Futurama hit the airwaves on Fox back in the tender year of 1999 as the brainchild of Matt Groening and David X Cohen. The show centered around the pathetic Philip J. Fry, a down on his luck pizza delivery boy who is cryogenically frozen for 1000 years when delivering a pizza on New Year's Eve 2000. When he awakes he is thrust into the reality that he is alive and well in the year 3000.

He joins up with the delivery crew of the Planet Express company and embarks on wacky adventures for the next five seasons (really four and a half). The show was a cult hit based on its cutting edge humour and situations but Fox never saw it as a commercial hit and shuffled it around the schedule and split the seasons up. Ultimately the show was canceled in August of 2003.

That normally would be the end, but as we saw for other cult hits, Family Guy (renewed), Farscape (four hour mini-series to wrap up the arcs), and Firefly (a movie to resolve some story and character issues), if it sells you will make more. Sell it did, with reruns getting good ratings on Comedy Central and DVD releases of each season being very successful. At Comic-Con this year it was announced that there would be four direct-to-DVD movies and 16 new episodes based on and pulled from the movies. The first is Bender's Big Score and it marks the return of the series in a great way.

The Movie

Bender's Big Score is a very complex movie dealing mainly with a time travel storyline that gets very convoluted (that fact is noted by Bender in a very funny way at one point) but at its core is a reboot story that does a lot to show each main character in depth so that casual or new viewers will not be overwhelmed.

The main crew here are:

• Philip J. Fry (Billy West), the hapless everyman who is central to the series.
• Bender Rodriguez (John DiMaggio), the disgruntled, angry robot who is Fry's best friend.
• Turanga Leela (Katy Sagal), the one-eyed, tough-as-nails alien pilot whom Fry loves.
• Prof. Farnsworth (Billy West), the owner of Planet Express and Fry's "many generations removed" nephew, he is also one of the oldest people living.
  

There are many other characters, but the other main recurring ones (but not as essential as the above) are Amy Wong, the intern, Dr. Zoidberg, the physician, Nibbler, the Nibblonian, Hermes Conrad, the office administrator, and the favorites, Zapp Brannigan, the completely incompetent yet revered space commander, and his associate Kif.  All make great appearances, especially Hermes.

The movie opens with very quick and pointed references to the crew being canceled from flying by the Box network, but since the idiots at the Box network have been fired and horribly killed, the Planet Express crew are back on the air — flying through it they mean, of course. It was a great opening and set a lighthearted and mocking tone that carried through the film.