You gots to love Fox. As the home DVD industry and the growing power of the Interwebs conspire to utterly dismantle all conventions of traditional network television profitability, Fox’s propensity for creating some of the edgiest, most inventive programming on TV is matched only by the station’s legendary compulsion to smack the shiny red jettison button on some of their most beloved shows at the slightest threat of ratings slippage. “Futurama,” Matt Groening’s wry animated sci-fi follow up to his unmatched run with “The Simpsons,” was an unprecedented blend of beer-swilling raunch and tech-geek intellectualism. Following the misadventures of a 20th century meathead catapulted 1,000 years hence by a late-night mishap with a cryogenics freezer, the show was populated by some of TV’s most ingeniously twisted, but oddly endearing characters—killer robots, loveable mutants, squishy aliens, addled scientists and attractive interns. The cartoon overflowed with winks to contemporary issues and nods to science fiction’s top concepts, all with an extraordinary reliance on mathmotech IT-room humor. Struggling against the considerable odds of Fox’s scattershot program placement and repeated NFL overruns the show never stood a spaceballs’ chance in the old cathode-ray, Neilson Rating driven model. After only four seasons and a sad total of only 72 episodes, despite fanatical fan enthusiasm, the button was slapped, and out the airlock “Futurama” blew.

In the new millennium, however, there are far more ways to skin a cathode ray than there used to be. Buoyed not only by the theatrical windfall of Groening’s recent “Simpsons” movie, but even more so by the resurgent success of two of Fox’s other most infamously cancelled shows—the animated “Family Guy,” which returned to the airwaves proper to huge ratings, and Joss Whedon’s sci-fi “Firefly,” concluding its prematurely axed series with the feature film “Serenity,” which made great heaps of loot with its’ DVD release—the producers of “Futurama” were inspired to invent completely new paradigm. In a fascinating combination of these two scenarios, they’ve committed to creating four brand new feature length “Futurama” films, to be released first on DVD, and then to be cracked into 16 distinct 30-minute episodes, which they’ve already pre-sold to air as a fifth season on Comedy Central (which has been mopping cash with the original series since championing it’s continued re-runs in syndication).

If this welcome news isn’t enough to raise a fanboy’s antennae, it gets even better. The first of the four, “Bender’s Big Score,” is an absolute joy-ride, a true-love valentine to the original series’ most beloved characters and gags, as well as to science fiction fanatics in general. In addition to hundreds of references to familiar faces and jokes from the show, discerning genre nerds will recognize story quotes from “Star Wars,” “Back to the Future 2,” “Star Trek,” “Terminator” and “Time Bandits.” Rabid genre nerds will also pick out “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Re-animator,” “Fifth Element” and even, in a couple of subtle nods to Comedy Central, “South Park.”

The pace is positively relentless, leapfrogging through multiple temporal paradoxes, world domination by alien spam scams and bot-enslaving computer viruses, with some enthusiastic emphasis on classic time-proven gems like nudity (lots of it), murder, grand theft, violence, voodoo science, corporate skullduggery and, naturally, the frustrations of unintentional decapitation. There are even a couple of rousing musical numbers.

As in the series, there are a slew of celebrity voice cameos. Coolio, Mark Hamill and Sarah Silverman among them. But the most prominent voice is that of a decidedly good-sported Al Gore, who skewers his own self in a number of hilarious scenes. For a known block of wood, the guy sure can scream when he wants to.

As the characters vault back and forth through time, duplicating and overlapping with a gleeful heedlessness for the traditionally understood dangers of fractured causality, the plot admittedly ties itself into something of a Gordian knot. At one point, the robot Bender even complains out loud that things are getting too confusing. But that’s all part of the fun. It’s a cartoon, after all, and as long as the laughs keep coming, which they do with relentless relish, it doesn’t need to make a whole lot of sense.

That said, it does seem particularly sense-making that an entity called “Futurama” would so prominently press the boundaries of old envelopes. The DVD itself, being the first ever eco-friendly “carbon neutral” product to be released by Fox, and including a promo for Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” in the form of an extra animated short titled “A Terrifying Message from Al Gore” is unusually forward reaching.

So, hats off, against all conventional wisdom, to the revolving executives at Fox. They actually do seem able to recognize a bad path when they’re on one, and to accept new and innovative ways to right the screw-ups of their predecessors. If their example can serve as any guide, perhaps our future will indeed be brighter than we may have thought.