The research department, with whom I first viewed Bender's Big Score a week ago Tuesday, said in no uncertain terms that he'd never been as excited for a new DVD as for this one, the first of four planned straight-to-DVD feature-length movies reuniting the creative staff and the voice actors of the late Fox sci-fi cartoon sitcom "Futurama." It's worth keeping in mind that this is an individual who has every available season of "Degrassi High," "Degrassi: The Next Generation," and "The Kids of Degrassi Street" in his collection. Coming from his lips, the superlative drips with portent.

So it's interesting -- or maybe it's to be expected -- that while on first viewing with the biggest "Futurama" fan I know we both were rather disappointed with the new movie, after several reairings with more casual fans, I've reached the conclusion that Bender's Big Score is really funnier the less "Futurama" experience you have. That's a little surprising considering the out-of-control level of fan service the picture tries to cram in -- every tertiary, one-off character from the show's five seasons seems to drift through at some point or another, from Elzar to the Robot Mafia to Scruffy the Janitor. I guess it's a tribute to the writing that despite the high amount of intertextuality all of these random cameos still get laughs out of the uninitiated. Or maybe it's something that I as an obsessive devourer of genre television seldom get to experience -- something that's just purely from-the-gut funny but goes under the head of the diehard because he's too busy trying to remember precisely where the character or joke previously appeared.

Which is all well and good, but you can't put the shaving cream back into the can, and I still have to approach Bender's Big Score as a fan who's viewed and absorbed the four DVD volumes to the point where the R.D. and I can communicate entirely in snippets of "Futurama" dialogue. I also think that the straight-to-DVD television sequel is something that we're going to see a lot more of in the future, and it's certainly not too early to make bold pronouncements about the specific peculiarities of this new genre. After all, we've got the "Family Guy" spinoff Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, and now we've got Bender's Big Score, and that's two, which is a trend.

The obvious problem that both the "Family Guy" and "Futurama" "movies" have had to face is that the content contained within has to serve a dual function. The content has to be both enjoyable and watchable as a single-serving, feature-length movie and as a multi-part sequence of half-hour television episodes. For "Family Guy," the seams were a little more obvious, as the episodes sewn together for Stewie Griffin were originally intended as just three more installments for the show's comeback fourth season. Fox smelled profit in the air and rushed the episodes into production for a quickie DVD which came out with scant interstitial material and unbleeped swears -- a way, in short, to fool fans into buying three separate SKU's for one season's worth of material (two volumes of the standalone episodes plus the "movie"). The "Futurama" movie has a somewhat less base background. Originally conceived as a way to both make money and meet fan demand, when Matt Groening and his creative team got the go-ahead to make four new films, they were really supposed to be movies -- television re-airings were a secondary concern. But a funny thing happened. Actually, "Family Guy" happened, with its relaunch not only winning solid ratings for Fox but also (and more importantly) giving the network the chance to make huge profits off the sale of further DVD sets. So not only are these four movies being made (well, I guess they've already been made, the long lead times involved in animation make getting tenses precisely right here kind of tricky), but Comedy Central has commissioned thirteen additional episodes to run next year.

The fact that there's going to be a network home for new "Futurama," I suppose, motivated the creative team to shift the master plan for the movies into more of an episodic framework. Bender's Big Score, because it was the first of the lot, suffers from a lot of confusion in this regard. It tends to speed up and slow down every twenty minutes, as the logic of a 22-minute sitcom is imposed late in the writing process. Even the title, which was decided on long before the writing was complete, doesn't really make a lot of sense -- in the commentary track, Groening and David Cohen discuss how the titular "big score" was actually dropped from the script midway through animation because the plot had already grown complicated enough. And there's a lot of other problems with the film as a whole -- dull, irritating villains that grow tiresome less than halfway in, a plot twist that's too easy to figure out and makes the savvy genre viewer mountingly impatient for the last two-thirds, important characters that go missing for long, dull flashbacks that most viewers will already have foreseen -- that are the inevitable fallout of a show that never made even a two-part episode during its original run suddenly switching to what in effect is a four-show serial.

What was initially brilliant about "Futurama" -- and indeed, why for a lot of folks including myself it immediately supplanted "The Simpsons" as the authority among cartoon sitcoms -- is that science fiction is a genre that lends itself beautifully to short-form storytelling, from "The Lady, or The Tiger?" to "The Twilight Zone." Because so many of the devices of science fiction are intimately familiar to the "Star Trek" types who adopted "Futurama" with such fury, the show was able to quickly develop a shorthand where complicated metaphysical ideas flew by at the same speed the gags do on "The Simpsons." That also logically insisted that "Futurama," plotwise, had to be pretty predictable most of the time -- since the great beats of science fiction literature were being parodied, most of the audience for whom the show was intended was going to know the endings well ahead of time. That's not a big deal for a 22-minute sitcom, but it kind of smashes the momentum of a 90-minute movie. About thirty minutes into Bender's Big Score, I knew I had figured out the twist. If it was a regular episode, big deal, it would be over already. But rather I had to sit there feeling as if my intelligence was being increasingly insulted as the storytelling went painstakingly through every step of a time-travel process of which I had already intuited the full workings. I guess that would be fine if the laughs didn't flag, but they do, and after a certain point all of the fan-service cameos become overkill -- don't put Bubblegum Tate in a "Futurama" episode unless you're going to give him something cool to do!

So viewing the movie for the first time from an obsessive fan's perspective, I couldn't help but be let down. That's the problem with obsessives, we're just never satisfied. I bought the two-disc special edition of Superbad yesterday and even though it came with stickers -- rad little Michael Ceras and Seth Rogens in action poses! -- I still couldn't help but feel let down that it only took me the better part of an afternoon to zip through all of the added content, commentaries, and deleted scenes. There's no such thing as enough for an obsessive. I'm glad that I took the time to show Bender's Big Score to some other friends, ranging from people who had caught a couple of reruns on Adult Swim to people who had borrowed the season sets from me and watched through them once. Backing down from true fanhood, it's easier to appreciate how challenging it must have been to find the characters' voices after two years off and how much of a task it must have been to do this while conceiving and writing a story four times more ambitious than any the writers had ever tackled before. Bender's Big Score works, it has a solid emotional arc and the rules of causality seem to be more or less adhered to for time travel yarn standards -- the thing holds together a hell of a lot better than Back to the Future Part II, is all I'm saying.

And it's highly likely that the next three movies will be far more satisfying, if only because the expectations will have been adjusted to a more reasonable level by the time they begin to roll out. It's the fifth volume of "Futurama" the series, which we probably won't see until 2009, that I really can't wait to own. Since the movies are the direct agent of that dream becoming a reality, I must wholeheartedly support them, even if the longer format doesn't particularly lend itself to the "Futurama" style.