Bender (Futurama)

Did You Know?

• Bender's name was chosen by Matt Groening as an homage to John Bender, a character in The Breakfast Club.
• When casting for Futurama, Bender's voice was the most difficult to cast, with about 300 auditions before John DiMaggio was chosen after his second audition.

Character biography

Bender was built in 2996 at Fábrica Robótica De La Madre, a facility of Mom's Friendly Robot Company in Tijuana, Mexico. The details of his creation remain uncertain; different episodes show him emerging from a machine with either a baby-like body or an adult-sized body, and series co-creator David X. Cohen has stated that what happens inside the machine has not been revealed. Unlike most robots, Bender is mortal, with Professor Farnsworth calculating he may have less than one billion years to live. A manufacturing error left him without a backup unit, preventing his memory from being transferred to another body. After reporting this defect, he narrowly escaped a guided missile and a robot death squad sent by Mom to eliminate the defective product. 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 the robot fraternity Epsilon Rho Rho and became known for chugging a keg of beer, streaking across campus, and stuffing 58 people into a telephone booth. Before joining Planet Express as assistant manager of sales and company chef, he worked bending steel girders for suicide booths.

Design

Bender's factory-set height is just over 6 ft tall with his antenna and just under without it. He chose his color, foghat gray, by flipping a coin rather than gold. His body includes a "shiny metal ass," two legs, and two "Extens-o-matic" arms—the right called "Gropie" and the left "Cheatie"—each with three fingers. His head has two replaceable LED-shaped eyes and a mouth used for fuel intake and voice communication. Bender claims to have a nose but chooses not to wear it. He displays human-like behaviors such as whistling, snoring, crying, feeling physical attraction, being tickled, dreaming, and belching. Other bending units of the same model, like Flexo, share the same hardware design but differ in personality; Flexo is similar but not as "evil." A simulation of a bending unit's sight in one episode implies that all bending robots are somewhat prone to theft and amoral by design, though another unit named Billy West is helpful and kind. Bender's serial number 2716057 can be expressed as the sum of two cubes (952³ + (-951)³), a property shared with Flexo's serial number 3370318 (119³ + 119³). His designation 1729 is a taxicab number.

Personality

Bender exhibits sociopathic behavior, being a pathological liar who rarely shows empathy. His catchphrase to bothersome people is "Bite my shiny metal ass!" He engages in constant theft, from petty wallet stealing to crimes like kidnapping Jay Leno's head and stealing Fry's blood and kidney. Even his dismembered limbs continue to steal, as shown when his hand takes a wallet from a scientist's pocket. Bender has a secret desire to be a folk musician that only manifests when a magnet is placed near his head; this is fulfilled in one episode after an accident leaves him paralyzed, leading him to become a lead washboard player on tour with Beck until he recovers. He is also fascinated with cooking, serving as chef of the Planet Express Ship despite having no sense of taste. His early dinners were so over-salted that even the omnivorous Zoidberg could not eat them, and he once served a meal of capers and baking soda, believing humans eat rocks. His cooking improves over time, as he bakes a lavish cake for Nibbler's birthday and beats Elzar for the title of Iron Cook using a potion called "The Essence of Pure Flavor," which contains water and LSD to make judges hallucinate. In one film, he mistakenly bakes prison guards a cake with nutmeg, thinking it was a natural sleep drug.

Reception and cultural influence

In 2008, Bender placed second behind the Terminator in a TechRadar poll for "Baddest Movie Robot." The song "Bend It Like Bender!" from the Devin Townsend Project album Addicted references Bender, with a lyric quoting his line "Game's over, losers! I have all the money!" from the episode "A Head in the Polls." The first two Android versions were codenamed Astro Boy and Bender by Google. Bender has made several cameo appearances in The Simpsons, including episodes "Future-Drama," "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade," "Missionary: Impossible," and "Replaceable You." He also appears with Professor Farnsworth and Fry in Matt Groening's series Disenchantment, in the episode "Dreamland Falls" as a hologram from a crystal ball. In the Simpsons-Futurama crossover "Simpsorama," Bender travels back in time to kill Homer Simpson but befriends him instead; after the crisis, he goes into shutdown mode in the Simpsons' basement, where his empty body cavity is later used to store cash. Bender makes background cameos in The Simpsons episodes "My Fare Lady" and "Simprovised," and appears in the TV show Mad in a parody segment. He is also an enemy in The Simpsons Game, and his head appears in the background of the "Clockwork Factory" level in Kingdom Rush: Vengeance.