Bender (Futurama)

Template:Futurama character Template:TV-in-universe Bender, full name Bender Bending Rodríguez, designated Bending Unit 22, is a fictional robot character in the animated television series Futurama. He is voiced by John DiMaggio. In the series, Bender plays the role of a comic anti-hero, and is described by Turanga Leela as an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler" and by himself as possessing a "swarthy Latin charm".

Casting

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 different voice for Bender.

Origin

In the series, Bender is a robot built by Mom's Friendly Robot Company at its plant in Tijuana, Mexico ("America's Heartland"), circa 2998. He is a Bending-Unit 22, serial number 2716057, chassis number 1729. He was created for the task of bending metal girders for the construction of suicide booths. He swears, fights, argues, smokes cigars, drinks, and gambles. A petty thief, Bender steals other peoples' wallets, watches and other valuables at any opportunity. He claims to have no emotions; but occasionally he is portrayed as having them, usually for comedic purpose. The series provides contradictory information about Bender's origin. In several episodes, he is portrayed as having been assembled in a factory in his current form only a few years prior to the start of the series. This is supported by the appearance of Flexo, another Bending-Unit 22 robot identical to Bender with the addition of a goatee. However, in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", he is shown as going through growth and development like an animal and said to have "robo- or RNA", a DNA equivalent. In the DVD commentaries, David X. Cohen states that the viewer only sees a full-sized Bender emerge from the machine that built him, while what happened inside the machine was not revealed. His full name is revealed to be Bender Bending Rodríguez in "The Luck of the Fryrish", and in "The Cyber House Rules" the "Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium" is renamed the "Bender B. Rodríguez Orphanarium" after him. Bender was educated at Bending State University (with a major in Bending and a minor in Robo-American Studies) and was a member of the Robot House fraternity, Epsilon Rho Rho, as disclosed in "Mars University".

Hardware

There is very little consistency in Bender's hardware throughout the series, and his internal workings vary as required for the story or for comic effect. In "Fry and the Slurm Factory", an F-ray scan reveals that his brain is a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor (the same CPU used in the first Atari, Apple, and Commodore home computers). Like all robots in the series, Bender has square pupils whereas the biological characters have round pupils. In "Bender's Big Score" his pupils turn to spirals after he downloads the obedience virus created by the scammers, who tricked him with his love for porn.

Bender uses alcohol as fuel to recharge his fuel cells, and produces greenhouse gases as a result in the form of fire whenever he belches or sometimes farts. He suffers symptoms of inebriation when he stops drinking, becoming disoriented and developing rust around his mouth, the robot equivalent of a five o'clock shadow. While alcohol is his primary fuel source, he is also capable of processing mineral oil, dark matter, and photons (solar energy). He is also equipped with a nuclear pile as revealed in "Godfellas". When scared, or after consuming bad "food," he will sometimes defecate bricks, as seen in episodes "Space Pilot 3000" and "Bendin' in the wind"

His "extenso-matic" limbs are extendable, detachable, retractable, and capable of functioning independently of his body. Bender can also retract his limbs and head into his chest cavity. In most cases, his eyes are shown to be extending cylinders with rounded ends (resembling light bulbs or vacuum tubes), but are generally replaceable as necessary for the plot. The housing for Bender's eyes is detachable, and function like binoculars, as Fry did in "Roswell That Ends Well". If he needs to close his eyes, a screen can be lowered from within the housing to shade them.

Like his limbs, Bender's head is detachable and retractable, appears to be attached to a thin, maneuverable wire, as seen in "Insane in the Mainframe," and can continue to function when not attached to his body, even for 1,000 years in "Roswell That Ends Well". This clashes with Bender's past breakdowns into a delusional state with a 5 o’clock shadow when he goes without alcohol in a matter of days, such as "I, Roommate" and "Obsoletely Fabulous"; but since Bender's head was detached from his body, he must have not needed a lot of energy, or had just turned off to save power. Bender's head is capable of various functions depending on the situation. It has been seen functioning as an audio tape recorder, answering machine, CD player, film projector, camera, martini shaker, a bell, credit card terminal, and a can of spray paint. The camera aspect of his head is a consistent feature, which he uses in multiple episodes, often zooming in on items, people or robots of interest. In other episodes, he is seen using a small purple camera. When he sees something interesting, he says "neat" and takes a picture. On top of his head is a retractable antenna, which is multi-functional and can work as a radio transmitter, a remote control receiver, sword, toilet flusher, or laser light show generator, or an all purpose push button. In "I, Roommate", Bender's antenna interferes with satellite signals and cell phone signals, the latter capable of picking up his thoughts via antenna. Bender is sensitive about it, seemingly equating it with a human penis, which, oddly enough, is what it becomes in "Anthology of Interest II".

Bender's chest cavity uses the fictional idea of hammerspace, as Bender frequently pulls and stores objects within it that are far bigger than what physics would normally allow. In the episode, "The Route of All Evil", Bender ferments 5 gal. 6 oz. worth of ale in his chest cavity. Also, in "I Second That Emotion", Bender uses his chest cavity as an oven to bake a four-layer cake for Nibbler's birthday.

Bender claims to have a total of eight senses, including four of the five classical senses and "smision" (A possible combination of smell and eyesight); however, he lacks the regular sense of taste. Aside from his own faculties, Bender has several external devices which he uses in the series including the following: "gaydar", a purple box with pushbuttons and a radar; a built-in but unreliable "cheating unit" that calculates odds; and a hilarity unit. Bender's computational abilities are self-admittedly poor, which he reveals in "The Cyber House Rules". This seems unlikely, since he was able to easily calculate that Flexo's serial number was the sum of two cubes in a few seconds in "Lesser of Two Evils". Based on Bender's performances in the early parts of both "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" and "Fear of a Bot Planet" its more likely that he's just too lazy to compute under most circumstances.

Bender seems to have four different buttons for deleting information which are located on his shoulder, chest, antenna, and baseplate. Bender also has a "Patriotism Circuit" which forces him, when signaled, to fight and possibly give his life in times of crisis. Zapp Brannigan has a device that can trigger Bender's 'Patriotism Circuit', (as shown in "When Aliens Attack") and uses it to draft him into Earth's defense force.

Magnets wreak havoc with Bender's inhibition circuit, causing him to act in bizarre ways and sing folk music. This quirk is first seen in "The Series Has Landed," triggered first when Fry sticks a souvenir magnet from the moon on Bender's head, and later when he is picked up by the Planet Express ship's electromagnet.

According to information from various episodes, Bender is composed of 30% iron ("30% Iron Chef"), 40% zinc ("Fry and the Slurm Factory"), 40% titanium ("A Head in the Polls"), 40% dolomite ("Jurassic Bark") and an unknown quantity of osmium in alloy with the iron with a 0.04% nickel impurity ("A Pharaoh to Remember"); and he also claims to be 40% lead in the Futurama video game. No explanation for the total of 190.04% is offered in the series (as the claims of Bender's composition are generally used for the sake of humor), though it is pointed out in the DVD commentary. David X. Cohen at one point suggests that the various substances may overlap as compounds. Bender's aforementioned calculation skills, or lack thereof, may also be a factor. In "Raging Bender", it is revealed that Bender weighed 525lb(~238 kg) even though Fry and Leela are shown carrying him away at the end of the episode.

In "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", Bender's self-destruct code is "1A 2B 3", a reference to the destruct codes on Star Trek. This blew up only Bender's head, leaving his mouth intact. Bender and Flexo have both shown incredible resistance to severe physical abuse. They have withstood crushing, can openers, explosives, fire, water, guns, extreme temperatures, and even supermagnets. Bender has been shown to operate in vacuum of space and the crushing pressure at the bottom of the sea. Despite this, Bender is still easily overpowered by the Robot Devil, who is able to knock him out with a single hit with his trident (seen in "Hell is Other Robots"), and is able to kick him around with ease. In the episode "A Pharaoh to Remember", it shows Bender transform his legs into roller skates.

Software

Bender initially could not act against his programming and was deprogrammed after being subjected to an electric current. It is unknown whether this caused other habits, such as smoking or stealing. In the episode "Roswell That Ends Well", parts of Bender's brain, in the form of computer chips was mistaken as food and was eaten by Fry's grandfather, Enos Fry, yet he functions normally without it throughout the episode. In "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back", Bender's personality is stored on a floppy disk, and without it, he is limited to bending girders and saying "I am Bender. Please insert girder."

When Bender is reactivated, he automatically takes on the traits of the first organism he encounters. In "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz", Bender reboots as a penguin after being attacked by a killer whale.

Celebrity encounters

During several episodes, Bender has had encounters with celebrities. In "Bendin' in the Wind", he met Beck who offered to let him to join his band. In "I Dated a Robot", Bender falls in love with Lucy Liu and she is later seen again with Bender in episode "Love and Rocket". In "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV", it is revealed that Bender has a feud with Jay Leno. In "Xmas Story", Conan O'Brien was doing a comedy routine about Y2K that Bender ruined by saying that Y2K was solved 900 years ago. In The Lesser of Two Evils Bender meets Bob Barker with the rest of the Planet Express crew when they are looking for Flexo.

In Bender's Big Score, when sent back to the year 2000 to assassinate Fry, Bender unwittingly comes across a Philip J. Fry who works as an assistant for Al Gore's presidential campaign in Florida. In his attempt to kill him, he destroys a pile of Gore's votes, leading George W. Bush to win the election. Twelve years later, when he spots Fry coming out of a boat from the North Pole, he hails a hybrid taxi (driven by Al Gore) to go after him.

Production

• Voice actor John DiMaggio has noted that he has difficulty singing as Bender in "Hell Is Other Robots" because he was forced to sing the harmony part in a low key.
• Bender's apartment number is 00100100, which when translated into ASCII, is the $ symbol.
• The original proposed name for Bender was URL, which was to be pronounced "Earl". It was reused as the name of the smooth-talking robot police officer, also voiced by DiMaggio.
• Besides also being a term for Binge drinking, as well as his primary function(bending girders), Bender's name was also most likely derived from Eando Binder (pronounced with a short 'i') authors of the first and highly influential I, Robot story. His name may also have been John Bender, a character in the film The Breakfast Club, who Bender was based on, as stated by Groening in a DVD commentary.

Alternative appearances

• Bender has made several cameos in The Simpsons. In the episode Future-Drama he appears besides Homer and Bart,and says "All right! You guys are my new best friends". Homer says "You wish, loser!" and throws him out of the car. Bender also appears in The Simpsons episode Bart vs. Lisa vs. The Third Grade. When Bart is sleep deprived in class, he hallucinates his class mates turning into characters from TV shows he had been staying up watching, one of which is Bender. He also appears in The Simpsons episode Missionary: Impossible as a phone operator. He appears as one of the enemies in The Simpsons Game along with Zoidberg.
• Bender appears in the Family Guy episode Blue Harvest in the background at the Mos Eisley cantina.