“Everyone out of the universe! Quick!”

“Futurama,” Matt Groening’s second series after “The Simpsons,” always had a great concept and an impressive visual style but always seemed lacking in the laughs department, which made it all the more disappointing. It may have been due to the characters, which just weren’t as inspired as those on “The Simpsons” – Bender, the crass robot, always felt like he was sort of being crammed down viewers’ throats as a cult character, a tin-plated Bart Simpson of sorts.

So the show got cancelled, but, as the title sequence notes in “Futurama: Bender’s Big Score,” It Just Won’t Stay Dead! “Bender’s Big Score,” a four-episode movie, was released earlier this year on DVD, and Comedy Central will present the whole thing with the added bonus of lots of commercials on Sunday.

The thing parodies time-travel movies that invariably get mired down in their paradoxical illogic. But first, Groening takes a shot at Fox for canceling his show – it’s announced that those responsible were fired, beaten up and killed, then ground into a fine pink powder which doesn’t actually seem to do anything.

Anyway, a group of nudists called the Scammers, through a series of spam Emails, take control of Earth. Then, using a tattoo on Fry’s butt that has a code that enacts time travel –

Leela: What’s the secrets of time travel doing on Fry’s ass?

Fry: It was bound to be somewhere.

– they dispatch a newly compliant Bender to go back in time and rob the planet of all its historical riches (he returns with the Mona Lisa before da Vinci finished her face).

Meanwhile, Leela falls for a guy named Lars, much to Fry’s chagrin. And, employing the time machine, a number of different Benders and a couple of Fry’s are created. “Jeez, this is confusing – and I’m sure it’s going to get a lot more confusing,” says a Bender back in the year 2000, just before he destroys a cache of Florida election ballots for Al Gore. (Gore turns up in the climactic battle sequence, exulting, “Finally! I get to save the Earth with deadly lasers instead of deadly slide shows!”)

“Bender’s Big Score” is funny enough to keep you watching but not quite funny enough to convince you that Fox made an egregious error when they cancelled the show. There are gags involving the word “handjob and the phrase “I’ve wiped Fry’s butt clean” that don’t mean what you think they would but still veer perilously close to being single entendres. And then, there’s this exchange on a Nude Beach Planet:

Bender: You know, it’s funny.

Fry: What?

Bender: Your wiener.

Ah, not that funny. But at least Fry is able to put things in perspective when, the planet impoverished but the Scammers stripped of their time machine, he declares, “The present may stink, but at least we can look forward to a better yesterday!”

– “Futurama: Bender’s Big Score:” 8 p.m. and midnight Sunday, Comedy Central.

(Oh, and the headline is a line from the film that I found amusing.)