The Futurama Holiday Spectacular

After months of waiting for a new episode, we are given the Futurama Holiday Spectacular episode to end this year with. To be honest, this episode was a huge letdown to be honest. For starters, I was confused half the time of what the hell was going on, since the pacing of all the episodes were all over the place, and not using the Anthology Of Interest story structure meant we weren't sure if the stories were canon or not. It is assumed by us that they aren't, but then again, what's the point? Are they trying to make Treehouse Of Horrors for Futurama? I think it's best it was left to Anthology episodes, plus there was way too much singing in this episode! Three below par songs for one episode is not a great record to be holding to be honest, and I thought they'd learn not to do this from that "All Singing, All Dancing" episode off The Simpsons!

Nevertheless, the episode is split up into three different stories: Xmas, Robanukah, and Kwanzaa. The first segment focuses on Planet Express reviving an extinct pine tree for Christmas, and this backfires on then once they find out the seeds are contaminated by biological weapons, and this causes the Earth to ignite and kill everyone. The first segment is passable, although the pacing is off and there's not too many jokes, but it's ok. The second segment, being the best one of the three, is about celebrating Robanukah, and Bender doesn't have enough petroleum for two fembots to continue wrestling for a couple of weeks. The crew try to get some petroleum by heading towards the center of the earth, getting attacked by a humping worm (get it?) on the way. As they get closer however, the pressure is too much for everyone except Bender, as the Planet Express crew are crushed to death by the ship. Bender waits 500 million years later and discovers the crew has turned into petroleum, and returns to the fembots, realising that the original petroleum lasted 500 million years anyway. This segment had the most laughs and believe it or not, the best writing of all three segments! The 3rd and final segment focuses on Hermes' family and the crew celebrating Kwanzaa. After a song by Kwanzaa Bot is sung to everyone, the crew realise that they need beeswax for the candles to celebrate. Heading back to the Bees' hive last seen in The Sting, the crew discover that the bees are infected by termite-like creatures. This causes them to get angry with one and another, and gives the crew an opportunity to obtain the beeswax. The crew then decide to try and help the bees by telling them about Kwanzaa, and for some weird reason this gets rid of the parasites, and causes the bees to attack the crew once returned to their normal state, leaving them to feed and eat until they die. This segment is by far the worst one, despite having the best song, but everything else about it makes no sense. Why all of a sudden can bees talk, and why is Family Guy mentioned here? Seriously, this segment made no sense, and this really got on my nerves, as there weren't many jokes either.

So in conclusion, only 1 out of 3 of the stories are decent, and the rest are below par in my opinion. The other Christmas and Anthology episodes are miles better than this one, and this episode is almost the worst one I've seen so far (It's in my bottom 5 episodes), and to be honest, pretty much all of us were disappointed with it. Hopefully next year, Futurama will come back up with some good stories and plenty of humour again.