The prayers of Futurama fans have finally been answered as a series of new straight-to-DVD movies, the first of which, “Bender's Big Score,” hits the stores on Tuesday.

It’s been four years since the 72-episode animated sci-fi spoof, created by “The Simpsons” producer Matt Groening, was cancelled by Fox.

“Well, every year we came back, not by the skin of our teeth, but ... we'd finish the table-read for the last episode of each season, and we'd never know if we'd be back for more,” Maurice LaMarche, the Toronto-born voice actor and impressionist whose credits include a half-dozen characters on Futurama, was quoted by thestar.com as saying.

“We weren't given a consistent schedule, to say the least,” he continued. “They bounced us around and bounced us around until finally ... well, we knew that was it. None of us could believe it. It's just such a good show.”

In April last year, Groening revealed in an interview that a huge part of the Futurama creative team will start working on new episodes, to be designed as four movies, after Groening approached 20th Century Fox Television to produce a direct-to-DVD Futurama movie. A couple of months later, Comedy Central announced that at least 13 episodes were to be produced.

“And now we have these four new movies, which will eventually be cut up into half-hours, so in effect that's our 16-episode sixth season. Obviously, we hope this will be the first of many new movies or seasons. We'd like to consider this our resurrection,” LaMarche said.

“We weren't dead after all. Just in a coma,” he added.

The show is also set for a television comeback: each DVD will be chopped into four episodes, to be aired on Comedy Central in 2008.

The first movie, “Bender’s Big Score” follows the Planet Express crew trying to save Earth in an epic battle against nudist alien Internet scammers who make a shocking discovery: the secret of time travel, mysteriously tattooed on Fry's buttocks, which they use to control Bender.