Entertainment

We’re baaack!

It’s probably been a while since your favorite animated charac ters ran around nearly naked for an entire episode, or there was a president-in-a-jar named Nixon, or a pizza delivery guy frozen from 1,000 years ago got defrosted.

If you have any clue what the hell I’m talking about, then for sure you are a once and future fan of “Futurama.” And the future, you’ll be happy to know, is now. Yes, “Futurama,” the crazy, often-hilarious, once-canceled Fox show returns tonight — on Comedy Central.

The rebirth came about after a successful spate of reruns on Comedy Central’s “Adult Swim” as well as surprisingly good sales of straight-to-DVD “Futurama” films, such as that classic tear-jerker, “The Beast With a Billion Backs.”

The madness from Matt Groenig (“The Simpsons“), whose partner in grime for this show is David X. Cohen, centers on pizza delivery/defrosted guy Fry (Billy West), his cyclops lady love, Leela, (Katey Sagal), a drunken, perverted robot named Bender (John DiMaggio) and the rest of the crew from the Planet Express ship.

If you missed everything that’s happened in the intervening seven years since the show was canceled, the series’ Web site has a “Recap-O-Rama: 5 Seasons in 7 Minutes,” which I recommend that you watch, since the show is as bizarre as a show set 1,000 years into the future with alcoholic robots can be.

Since there will be back-to-back shows tonight, the premiere episode, “Rebirth,” starts where the last DVD left off. It’s not as good as the second episode, so be sure to stay tuned. That one, titled “In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela,” finds Leela and futuristic cheeseball captain Zapp Brannigan (West) alone together after a crash landing. He tries to seduce her while she’s trapped under a tree, telling her that they are the only humans (well, she’s not human) remaining in the universe.

Think of them as Adam and Evil.

Suffice to say, the rest of the episode involves lines about “the pubic library,” a nude-beach planet and plenty of cartoon nakedness.

The, er, future(ama), will include revisits by the series’ favorite guests, record-holder Al Gore and runner-up Coolio. Yes, Al Gore, like the cockroach, is alive and just as pesky 1,000 years from now as he is in this incarnation.