31st century returns in DVD feature of Fox's 'Futurama'

Pandas dumped on the streets by the truckload. Romantic nights at the pickled-head museum. The Harlem Globetrotters doing rhythmic math routines. A murderous robot Santa, extraterrestrial e-mail scammers and prime time with a mind-control show called "Everybody Loves Hypnotoad."

It could all mean only one thing. After years in the big green room in the sky, Matt Groening's "Futurama" is back with a burning question: Can a deeply unorthodox idea that worked wonderfully in a half-hour cartoon, no matter how sophisticated and textured, maintain interest for an 88-minute feature?

"Futurama: Bender's Big Score!" -- set for a straight-to-DVD release Tuesday -- is as much of an animation accomplishment as the series that spawned it. The artwork is rich, the palette is varied and the intricate content always, as Groening has put it, rewards viewers who are paying attention. It's frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

But as a story, it barely hangs together -- a disappointment for fans who grew to adore its incisive social commentary.

Make no mistake: It's an enjoyable ride, and it's great to see the band of 31st-century misfits -- time refugee Philip J. Fry, monocular mutant Leela, besotted and cantankerous robot Bender and their space-faring compadres -- reappear with their lives as pathetic and misguided as ever. If "Gilligan's Island" was set in the future, this would be your ensemble cast.

And yet ...

What made "Futurama" superior -- and what made those who canceled it occupy a space on the food chain below lawyers, shock jocks, even critics -- was its trademark blend of dada humor and sniperlike satire. Even more than Groening's flagship series, "The Simpsons," the David X. Cohen-steered show smartly skewered consumer culture, social mores and general early 21st-century obliviousness with wonderful parables possible only in the distant future.

It offered us a menagerie of ghastly creatures that would have made Gary Larson blanch: the Willy Wonka-like slugs that manufactured an addictive soft drink called Slurm; the herds of giant beetles wrangled by pioneers in the Martian deserts; poplers, the fried shrimplike snack that humans munched upon mercilessly until they were revealed to be cute and cuddly; and Nibbler, the tiny intergalactic pet who swallowed hams whole and was actually a member of a deep-baritoned race called the Niblonians who were positioned to save humanity.

As the series went on, the animation and the characters got more textured. By its final (fourth) Fox season, the cartoon was almost operatic in its absurdity -- as if "The Simpsons" had been crossbred with "The Jetsons" and the best of the Warner Bros. Daffy Duck-Marvin Martian cartoons. But "Futurama" never caught the broader zeitgeist as "The Simpsons" did, and suddenly, in mid-2003, it was gone.

While the series adeptly incorporated all manner of disjointed gags and throwaway lines into tight plots, "Bender's Big Score!" boasts a muddled narrative and feels like a series of vignettes stitched together by a mad doctor. Which isn't uninteresting at all; it just feels like these folks are out of practice.

The plot focuses on creepy, fawning aliens who are running a Nigeria-like e-mail scam to get people's money. Their scheme, though, produces unimaginable success: President Nixon's preserved head gives away Earth in an attempt to procure the money they promise. The ensuing tale winds in and out of the 21st and 31st centuries, giving our hero -- hapless deliveryman Fry -- a chance to prove his love for Leela once and for all.

Various obstacles, of course, prevent this, many of them hilarious and accompanied by great lines. A few:

• Professor Hubert Farnsworth, calling a mandatory meeting: "To the mandatorium!"
• West Indian bureaucrat Hermes, who's been decapitated and is living on as a pickled head: "Without my body, I'm a nobody." (Pretend you're hearing this in a Caribbean accent.)
• Bender, the aggressive robot, assigned to kill someone: "Want me to concludify him? Like some sort of a dispatcherator?"

The best moments of the whole affair are appearances by Al Gore -- yes, it's really Al Gore's voice -- in a hilarious subplot. DVD extras are equally fun, particularly an "ad" for Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" in which the Nobel Peace Prize winner beats Bender to a metal pulp with a baseball bat.

What is the strategy for making a half-hour cartoon into a full-length movie? "The Simpsons" did it this summer and managed to blend oddity, comedy, stepped-up animation and plot into something bigger than the series itself.

"Bender's Big Score!," though, feels like a really long episode. It's fun to watch -- really fun -- but it's not a movie.

Fortunately, more "Futurama" DVD releases are scheduled for 2008. Those of us who adore this universe -- and know how great it can be -- can consider "Bender's Big Score!" a rough draft for the bright, colorful future to come.