In 2007, Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone, Microsoft released the “successful” Windows Vista, and Futurama premiered its first movie, ‘Bender’s Big Score.’ The famous futuristic series created by Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, presented us with a 90-minute film that enamored fans (myself included).
The plot of the movie was incredibly absurd: after visiting a nudist planet (yes, a planet), the members of Planet Express become victims of a scam that, among other disastrous consequences, infects Bender with a virus and puts him at the service of the scammers: a nudist alien trio.
As if all this wasn’t enough, everything goes haywire when it’s discovered that Fry has a tattoo of Bender’s face on his butt, of which he knows nothing, and to make matters more complicated, the tattoo includes a binary code that allows Bender to travel to the past. With Bender under their control and a code for time travel, the scammers start acquiring all kinds of relics and treasures until they are disgustingly rich.
Once they have all the Earth’s fortunes, the aliens decide to get rid of both the code and the person who has it, involving Fry in a pursuit through the past with Bender turning into a Terminator (complete with sunglasses). Although the movie includes several journeys by Bender, who tries to find (and kill) Fry, there was one that was eventually discarded.
According to Ken Keeler, one of the writers of the movie, and Dwayne Carey-Hill, its director, this 21st-century chase was going to feature a 10-minute scene in which Bender found himself in Italy with an aristocrat named Fillippe Frey, whom he threatened to kill because he couldn’t distinguish whether he was his old friend or just a random person.
“He found a bored Italian aristocrat playing roulette in Monte Carlo named Fillippe Frey, but he didn’t know if it was Philip Fry or not, obviously, and he got involved in a situation where the aristocrat just kept winning huge amounts of money and didn’t care. He didn’t care at all,” Keeler recounts. “And Bender finally threatens to kill him, and he says, ‘I don’t care! Go ahead, kill me, I don’t care!’ It was very funny to me, but unfortunately, it no longer exists.”
The scene, likely discarded to shorten the movie’s duration, which also had to be divided into four parts to be aired in series format, was never even created. But there’s still hope because, now that the series has returned, it’s possible that we might see the gags envisioned by its creators adapted into an episode or two of a future season.
