One production challenge was pulling together a new crew to work on a show that had been out of production for several years. It was a big learning curve getting the crew and staff to understand how to tell a Futurama story.

"We had a great series and all the DVDs to reference. A lot of our crew had been doing storyboard and design on Drawn Together and were using Futurama as a storytelling model anyway; some of them had even worked on Futurama prior to Drawn Together. It helped them to storyboard the way we liked to begin with. Basically it was a crew we were very familiar with, artists we enjoyed working with."

There was no creative interference from FHE or Comedy Central beyond "getting some standards known," as Katz puts it. "Content-wise it was producer driven, which was really nice. They were, 'here, go ahead.'"

It must've been a dream come true for Groening and Cohen, who fought Fox TV executives for creative control of their show since day one, a battle which undoubtedly contributed to the premature end of its broadcast run. Producing the new episodes for home video and basic cable meant the shows could be scripted with the same freedom enjoyed by South Park and Drawn Together. "The movie is looser than the series," Katz acknowledges. "Network standards have tightened quite a bit since we were on, since the Janet Jackson incident. On Fox you can't show Bart's butt crack any more, something they'd been doing for years. Writing them as DVD movies was a little more liberating -- we see more of Fry's ass than we ever have before."

It was also more challenging. "The film has a bigger, more epic story arc," she adds. "Usually you approach a 22-minute episode as a three-act arc, but they're writing it like a movie you could look at as having four acts. They wrote it like a movie and then sort of backed out of that [to divide it into four episodes]. It's a pretty big challenge and I think they did a great job structurally."

There was no creative interference from FHE or Comedy Central. This was in marked contrast to the series, in which the creators fought Fox TV executives for creative control of their show from day one.

That feature-length structure is built around a complex time-travel story that toys with all the clichés and paradoxes inherent in the genre and builds to a twist ending worthy of The Sixth Sense. If anything, fans of the show may feel the movie's dense plotting shortchanges the zingy dialog and gags they've come to expect. Katz admits Big Score is "a very heavy sci-fi genre story and might be a little lighter on humor in favor of serving the story." For his part, director Hill sees the first movie as "a great fan-based story. The fans will really, really enjoy the return of something they've been waiting for. At the same time, it's a great intellectual story. It kind of introduces all these characters without you having to know who they are -- but it definitely feels like more of a fan script."

Bender's Big Score comes to a definite conclusion -- then introduces a cliffhanger that will be resolved in the second direct-to-video release, The Beast with a Billion Backs. "The next DVD is another great Futurama story, but it's more of a standalone, even though they hook up together," says Hill. "It takes up where the first one leaves off, but definitely in a not-expected Futurama way."

Joe Strike is a regular contributor to AWN. His animation articles also appear in the NY Daily News and the New York Press.