Proving that you just can't keep a good animated series down, Bender's Big Score revives the Futurama crew in a full-length feature (reportedly, the first of four which will later be broken down into individual episodes for television broadcast) chock full of the satiric touches that made the Matt Groening series a cult favorite among sci-fi and animation fans. In true Futurama form, the plot of Big Score is proudly ridiculous: At its core, it's about alien telemarketers with a plan to steal Earth's most valuable historical objects, who use e-mail viruses to cripple Planet Express and take control of belligerent robot Bender; the latter carries out their scheme via a time-travel code tattooed on Fry's backside. This allows for all manner of subplots involving Fry's return to the 20 th century, romantic confusion between Fry and Leela (Katey Sagal), and a host of cameos ranging from Kwaanza-bot (Coolio) and Zapp Brannigan to Al Gore (voiced by the real former vice-president, who once again displays an offbeat sense of humor).

Bender's Big Score also features a staggering amount of extras that reflect the show's sense of playful anarchy. Most valuable to longtime fans is the feature-length commentary by Groening, writers Ken Keeler and David X. Cohen, director Dwayne Carey-Hill, and cast members Billy West (Fry), DiMaggio, and Phil LaMarr, which provides a wealth of information on the film's production as well as plenty of laughs from the voice actors. "Futurama Returns!" is a live comic book reading by the cast in front of an enthusiastic convention audience, while "A Terrifying Message from Al Gore" is a short animated promo featuring the ex-veep in an animated promo for his Inconvenient Truth documentary (Gore's commentary for this short is worth the DVD's sale price alone), and "Bite My Shiny Metal X" is an amusing, tongue-in-cheek lesson on the mathematics used to deliver the show's futuristic touches. Perhaps the oddest extra is a full-length episode of Everybody Loves Hypnotoad, a sitcom based around the bizarre title creature that will provoke equal amounts of laughter and exasperation. A small battery of deleted scenes, new character design sketches, and a five-minute promo shot for Comic-Con round out the extras. --Paul Gaita

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Stealing is profitable for everyone!

So I first stole it off the internet to watch it and it was soooo good that I am going to buy it for myself annnnd my brother for Christmas. It's an awesome Christmas present! In my humble opinion, ha. Anyway Futurama is at it's best in this movie, they haven't lost a thing in the last 3 or 4 years being off the air. The jokes are still hilarious, and the story is just as outlandish. The character writing is brilliant! I cannot praise Futurama enough, one of the best shows on TV and this movie is a terrific showcase of that. Get it as fast as you can! Faster!

One star for the memories, one for the future

Well, it's here and I got my pre-order and sat down for an evening of comedy gold. That's when it happened. Nothing. Not the Seinfeld kind of nothing, but a kind of empty pit where the comedy should have been. The first forty-five minutes of this 89-minute feature had, perhaps, three laughs and those were more like chuckles, not the kind of wiping the tear from your eye laughs that I'm used to from Futurama. The GF and I looked at each other at that point and decided to take a break from the movie and go do other stuff, like housework, because it was more entertaining. While it was great to see the characters again, they did relatively little, acted like fools (which was not necessarily atypical, but seemed somehow amiss - Fry is the primary fool) and generally bungled the schtick. To be fair, when I was able to force myself to resume watching the next night, the fourth segment sort of pulled things together and wound up relatively strong, but it wasn't worth the sheer volume of boring junk which went before. Seriously, this could have been a funny 30-minute episode, but it just isn't feature-length material. As the caption says, one star for bringing the series back, another to keep the last disks in production, but I won't be pre-ordering those - they'll be strictly rentals.

Not So Great News, Everyone: Futurama Cast Reunion Special

I was disappointed. 'Bender's Big Score' tries too hard to reference every previous episode and include every character from the original show, and ends up being one of those cast reunion specials no one can stand. It is also a little a little like one of those "Remember that time when..." type shows they used to put in sitcoms when they didn't want to write anything new. Maybe it wasn't quite as bad as that, but pretty bad; a lot of recycling going on. "Reduce, re-use, and recycle" should not apply to comedy. The plot was all over the place and included flimsy pretexts to include characters that didn't belong. It included none of the normal plot continuity you'd expect and none of the typical one-liners, the exception I remember being Bender saying, "Hey! I don't tell you how to tell me what to do, so don't tell me how to do what you tell me!"

There is one thing you may want to consider when reading these reviews, though: I, like most people who bought the movie as soon as it was available, am a big fan of Futurama. I have found in the past that the kind of anticipation felt by fans while waiting for a new release of a favorite to come out generally leads to disappointment. Still, being as objective as I can, the writing on 'Bender's Big Score' was sub-par.

On the other hand, the episode of 'Everybody Loves Hypnotoad' included in the DVD extras kept me in stitches for the entire time it was playing. At least in it they focused on one plot line and the jokes that made sense for that plot. Well, two plot lines if you include speed-dating.