“What if Bender was really giant?”
“You idiot, we already saw that.”
“I know, I liked it, I want to see it again.”

When a TV series reaches its thirteenth season (or tenth season, depending which way you count), how much slack do we give it for repeating itself? ‘Cause “Destroy Tall Monsters” repeats past Futurama episodes a lot.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Bender grow to giant size and get into a kaiju battle (heck, it’s not even the second). And Bender undergoing weird body modifications in general has been done, and done, and done again, and done some more, and done even more than that. And Bender chasing fame & respect and/or obsessing over somehow being less than 100% gloriously perfect … well, that’s been the driver of so many episodes, I ain’t even gonna dig up links to them. Just throw some darts at a Futurama episode list, and you’ll probably hit one.

Point is, there’s little innovation present in “Destroy Tall Monsters”. We do get Leela & Fry arguing about whether their relationship is built on being similar or different, which is a new addition, but it’s also a really nothing plot, just there to give those two something to do while The Bender Show goes on (and to setup that Pacific Rim spoof at the end). Otherwise, this ep’s strictly been-there-done-that.

But how bad a thing is that, really? After all, Futurama isn’t a twisty thriller or mystery that’s meant to shock us with where the story goes (well, not most of the time, anyway). It’s a comedy that rarely takes its plots too seriously, mostly using them as a framework to spin jokes out of. And so long as those jokes are new, does it matter if the plot they’re riffing on is reheated leftovers?

Like, I’ll go to bat for the Coyote and the Roadrunner cartoons from Looney Tunes being one of the greatest comedic creations of all-time, and those have the most repetitious story imaginable. The Coyote tries to catch the Roadrunner, fails, gets hurt, and then that just repeats eight or ten times in each seven-minute cartoon. Yet those toons are comedy gold, because within their formulaic structure, they found endlessly absurd ways for the Coyote to fail, and endlessly inventive ways to depict the resulting injuries.

And I think “Destroy Tall Monsters” works in the same spirit. I mean, even when “Anthology of Interest I” came out 25 years ago (yes, everyone who watched it when it first aired, you are that old) it was hardly the first piece of entertainment to spoof giant monster movies – nor was it the tenth, probably not even the hundredth. Plenty of people had riffed on the same plot beats before, but as long as Futurama can come up with new jokes to tell, new ways to twist the formula to get a laugh, it can still make for a damn fine half-hour of television.

(Of course, this all depends on the jokes actually being funny. Your mileage may vary, but I laughed a lot this episode. Biggest guffaw was probably at Godzooka’s rictus-riddled corpse floating in the harbor.)

Stray Observation:

• Am I the only one who, when they started talking about “Godzooka”, was instantly transported back to watching the Godzilla cartoon from the 1970’s?

(Hey all, we’re back with another season of Futurama! This time around, Hulu put the whole season out at once, rather than doing the one-episode-a-week release schedule. I’ll still be doing one review each week, though, and to keep my thoughts on each episode from getting muddled, plan to stick to a weekly viewing schedule. Feel free to post spoilers in the comments, I ain’t gonna stop you, but if something in my review seems odd in light of events in future episodes, well, now you know why.)