Futurama's Writers Regretted Cutting A Bender's Big Score Sequence We'll Never See
In the "Futurama" movie "Bender's Big Score," a visit to a nude beach planet revealed that Philip Fry (Billy West) had a tattoo on his butt — a tattoo of his robot friend Bender smoking a cigar — that he didn't know had been placed there. A closer examination of the butt tattoo revealed a miniature binary code embedded in one of the portrait's eyes. It seemed that this was a thought-to-be-mythic time-travel code that, when read aloud, manifested a portal to the past. The Professor (West) noted that time travel was dangerous as it couldn't be achieved without creating universe-threatening paradoxes.
Unluckily, Bender himself (John DiMaggio) had been infected with a computer virus, placing him in the control of a trio of nudist internet scam aliens. The aliens ordered Bender to go back in time to steal Earth's artifacts. Bender, being a robot, could wait in a basement for a thousand years before emerging to present his masters with the objects he stole. Once the aliens are rich, they want to destroy the original time code on Fry's butt by sending Bender back in time to murder Fry. Bender, fecklessly under their control and generally insensitive in general, has no issue with the assassination assignment. A portion of "Bender's Big Score" takes place in the early years of the 21st century while Bender stalks around Earth with a ray gun, hoping to find and kill his buddy. It takes him about 12 years to get the job done.
There was originally more to it than that. According to the "Big Score" DVD commentary track, one of the film's writers Ken Keeler and director Dwayne Carey-Hill revealed that there was a ten-minute sequence wherein Bender was lost in Monte Carlo, chumming around with a European aristocrat named Fillippe Frey.
Fellippe Frey
The joke of the sequence, of course, was that Bender, even though he knew Fry for many years, couldn't tell the difference between his old friend and some random rich gambler he met in Monte Carlo. This was a riff on James Cameron's "The Terminator," wherein a killer robot from the future merely had to consult a phone book to find his intended victim, and had to murder each woman named Sarah Connor in order to make sure he had terminated the correct one.
In the finished film, Bender arrives in New York, close to where Fry lives. In the deleted sequence, he would have possibly landed in Italy. Keeler described the sequence thus:
"He found a jaded Italian aristocrat playing roulette in Monte Carlo whose name was Fillippe Frey, but he didn't know whether it was Philip Fry or not, evidently, and he became embroiled in a thing where the aristocrat kept just winning huge amounts of money and not caring. Not caring even slightly. And Bender eventually threatens to kill him and he said, 'I don't care! Go ahead and kill me, I don't care!' And it was extremely entertaining to me, anyway, but it's gone now, sadly."
Carey-Hill jumped in to note that the Frey character got punched in the stomach and that Bender pulled his pants down, adding to his humiliation. Executive producer David X. Cohen also recalled a gag from the sequence wherein Bender was wearing a dress. Cohen said:
"[T]hey made Bender leave [the casino] because he wasn't in formal wear, so then he went off screen, you heard him beating someone up, and he came back wearing a long dress. Anyways, stuff you will never see. We never even saw it."
C'est la vie.
Why was it cut?
It seems that the writers included a rather long sequence. Although "Bender's Big Score" is technically a movie, it was also constructed in such a way that it could be divided into four episodes of broadcast television. As such, the filmmakers needed to pay very close attention to how long the film was and how the plot moved. It's reasonable to assume that the Monte Carlo scene was cut for length. It also seems like a massive aside for the movie's main (already complicated) plot. Cohen noted that the sequence would have been ten full minutes, which is almost half of a standard episode of "Futurama"
Of the sequence, Keeler said "Ah, it's breaking my heart." Clearly, he liked what he wrote.
Keeler also noted, however, that the gags he wrote may not yet be dead. At the time of the commentary track's recording, it seemed that Keeler, Carey-Hill, and Cohen had recently finished their work on "Into the Wild Green Yonder," the fourth of the "Futurama" movies ("Bender's Big Score" was the first). Keeler noted, "that scene almost made it into the fourth movie also." It ultimately didn't — even though a lot of "Green Yonder" takes place in Vegas — but it seems that Keeler did not forget.
Now that "Futurama" has returned on Hulu, Keeler (who wrote the 2023 episode "How the West Was 1010001" under the nom de plume Nona di Spargement) is likely pushing for his joke once again. Keep an eye out for Bender in a dress.