Pleased to be warned of the possibility of spoilers …

A momentous day in television history!

See, once upon a time, there was a great cartoon show on FOX. Actually, there were a couple cartoon shows on FOX: The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Family Guy, and Futurama (”IT JUST WON’T STAY DEAD!”) With the exception of Futurama, all of the other cartoon shows on FOX blew monkey goats (by which I mean they suck*).

In the case of Futurama and Family Guy, both were canceled by the fucking moronic assholes at FOX (which, by the way, stands for ‘Network Idiots’). However, thanks to the Miracle of The Modern Age, TV Shows on DVD, both shows were granted reprieves: Family Guy was brought back to television as a weekly series (I have no idea why, with the exception of the occasional brilliant parody of the best sci-fi movie series ever, that show blows monkey goats), while Futurama has been brought back as four straight-to-DVD movies, the first of which, Bender’s Big Score, was released today on DVD.

Long story short: Bender travels back in time on behalf of evil nudist aliens to rob Earth’s riches and kill Fry. There’s also a lot of small side plots — Hermes chops off his head, Leela has a romantic interest. Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of time-traveling parodoxical stuff (that really makes my head hurt, even though the Globetrotters work out the mathematical stuff.)

There’s an epic scope to this movie, particularly in the sense that a lot of major and minor characters from the show’s run return. All of the original cast returns (by which I mean the voice actors, of course!), and the opening sequence is slightly changed: every character is highlighted, and the monitor that the Planet Express crashes into is playing a scene from the series’ first episode. The FOX executives are — deservedly!!! — well bashed for being, y’know, stupid. Kitten-class ships fly into combat, The Robot Devil plays a wedding, Fry has a tattoo of Bender on his ass, Amy and Leela have a naked scene (well, and so do Zoidberg, Farnsworth** and Fry), and the good guys team up with Evil Santa to defeat a fleet of gold-plated Death Stars.

Everything turns out okay, of course. Well, I mean … ‘okay’ might not be the word. “We’re boned!” Bender says. Meanwhile, I did indeed start to tear up — just a tad — at the end. ‘Cuz I’m a sap.

I’m looking forward to getting to watch the commentary track. The commentaries on the episodes are one of the best features of the season sets — they really are, you should check ‘em out if you haven’t already.

Coming Next (probably in May): Futurama - The Beast With A Billion Backs

*Yes, even The Simpsons, which hasn’t been funny since, like, before I had double-digits in my age.

**And I’d been eating, too …

(Just as a side note, you would not imagine how disturbing it is to do a Google image search for FUTURAMA with the safe-mode turned off…)