PARTY LIKE IT’S 3007 The cast of Futurama is drawn together yet again.

Photo: Courtesy of Futurama TM and © 2007 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Fox enjoyed  a boom animation year in 1999: The Simpsons celebrated ten years, and Family Guy and Futurama joined the network’s prime Sunday-night lineup. Yet while The Simpsons was more popular than ever, and Family Guy sparked controversy for its racy material, Futurama just chugged along, largely unnoticed.

But the show picked up steam after its 2003 cancellation—as with Family Guy, we can thank syndication success on Cartoon Network for that. And just when fans were giving up hope for new 31st-century adventures, along came Comedy Central. Its agreement with Fox didn’t just score it rights to Futurama reruns; Comedy Central’s also releasing four feature-length DVDs of all-new material, which will later be broken up into 16 episodes to air next year.

The first installment, Bender’s Big Score, hits shelves Tuesday 27—and as you’d expect after four years of waiting, the show’s been saving its punches. The opening scene takes the requisite shot at the station that canceled the show, then helped bring it back: Professor Farnsworth informs the employees of Planet Express Delivery that they’ve been fired by the “brainless drones” at the Box Network. Then, after taking a phone call, he informs his crew that “Those asinine morons who fired us were themselves fired for incompetence. They were beaten, too, and pretty badly.”

The rest plays out like a typical Futurama episode, just longer and on a larger scale. Fry, a pizza delivery boy who was cryogenically frozen in 2000 and awoke in the future, still pines after the one-eyed karate-chopping ship captain Leela. Bender the boozy robot swindles his friends out of cash. Hermes Conrad’s a controlling bureaucrat. Disgusting lobster Dr. Zoidberg needs to be accepted. Farnsworth’s kind of out of it. Amy’s kind of just there.

It’s refreshing to see all the pieces back in play, but it’s Billy West who we’ve missed most in the interim. The 56-year-old voice actor, who also worked on Ren & Stimpy, speaks for Fry, Farnsworth, Zoidberg and fly-by-the-seat-of-his-short-shorts captain Zapp Brannigan (who wears hubris like cologne), among others. He, too, was holding out for more Futurama, a show he confides would be his favorite even if he weren’t involved. “I’m intuitive enough to know that when something is truly good, like [Futurama], it can’t just be cast away,” West says. “The fans knew it, and they were the ones who brought it back. It’s not like I’m dreaming. I owe the fans a debt of gratitude.”

The fans have plenty to be thankful for themselves: The plot of the film tracks Planet Express as they’re forced to relinquish control of the company to a group of Internet-spamming aliens. Bender falls under their control in the process, and when it’s discovered that Fry has the secret to paradox-free (yep) time travel tattooed to his ass (yep, yep), Bender is sent to steal history’s greatest treasures. The aliens later take over the world with a fleet of solid-gold Death Stars, and Planet Express leads the charge to save it.

Back at work, West remains vocal against what he perceives to be industry hypocrisy. When asked if he thought Futurama always got the shaft from Fox, West says yes, but is quick to bring up a larger point about the lack of rhyme or reason in Hollywood today. His main gripe is its obsession with cramming the square pegs of celebrity voiceovers into the round holes of animated motion pictures. “It’s unfortunate for voice people who want to go into animation when [someone like me] is sitting here saying it’s a rigged fight,” he notes. “Imagine being in the business and there’s a weird Area 51 that you can’t enter because you’re not a celebrity.”

The ironic thing about Futurama is that it has made West a celebrity—to a degree. At New Zealand’s Armageddon science fiction expo last November, 30,000 people showed up to hear him speak. But West’s still outspoken about the ineptitude of “those little bedheads” when it comes to voiceover work. (“Why don’t they just use my younger brother? Why don’t they get my plumber?”) It makes sense that he’d feel at home with Futurama, a show that, despite all its ratings difficulties, stuck to its fan-beloved formula.

So much so that West felt a twinge of familiarity upon reentering the studio to record the new material—like a song that reminds one of a particular summer. “It reminded me of the year 2000, but then I got this creepy feeling because that was the year Bush got elected. And I started to get this malaise, and I go, ‘I have to go out and shake this off.’ ”

Bender scores big Tuesday 27 ($29.98).