Before he knows what's happening, he's instantly flash-frozen. When the timer on his tube finally hits "zero", Fry emerges from his steel cocoon, blinking in astonishment out the window at a radically different New York skyline. Soon he learns that the date is now December 31st, 2999 from his "fate assignment officer", a shapely cyclops named Turanga Leela (Married: With Children's Katey Sagal) who quickly takes pity on this gawking man-child from "the stupid ages". The two flee the dreary careers that have been assigned to them and, along with a rude, alcoholic robot named Bender (John DiMaggio), try to mooch off of Fry's last living relative, his great-great-great-great (etc., etc) nephew Hubert J. Farnsworth (West again), a doddering, fuddy-duddy inventor who runs a cargo delivery service on the side to help fund his scientific endeavors.

So, Fry is basically back where he started a thousand years before as a delivery boy, only now with a sexy, one-eyed captain, a boozy, in-your-face robotic chum, and a few other oddball Planet Express employees to bounce off of, including uptight, Jamaican bureaucrat Hermes Conrad (Phil LaMarr), flirty Asian intern Amy Wong (Lauren Tom) and perennially downtrodden crustacean doctor John Zoidberg (West yet again).

Groening's series offered an iconically simple (yet not simplistic) art design similar to as The Simpsons, as well as some elements of humor, yet the show set a tone of it's own early on, creating a vivid cast of regular and semi-reoccurring characters that offered satire of many of the well-worn conventions of the science fiction genre while simultaneously creating an elaborate fictional universe all it's own for it's characters to play in. Yet, for all it's smart tweaking of the "geek" demographic, the Fox Network never allowed the show to find it's audience, shuffling it around their weekly schedule willy-nilly until they finally buried it at 7:00 PM on Sunday nights, wherein it was consistently either pre-empted entirely by football games or else joined "already in progress". After four seasons and 72 episodes, the show left Fox during the summer of 2003 (the network "burning off" the remaining, unaired episodes with little-to-no promotion), only to move to the Cartoon Network in the fall of that year, where it's reruns finally began to build the loyal fanbase that had consistently been unable to discover it during it's original run. Eventually, the show's cult following (not to mention good sales for it's DVD season releases) became strong enough for Fox to announce plans for a quartet of direct-to-DVD movies reuniting the show's creative team and cast for new adventures.

When last we left the crew of the Planet Express at the climax of the previous Futurama DVD movie, 2007's Bender's Big Score, the universe had just been torn asunder by all the time-travel shenanigans that Fry and Bender had undergone, the resulting, glowing rift in the sky throwing the Earth into a panic. Professor Farnsworth makes a plea at a science expo (with the head of guest star Professor Stephen Hawking as MC) to study the rift, but his arch-nemesis, Professor Ogden Wernstrom (David Herman), makes his own bid for the job, and the two rickety enemies decide to settle the matter with a game of Deathball, offering the film's first special-effects showcase.

Meanwhile, Fry, apparently having put his long-time infatuation with Leela on the back burner, has found himself a new girlfriend, the freckled Colleen (voiced in full-tilt adorable ditz mode by King Of The Hill veteran Brittany Murphy). However, following the Planet Express team's Deathball match victory, he's understandably surprised and upset to learn that Colleen has no less than four other boyfriends that he'll have to share her with!

In other romantic news, Amy announces to the PE crew that her long-time alien boyfriend Kif Kroker (Maurice "The Brain" LaMarche) has asked her to be his "Fon-Fon Rue", and the gang travels to Kif's home planet of Amphibios 9 in order to witness the happy (if extremely gross) union of the two.

But wait, there's more! When the PE crew's expedition to the outer space rift results in a catastrophic failure to explore beyond, Bender's resulting visit to the hospital (apparently metallic objects cannot pass through the anomaly) earns him a heavily publicized token visit from popular -- and horrible -- robot actor Calculon (LaMarche again), his brief, court-appointed bedside "vigil" inspiring Bender to become an official celebrity stalker (his decision also stemming from his jealousy involving Fry's relationship with Colleen), never expecting the secret robot society that Calculon eventually offers him a membership in...

Then, an attempt by the Democratic Order Of Planets (DOOP) to destroy what they can't -- or won't -- understand leads them to assign Kif's superior officer (and inferior human specimen), Zapp Branigan (West yet again, channeling the late, great Phil Hartman by way of William Shatner at his most Shatnerian), to take his ship The Nimbus to the rift and send a Universe-To-Universe missile (U.U.M.) through to the other side. But then what's been concealed to our universe finally makes it's appearance... a mass of slimy, Lovecraft-ian tentacles that burst through the tear in the fabric of reality and quickly make their way to Earth and every other planet in the known galaxy, jabbing themselves into the necks of each and every living being and making them part of a mass, collective consciousness. Fry, having made "first contact" with the horror from beyond the universe, becomes the official spokesperson of it's new religion, preaching the glories of global communion with the almighty...Yivo! (voiced by comedian David Cross).  

Like the series that spawned it, Futurama is insanely dense with layers of satire, physical slapstick, gross-outs,  nearly-subliminal background gags (I especially liked the video game "Honky Kong" at the local arcade) and elaborate mathematical jokes that only the most advanced college graduates can possibly decipher. A lot of people like to use the common "you just didn't get it" argument to defend brainier-than-normal movies and TV shows that don't appeal to the Unwashed Masses, yet one is sorely tempted to dust off that old saw when an animated series as crass, vulgar, and comedically vapid as Family Guy not only was resurrected after it's initial 2002 cancellation, but has actually thrived since it's return to Fox in 2005. Yeah, the success of that particular series renewal was likely a key factor in bringing Futurama back from it's premature burial, yet it still stings when a show as witty, stylish, laugh-out-loud funny, and even poignant as Futurama couldn't ever get a break back in the day, while Family Guy is content to reap untold millions just by smugly parroting shit that creator Seth McFarlane saw on TV when he was ten and adding fart and drug jokes.

Anyway's, the important thing is that Futurama is back, baby, and, after a bit of creative rustiness in it's first DVD movie, is now firing on all comic cylinders again. Huzzah!

Presentation
Whereas the series was animated in a 1:33.1 full-frame ratio, both Bender's Big Score and now BWABB are presented in an anamorphic 1:85.1 widescreen format, and the presentation is excellent. The visuals pop off the screen, the CG elements mixing seamlessly with the hand-drawn elements, and the colors are deep, rich, and grain-free. Awesome. The 5.1 English track (what, no Spanish? Bender Bending Rodriguez does not approve!) offers it's own fun, with the terrific voice work melding perfectly with an elaborate soundscape offering whizzing spacecraft, laser blasts, squishy tentacle invasions into numerous bodily orifices (ewwww...), and Christopher Tyng's fine musical score (no musical numbers this time, which will please those disappointed by the two intrusive, only vaguely catchy songs in BBS).

Extras
First off is a typically raucous audio commentary featuring the usual gang that has contributed tracks to each and every episode of the series on DVD, including creator Matt Groening, executive producer David X. Cohen, voice actors Billy West, John DiMaggio and Maurice LaMarche, director Peter Avanzino, producer Claudia Katz, writer Michael Rowe & producer Lee Supercinski. Like their yack tracks on the series sets and the previous DVD movie Bender's Big Score, this offers a wildly entertaining party with Groening and Cohen holding court over their team of writers, producers, and voice talent as they riff on the film's plot, technical challenges, fan reception, the recent death of series guest star Gary Gygax (who played a member of "Al Gore's Presidential Action Rangers"), and other topics. It's a commentary filled with nearly as many laughs as the feature (the voice artists all frequently drop into character, and DiMaggio's cackle is particularly infectious).

Futurama: The Lost Adventure (30:12, with optional commentary by Groening, Cohen, West, DiMaggio, LaMarche, Rowe, Supercinski and dialogue writer J. Stewart Burns), offers most of the "cut scenes" from the 2003 Futurama video game (on the Playstation 2 and Xbox systems), which basically told the story between the actual game play levels. Despite the promise of this being an "unseen" episode, stitching these CG animated segments together is far from seamless, despite some sharp writing and dialogue (the plot featuring the evil Mom buying enough of Earth to be made it's supreme ruler, causing the PE crew to brainstorm a way to rectify the situation, ultimately involving some tricky time travel paradoxes) that would have easily worked as an actual episode. The main problem being that, much of the story was actually revealed during the game play levels, making this a somewhat fragmentary experience from a pure narrative standpoint. Still, it's nice to have all (er, most) of these cut scenes conveniently in one place.

A Deleted Scenes submenu (3:23) offers the following discarded bits, in various states of completion (from final color to rough storyboards):

• Original Opening (Bender berates the film's narrator [West] about not discussing more of the last film's plot) 
• Fry & Colleen Meet (an extended Meet Cute)
• St. Asimov Parade (A spectator gets kicked by an animatronic statue)
• Zapp & Scientists (Zapp speaks up at the scientific symposium, only to get a pair of dentures thrown at his head by Prof. Farnsworth)
• Amy, Fry & Leela (Fry details the anguish of his break-up with Colleen to Leela and Amy, who offer some ineffectual romantic advice)
• Scruffy, The Janitor (recurring supporting PE employee meets a grisly end)

Storyboard Animatic (21:45) offers the first "episode" of the movie in rough, B&W animatic form. Worth sitting through to notate all of the little changes made between this and the finalized product.

David Cross Featurette: Meet Yivo! (2:03) has the voice of the film's tentacled horror cracking wise in the recording booth.

Blooperama: The Futurama Cast At "Work" (2:12) has footage of Billy West, John DiMaggio, Phil LaMaar, Katey Sagal, and Tress MacNeille (the voice of Mom and the perennially chipper TV newscaster Linda, among many others) screwing up takes and goofing around behind the microphones. I wish this featurette went on for much longer, if only to marvel that Zoidberg's somnambulant voice comes out of an actual person. 

3D Models With Animator Discussion (4:11) offers pretty much that.

A Brief History Of Deathball (2:02) looks at model sheets for the Deathball arena costumes, with animator commentary.

Bender's Game: A Sneak Peek At The New Futurama Epic! (2:01) takes a look at the next Futurama movie (due November 2008), which looks to take a great deal of inspiration from Gary Gygax's Dungeons & Dragons and smacks of the series' "Anthology Of Interest" episodes. Leela as a centaur! Professor Farnsworth as Gandalf! 

Bottom Line
Even those who were disappointed with Bender's Big Score and it's obsession with Fry/Leela shipping and fanboy in-jokes will find much to savor in this rich, funny, beautifully-designed second installment (even if there's no cliffhanger to match BBS's memorable "We're boned!"). Oooooooo yeah, it's gonna be fun on the bun!