Let's just get this out of the way right off the bat: I kinda sorta totally have a thing for Rocket Raccoon. Have done ever since I stumbled across his character bio in an old Marvel Character Encyclopedia, way back in the late 1980s. As a young teen coming of age in the pre-internet, pre-furry-fandom era, I pretty much took what I could get (heck, my first, innocent kid-crush was probably Ranger Rick... hmm). Still, you could do way worse than Rocket. He's dashing, if you think fur and stripy tails are dashing. He's charming and fun. He's a little gritty, but with a good sense of humor, and even better he's always having awesome space adventures. How could I not swoon a little?

So, when Marvel announced that a 'Guardians of the Galaxy' movie was in the works, and that Rocket would be a major character in it, I think my heart actually skipped a beat. Sure, Cynical Adult Me was worried that they'd find a way to screw it up, but Teen Kid Me couldn't stop grinning from ear to ear. Even better, they'd turned the controls over to James Gunn, the quirky talent behind 'Slither' and 'Super', and whose sensibilities (and sense of humor) seemed like a perfect fit. My anxiety as I counted the weeks up to, and then through, production was less "it's gonna suck" and more "please oh gods of the cinematic universe, just let this one actually happen. Let this movie actually exist. I won't care if it's not a masterpiece or anything, I just need to know that a fun movie with a talking, gun-slinging raccoon (swoon), a sentient tree, and an army of oddball aliens, rogues and thieves can even happen anymore."

So, without any spoilers or anything, was it worth the wait? Does 'Guardians' deliver?

Hell yes, it does. I can honestly say that it not only meets expectations, it exceeds them. This isn't just a quirky, irreverently fun sci-fi romp, it's a genuinely terrific movie, stuffed almost to overflowing with great characters, laugh-out-loud humor, tear-jerking sentiment, lavish spectacle and above all a whiz-bang, kid-in-a-candy-store sense of wonder. There's an infectious feeling of joy running through 'Guardians', a deep fondness not only for the characters and their colorful alien worlds, but for the possibilities of movie-making itself. There's never a moment that doesn't feel like Gunn and his crew weren't having a total blast telling this story.

Even better, the story itself, with all of its imaginative, fast-paced detours into otherworldly vistas and candy-colored cityscapes, is compulsively entertaining. You'll want to know what happens next, and you'll relish every moment you get to spend with the film's charmingly smart-assed group of semi-heroes. It's not that the flick aggressively demands to be loved... it's that it goes out of its way to actually earn your affection. In an era of over-directed, overblown event movies, it's beyond refreshing to come across something that seems so unfashionably retro in its willingness to simply trust the audience. In one breezy sci-fi burst, Gunn and company have managed to deliver in spades what the bloated, combined might of the 'Star Wars' prequels and the new 'Star Trek' franchise together could not: a good old-fashioned sense of fun.

(And yes, Rocket is completely, totally, lovably awesome. Double-swoon.)