frozen and then dug up by come local cave dwellers. After smashing his head, Fry suffers from amnesia and accepts the fact that he is also a ‘neanderthal’, but strangely enough he gets constant reminders of his former love Leela.

Bender gets word that his mammoth-sausage has made the finals so everybody decides to go back to Oktoberfest to cheer him on. However, after winning third-place the festival gets overrun by Fry and his loyal army of cave-dwellers of whom are hell-bent on getting even with the “homo-sapiens” and therefore take back their land! Pretty much an all out war breaks out between Zapp Brannigan’s army of technology versus Fry’s Middle Earth-like stampede. Eventually, Leela shows up and gets taken out by Fry’s elephant which then causes a final fight showdown between the two. Fortunately, before any real damage gets done the adoring couple recognize each other and a truce is called between the two warring sides.

Futurama is now as strong as its ever been, giving us a visual feast of animated goodness the likes of which we can only expect from this show and that’s put on display for “Fun on a Bun”. Hell, right from the get go with Farnsworth’s pitch to go to Oktoberfest, you knew this week was going to be funny and it was. Fry getting drunk, then naked, then ending up among cave dwellers because Bender clearly didn’t give a shit about his friend potentially getting mashed up for a sausage made out of a 30,000 year old Woolly Mammoth for the sole purposes of a sausage contest that gets broken up anyway is just….a lot! Just that whole plot could have been used and the episode would have been great, but instead we also get a huge  battle that makes Empire Strikes Back look like a dog and pony show! And while all the fighting is going on, Hermes gets into a shouting match with a sloth, Bender kills off his competition and claims all of the trophies!! To top it all off we have Leela’s memories all out of whack right up until the climax when the fighting stops and get romance that is indicative of anything you would see in a Hollywood film these days.  This episode was really special, and it just couldn’t be beat.

(10 out of 10)