The “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” movie is the first feature-length adaptation drawn from the Cartoon Network’s popular late-night slate, Adult Swim. Not unlike other shows that air at the same time, the four seasons of “Aqua Teen” have featured perfunctory animation, characters that are impudently misshapen in body and mind, and a mix of total weirdness and conversational casualness. At 12 or so minutes apiece, the loopy episodes make for strangely addictive comedy packets for the droopy-eyed midnight channel surfer.

Creators Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro have directed the movie, and they preserve the show’s ludicrous plotting and inimitable cast of characters. As in the show, monster-and-robot-ridden adventures ensnare three feckless suburban roommates who are all talking food products: Master Shake, a brainlessly hedonistic and pompous milk shake; Frylock, a baritone box of fries who is responsible, educated, but, let’s face it, still living with Shake; and an adorable juvenile of indeterminate gender, Meatwad, the most precisely named character in cartoon history.

For better and for worse, the movie works out to around three episodes of material, expanded to 86 playfully shaggy-dog minutes, replete with matter-of-fact oddity and mayhem of the sort rarely seen outside animation. At its best — primarily the beginning and the end — “Aqua Teen” pushes its television source into a hilarious offhand absurdity and twisted logic that recalls Donald Barthelme’s postmodern short fiction. At other times, the writing is perilously thin and crude, indulging the stoner antics and repetitions that many scoff at as the show’s actual inspiration.

“Aqua Teen” opens with a hallucinogenic retelling of the fast-food trio’s origins, encompassing ancient Egypt, a gargantuan robotic rabbit, and noted time traveler Abraham Lincoln. What turns out to be Shake’s false embellishment proves only slightly more fanciful than the truth. Advancing, like the show, through the casual arrival of aliens and diabolical technology, the movie hinges on an infernal bipedal exercise-bot that plays dance music and stomps buildings, and a photo that depicts Frylock side-by-side with the evil Dr. Weird. (Something about “Aqua Teen,” perhaps the plot’s embrace of instantly malleable realities, demands list summaries.)

“Aqua Teen” the movie therefore recalls the earliest episodes of the show, when the incompetent fast-food trio was nominally a crime fighting “force” (if you will) against beasts unleashed by Dr. Weird in each episode’s opening. The evil doctor is one of the many ingenious repeat characters that make the show such fun and that figure in the movie’s haphazard plot: Among them are the trio’s human neighbor, Carl, a tank-top wearing yutz; moon-dwellers Ignignokt and Err and petulant spaceship denizens Oglethorpe and Emory; and even the chicken-mohawked Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past.

Contrary to street buzz (or the dauntingly bizarre cast list above), nothing about the movie should be inaccessible to non-fans. Anyone who appreciates Conan O’Brien’s comic menagerie or Homer Simpson’s lovably reliable brand of obtuse selfishness should find something to enjoy. Charmingly, all the aliens and robots are basically weirdos and dorks, and Messrs. Willis and Maiellaro know how to keep fresh their basic conceit of monsters in ordinary circumstances (which include references to Rush and Genesis). “Aqua Teen” is proudly set somewhere in New Jersey.

Take Dr. Weird, a wing-helmeted villain in the Hanna-Barbera tradition — except, that is, for his bloodthirsty perversity and equally perverse insistence on a cloak that just misses covering his nipples. Or the supreme visual joke of the “Mooninites” Ignignokt and Err, walking squares drawn with eight-bit computer graphics. Full of self-important menace, they’re about as mature as 12-year-old boys and just as stoked by flipping someone the bird (as they infamously did to the city of Boston earlier this year).

The movie also boasts the same fine vocal talents as the show, which is often erroneously knocked as half-baked technically. Dana Snyder’s sputtery Master Shake, all wheedling and empty threats, is a well-developed comic creation, a cartoon Buddy Hackett or Don Rickles. Mooninite Err and the Cybernetic Ghost (voiced by Messrs. Willis and Maiellaro, respectively) get a lot of mileage out of simple voice distortion. Oglethorpe (Andy Merrill) flourishes a choice Bavarian accent. And Mr. Willis’s home-fried Southern accent for Meatwad, a twist on typical baby cartoon animals, is still cute as a button.

The problem remains, however, that the movie is not the concentrated sketch that makes a typical episode. Again, it’s not entirely foreign material; you could even draw a straight line from the Hunger Force’s slobbish adventuring all the way back to Bugs Bunny’s slangy take on his cartoon world. But the old one-reelers also teach the valuable lesson that some truly loony tunes thrive only as shorts.