Bender (Futurama)

Bender Bending Rodríguez
Futurama character
Bender drinking beer and smoking
First appearance	"Space Pilot 3000"
Voiced by	John DiMaggio
In-universe information
Species	Robot
Gender	Male
Occupation	Industrial Robot, Assistant Manager of Sales
Relatives	Son: Ben, Junior and Ben Rodríguez Twin: Flexo Uncle: Vladimir
Origin	Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico

Bender Bending Rodríguez (commonly known as Bender) is a fictional robot character in the animated television series Futurama. The character, designated in the series as Bending Unit 22, was created by series creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, and is voiced by John DiMaggio. The character fulfills a comic, anti-hero-type role in Futurama and is described in a fourth season episode by central character Leela as an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler".

According to the character's back-story, Bender was built in Mexico, with the other characters making reference to his "swarthy Latin charm" throughout the overall narrative. Viewers are informed, through the character's own testimony, of Bender's prejudice against non-robots and his dialogue often contains anti-human expressions, such as "kill all humans". Exceptions who are not subject to Bender's prejudicial attitude are those individuals on his "Do Not Kill" list, such as his best friend, Fry, Hermes, Amy, Leela and Dr. Zoidberg. However, Bender is also portrayed as a kind character, suggesting that he is not as belligerent as he claims, and this sentiment is also extended to human characters in the series.

Back-story

Bender, an industrial metalworking robot, was built in 2997 at Fábrica Robotica De La Madre, a manufacturing facility of Mom's Friendly Robot Company in Tijuana, Mexico. However, the story of his construction is a mystery. Although different creation processes have been shown, David X. Cohen has stated that the viewer has only been shown Bender emerging from the machine that created him, whilst what happened inside the machine has not yet been revealed. According to one version, suggested by a Hermes' flashback, and also by a reverse aging process shown in the "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles" episode, a newborn Bender possessed a baby-like body. In "Bendless Love", however, Bender is portrayed with a normal, adult-sized body in a flashback sequence conveying his memory of coming into existence. As Bender's memory contains an adult form, the episode's content suggests that the character might actually be recalling a transfer to an adult body, rather than the moment of creation. An alternative view, considered by some viewers as the most provocative, was seen in the episode "Rebirth", in which it is proposed that Bender is actually a cyborg reconstructed from adult stem cells.

Unlike other robots, Bender is mortal and, according to Professor Farnsworth's calculations, may have less than one billion years to live. Because of a manufacturing error that left Bender without a backup unit, Bender's memory cannot be transferred to another robot. After reporting that defect to his manufacturer, Bender barely escapes death from a guided missile and a robot death squad dispatched by Mom in order to eliminate him and effectively take the defective product off the market.

At the factory Bender was programmed for cold-bending structural steel and later attended Bending State University, where he majored in bending and minored in Robo-American studies. At the university he was a member of Epsilon Rho Rho, a robot fraternity, where he became something of a fraternity hero for his many shenanigans; one night he chugged an entire keg of beer, streaked across campus and stuffed fifty-eight people into a telephone booth, although Bender admits they were mostly children.

Before meeting Fry and Leela and joining Professor Farnsworth's delivery crew at Planet Express where Bender currently works as the assistant manager of sales, he had a job at the metalworking factory, bending steel girders for the construction of suicide booths. Ironically, Bender attempts suicide using one such booth after discovering the sinister purpose of the product of his labor.

Bender is Fry's housemate and one of his closest friends, though the relationship is often one-sided. In "Proposition Infinity", Bender's secret affair with Amy Wong leads to a referendum that approves legalization of robosexuality. In "The Bots and the Bees," he has a sexual encounter with a soda vending machine that leads to the birth of a son, whom he names Ben.

Character

Creation

The name Bender was chosen by series creator Matt Groening in homage to the character John Bender from The Breakfast Club.

The design for Bender's physical form went through multiple changes before reaching its final state. One of the decisions which Matt Groening found to be particularly difficult was whether Bender's head should be square or round. Initially he worked under the idea that all robots would have square heads in 3000; however, it was later decided that Bender's head should be round, a visual play on the idea that Bender is a "round peg in a square hole".

Voice

When casting for Futurama, Bender's voice was the most difficult to cast, in part because the show's creators had not yet decided what a robot should sound like. Because of this, every voice actor who auditioned, no matter for what character, was asked to also read for Bender. After about 300 auditions, series co-creator David X. Cohen even attempted to audition after being told he sounded like a robot. John DiMaggio was eventually chosen for the role after his second audition.

He originally auditioned using his Bender voice for the role of Professor Farnsworth and used a voice later used for URL the police robot for Bender. He describes the voice he got the part with as a combination of a sloppy drunk, Slim Pickens, and a character his college friend created named "Charlie the sausage-lover". Casting directors liked that he made the character sound like a drunk, rather than an automaton. DiMaggio has noted that he had difficulty singing as Bender in "Hell Is Other Robots" because he was forced to sing the harmony part in a low key.

Design

Bender is a high-tech robot; he is a unit from a series of bending machines manufactured by Mom's Friendly Robot Company. His design is based on a prototype developed by Professor Farnsworth over 75 years ago. Robots in that series are not androids, but nevertheless have features that are designed to resemble those of humans.

Bender's factory-set height is 5'-6" (little over 6' with antenna) In The Farnsworth Parabox, Bender states that he flipped a coin to decide his color, ending up with cool gray rather than gold. He has a body with a "shiny metal ass", two legs, two arms with three fingers each, a head with two replaceable eyes shaped like light-emitting diodes, and a mouth used for fuel intake and voice communication. In "Bender Gets Made", Bender says he also has a nose, but chooses not to wear it. Bender's human-like character is also reinforced by his ability to display many traits that are often regarded as exclusive to humans, such as whistling, snoring, having bloodshot eyes, crying, feeling at the least physical attraction, being tickled, dreaming, and belching.

Other bending units of the same model as Bender, such as Flexo, share the same hardware design, but differ in terms of their personality and behavior. For example, Flexo shows personality traits similar to those of Bender but is not quite as "evil" as Bender. In the episode Mother's Day, Leela looks through a simulation of a bending unit's sight, which targets potential rubes and then denotes a plan to rob them and leave them in a ditch, showing that all bending robots are thieving and amoral by design. However Billy West is helpful and kind, though this unit lives as a farmer on the Moon and insists on not being a bending unit.

Bender's serial number is 2716057, which can be expressed as the sum of 2 cubes.

Functions

Bender was designed specifically for the relatively simple task of bending metal shapes. Despite that, Bender is a technologically advanced robot with numerous features superfluous to his original purpose. The scope of Bender's functionality is immense and impressive as he often acts as if he was a multifunctional gadget rather than a simple, single-task bending machine. Bender's body parts host a number of input/output devices. Thus, his head has a data socket and remotely operated volume control. His body has a socket for a microphone jack, a dual-socket power receptacle, a reset button, a kill switch, and a self-destruct button. Having the hardware-based self-destruct control on the body, rather than in his software, prevented Bender from committing suicide in A Head in the Polls when he pawned his body for cash, grew desperate without it and wanted to kill himself.

Bender is capable of disassembling and reassembling his body at will and operating each detached body part individually and remotely, presumably by using his transmitter and antenna to send wireless signals.

Bender uses his chest cavity as a locker, which seems to store much more than is physically possible; it is often used to store heads in jars, small children, alcohol, money, loot, and the world's last darkroom. In The Route of All Evil, the cavity was also used as a boil kettle, hopback and fermentation tank to produce home-made beer. On inspection of his body, it appears to be empty, though devices like the F-Ray reveal that, despite appearing hollow, Bender's body contains gears and other robotic components.

Having a computer in his head, Bender can perform calculations, but he admits that he is a poor calculator.

Build

As a bending unit, Bender is shown to have extraordinary strength, even bending enormous steel girders marked "UNBENDABLE" in Bendless Love. Bender is also shown to be extremely durable and strong, as he is able to break through solid objects, survive gunfire and explosions, function underwater or in the vacuum of space, and sustain extremely high temperatures

Even when Bender's body is seemingly destroyed or completely detached from his head, it has no effect on Bender's ability to think and communicate, indicating that his electronic brain is located in his head. Bender's hardware is controlled by a factory-loaded operating system, which reboots upon incidental shutdown and automatically adjusts its settings to the environment detected at the time of rebooting. For example, in The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz, when Bender reboots, his visual sensor detects a colony of penguins and his boot loader reinitializes him with a penguin language and penguin-like behavior.

Bender is equipped with computer data storage with capacity in excess of 50 TB.

Source of energy

Bender operates on alcohol-based fuel, which is converted into electrical energy strong enough to power not only Bender himself, but also small household appliances plugged into his power receptacle. Having low alcohol level in alcohol-fueled robots made by Mom's Friendly Robot Company impedes production of electricity needed for them to function. So when Bender stops drinking and sobers up, in human terms, he becomes increasingly drunk-like and dysfunctional, and grows a red beard of rust.

Due to imperfect design by Professor Farnsworth, the energy conversion process inside Bender's body produces inordinate amount of waste gases and heat. Bender can expel these products from his rear end or, more often, as a flaming belch.

Bender also has a nuclear reactor, as seen in "Godfellas". However its location inside Bender's body and purpose are not specified.

Personality

Bender often shows signs of sociopath-like behavior, as he is a pathological liar and rarely shows empathy towards anyone. He has a mostly voluntary morality and constantly steals, ranging from the petty theft of wallets to much higher crimes like kidnapping Jay Leno's head due to their long feud and stealing Fry's blood. He also once stole Amy's earrings while giving her a hug. It was shown in "Roswell That Ends Well" that even in a disassembled state, his individual limbs carry on attempting to steal anything in proximity; the hand on his dismembered arm steals a wallet right out of a scientist's pocket before becoming inactive again.

Bender is shown throughout the series as having a secret desire to be a folk musician that only manifests itself when a magnet is placed on/near his head. This desire is finally fulfilled in the episode "Bendin' in the Wind": an accident involving a giant can opener leaves Bender with a severely ripped-open chest and paralyzed from the neck down and an encounter with Beck during his hospitalization leads to him becoming his lead washboard and the two teaming for a musical tour that turns Bender into a folk hero for other broken robots, only for his career to end when he recovers from the damage.

Bender is also fascinated with cooking, being the Planet Express ship's chef, though he is shown to have no sense of actual human taste, in fact, his early dinners were so horrible that even the literally omnivorous Zoidberg couldn't eat it. In his first attempt, he creates a dinner for the crew that is so over-salted they all gag (which is aggravated further when their drinks turn out to be salt water, or "Salt with water in it," as Bender puts it), then tells them that the food was fine since the salt content was 10% below a lethal dose (Dr. Zoidberg remarks that he "shouldn't have had seconds"). In "The Problem with Popplers", he creates dinner consisting of nothing but capers and baking soda and mistakenly expresses the belief that humans eat rocks. He seems to improve his cooking skills over the series, cooking a lavish cake for Nibbler's birthday party and beating Elzar for the title of Iron Cook (though he uses a potion called "The Essence of Pure Flavor," consisting of water and a generous portion of LSD to make the judges hallucinate that his food tastes good). In Into the Wild Green Yonder he mistakingly bakes prison guards a cake with nutmeg thinking it was a natural human sleep drug, before being corrected by Amy that nutmeg is in fact a baking drug.

Bender also states, "I've always wanted to break into gooning." in the episode, "Bender Gets Made."

As a robot, Bender possesses an incredible amount of patience. In the series and movies, he is shown to wait over a thousand years in sand after his head is lost during a trip back in time to 1947, as well as many thousands of years in subterranean caverns under New York (Although on this occasion he was also in the presence of multiple alternate versions of himself that had previously made the same 'trip'). Despite the long wait, it is suggested that Bender does not power down, apparently enjoying his own company so much that he does not consider it necessary. However, in one episode, he shows next to no patience as a one-time joke.

Although consumption of booze is necessitated by Bender's design and should not be generally viewed as a vice for alcohol-fueled robots, he apparently drinks far more than he needs for energy conversion. Bender's excessive drinking contributes to his characterization as an alcoholic ("Hell Is Other Robots" reveals that robots can function equally well on mineral oil instead of alcohol, also contributing to the perception of Bender's alcohol use as a vice). If Bender is deprived of alcohol, for instance during periods of depression, he ceases to function properly and shows signs similar to human drunkenness, including developing a rusty 5 o'clock shadow. As noted above, his disembodied head has survived for millennia with, presumably, no source of alcohol, so it may be that, when a mere head, Bender neither requires alcohol nor suffers from its absence.

When he is sufficiently frightened or sickened, bricks fall from his backside (a reference to the slang "shitting bricks"). When sufficiently fascinated by something, he may pull out a camera and snap a picture, adding the catchphrase "Neat!" In addition to drinking, Bender also has an affinity for cigars, which he lights up with a lighter built into his finger, although in Decision 3012 he uses a Zippo. Unlike drinking alcohol for fuel, Bender tells Fry that he smokes cigars simply because they "make (him) look cool."

Despite being a robot, Bender has been seen to show emotion on many occasions, going so far as to shed a tear in "Crimes of the Hot", to the astonishment of Fry. One of the series' running jokes revolves around Bender having emotions, while technically he should be unfeeling. Bender is seemingly unaware of his emotions, stating in the episode "Anthology of Interest II" "I mean, being a robot's great but we don't have emotions and sometimes that makes me very sad". In his very first appearance, he tries to commit suicide via a suicide booth out of guilt for having unknowingly participated in creating suicide booths. Bender has also been known to be nonchalant to the point of appearing both uncaring and incredibly brave, even when faced with life-threatening situations.

Bender is a classic narcissist. He considers himself flawless, a "towering inferno of physical perfection", and frequently refers to himself in the first and third person. In "The Farnsworth Parabox" Bender seemingly falls in love with an alternate gold-plated version of himself, stating that he has finally found someone "as great as me". Even his personal email address, bender@ilovebender.com, reflects his self-absorbed nature.

Despite these human characteristics, Bender has no detectable soul, as seen in "Obsoletely Fabulous" when he passes through a 'soul detector' without an alarm sounding. But in "Ghost in the Machines", due to his suicide, Bender is turned to a ghost who can't interact with people and can possesses machines: he used this ability in order to "scare Fry to death" when he makes a deal with Robot Devil to get a new body. Though never addressed, an explanation to this seeming contradiction can be found on the fact that, as noticed by the Robot Devil himself, Bender's spirit existes on a universal wireless that allowed him to travel in the physical world while trapped in a Limbo-like loop. The fact that Bender's ghost is a discorporial program rather than a soul is further supported by the fact that the "spirits" on The Honking, where actually mere holograms of an old computer folder.

Bender's relationships with the crew of Planet Express vary from person to person, although he treats nearly all biological organisms with disdain. The only one of his friends who he has openly shown affection for is Fry, his best friend and roommate. "Of all the friends I've had, (he is) the first." Although he is verbally and physically abusive towards Fry and considers him to be vastly inferior to him, he has been shown to care for him a great deal. In "Jurassic Bark" he states that he loves Fry "the way a human loves a dog" and in "I Second That Emotion" when Bender gets jealous of Nibbler and flushes him down the toilet, a distraught Leela asks how he would feel if she did the same to Fry, effectively describing Fry as Bender's pet (Bender responds with an apathetic "Only one way to find out."). He routinely takes advantage of his friends, framing them for crimes, robbing them, stealing Fry's blood on more than one occasion, stealing Fry's power of attorney, using Fry's body to smash open a window, stealing jewelry from Amy, as well as using Zoidberg in various get-rich-quick schemes, although it is probable he does not consider Dr. Zoidberg a friend since in "Obsoletely Fabulous" Bender begged the 1X Robot to "save (his) friends and Zoidberg" (Though it is seen that he helps Zoidberg from time to time, as seen in "That's Lobstertainment!"). He even betrays Leela to Zapp when she becomes a wanted criminal out of jealousy of her steadily growing rap sheet in Into the Wild Green Yonder, only to break her out of prison to make sure his own rap sheet is longer than hers. Although he regularly frustrates the group, they have demonstrated a certain affection for him as well; during "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back" the entire crew travelled to the Central Bureaucracy to recover his brain after Morgan Proctor downloaded it onto a disc and sent it away, Hermes Conrad subsequently risking his bureaucratic license to locate the disc with Bender's brain on it by sorting the entire pile in just under four minutes. In this episode, when Amy asked why they had to fix him, after being met with a brief period of uncertain silence, Leela responded with "Those arguments aside, we're still going." Amy and Bender even dated for a time in "Proposition Infinity", the relationship becoming so serious that Bender proposed to Amy and participated in a campaign to legalise human/robot marriage, although the relationship ended because Bender realised that marriage would require monogomy.

Despite his often criminal and immoral attitude, Bender is not free of a soft side; he can feel guilt and remorse over his actions if he goes too far, even for his patterns, indicating that he is not selfish or unkind as he appears to be. In fact, Bender intends to commit suicide in Space Pilot 3000 due to his role in the creation of suicide booths. In Bendless Love, Bender intends to get rid of Flexo in order to gain the love of a fembot (Angelyne), but when the latter gets stuck under a gigantic steel girder, Angelyne shows sorrow for him. Bender decides that her happiness is more important than his own and he ends up saving Flexo. Also in Jurassic Bark, when Bender becomes jealous of Fry's petrified dog, Seymour, he decides to throw him in magma. But when he realizes how Fry becomes deeply hurt, Bender apologizes for his behavior and in the finale, he saves the dog. In Godfellas, he becomes a god of a microscopic alien race (the shrimpkins) and abuses his title by commanding them to produce beer for him. But when his abuse causes their death, Bender cries in mourning and remorse.

Reception and cultural influence

File:Matt Groening with Bender by Gage Skidmore.jpg

Groening presenting a Bender-shaped DVD box set.

Bender (being the show's breakout character) has made several cameos in different episodes of The Simpsons, another series by Matt Groening. Within The Simpsons, Bender has appeared in episodes "Future-Drama", "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade", "Missionary: Impossible" and "Replaceable You." He also appears as one of the enemies, along with Doctor Zoidberg, in The Simpsons Game. Bender has cameo appearances in several Family Guy episodes. In "Blue Harvest" he can be seen in a cantina, and in "The Splendid Source", he is one of the people who had heard and told a dirty joke whose original author Peter, Joe and Quagmire are seeking.

In 2008, Bender took second place behind the Terminator in a poll for the "Baddest Movie Robot" on Techradar.com.

The song "Bend It Like Bender!" from the Devin Townsend Project album Addicted, is a direct reference to Bender and contains the quote, "Game's over, losers! I have all the money!"

One Bender Bending Rodríguez was elected to the 2010 school board in Washington DC. A team of hackers from the University of Michigan got Bender elected as a write-in candidate who stole every vote from the real candidates.

See also

• Tilden's Laws of Robotics