Bender Rodríguez
Bender Bending Rodríguez
| ||||||||||||
Character Information
|
Bender Bending Rodríguez, better known as Bender is a robot and is one of the main characters from Matt Groening's other series, Futurama. In Futurama he is voiced by John DiMaggio and plays the role of a comic anti-hero, and is described as an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler".
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 (Richard) 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. In the Simpsons Game, Bender will say dialouge such as 'Exterminate'. A reference to Doctor Who.
Role
Bender serves as a member of Hubert J. Farnsworth's delivery crew, being the chef for the often long trips through space, to deliver goods for Planet Express. He is one of Fry's closest friends, though the relationship is often one sided. Bender is a heavy drinker, smoker, and gambler and has been known as "pure evil". 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.
Bender is a robot built by Mom's Friendly Robot Company at its plant in Tijuana, Mexico, circa 2996. He is a Bending-Unit 22, serial number 2716057, and chassis number 1729. He weighs about two metric tons. He was created for the task of bending metal girders for the construction of suicide booths. Bender attended Bending State University, where he majored in Bending and minored in Robo-American studies. He was also a member of Epsilon Rho Rho ('ΕΡΡ' is shown as 'ERR' in the episode Mars University) (a.k.a. Robot House), a robot fraternity; here he gained notoriety for one night in which he chugged ten kegs of beer, streaked across campus, and stuffed fifty-eight people into a telephone booth. While different creation processes have been shown, David X. Cohen stated that the viewer has only been shown Bender emerging from the machine that created him, while what happened inside the machine was not revealed.[1]
As a state-of-the-art bending unit, he has bent some rather impressive objects. This includes enormous steel girders marked "UN-BENDABLE", the Professor's spine (both ways) and even a level brick wall. And he has shown incredible feats of strength, such as breaking through solid concrete walls, surviving incredible amounts of gunfire, pushing the Planet Express ship's exhaust to one side, managing to survive at the very bottom of the exact center of the Atlantic Ocean, and diving into magma.
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 ("Magnets screw up my inhibition unit," he explains). 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.
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 his first attempt, he creates a dinner for the crew that is so disgusting they gag, then tells them that the salt content is 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 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 expresses his mistake of baking prison-guards a cake thinking nutmeg was a natural human sleep-drug.
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, and many thousands of years in subterranean caverns under New York. 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.
Bender's constant drinking stems from the fact that he needs alcohol to power his fuel cells; the process generates waste gases and heat, which he often expels as a flaming belch. 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 rust 5 O' clock shadow. In addition to consuming alcohol for energy, he also has a nuclear pile, as seen in "Godfellas". When he is sufficiently frightened or sickened, bricks fall from his backside (a reference to the slang "shitting bricks"), as seen in "Space Pilot 3000", The Beast with a Billion Backs and "Bendin' in the Wind". 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. Unlike drinking alcohol for fuel, Bender tells Fry that he smokes cigars 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. 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.
In the second Anthology of Interest, Bender proclaims, "I mean, being a robot's great but we don't have emotions and sometimes that makes me very sad".[2] Bender can perform many functions that are often regarded as exclusive to humans, such as whistling, snoring, having bloodshot eyes, crying, feeling at the least physical attraction, being tickled, and dreaming. Despite these anthropomorphic characteristics, he can function in the vacuum of space, in the deep sea, or while submerged in lava for a short period. Bender is a classic narcissist, as seen in "The Farnsworth Parabox" when he falls in love with an alternate gold plated version of himself, stating that he has finally found someone "as great as me". In Bender's Big Score he converses with time-duplicates of himself under New New York in a limestone cavern for thousands of years because he is so in love with himself. 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.
Bender's family is rarely seen in the show. However, it is known that his mother was a mechanical robot manufacturing arm, and his grandmother was a bulldozer. On several occasions he meets with another bending unit of the same manufacturer, Flexo, who looks and sounds exactly like him except for an arbitrary metal goatee. He also claims to have an identical cousin named Buster. It is also revealed that Bender has a young son who he willingly sent to Robot Hell in exchange for a robot army provided by the Robot Devil in The Beast with a Billion Backs. He also has an Aunt Rita, a screw, however this is only mentioned in a dream-sequence of Leela's, and may not be true.
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 himself, 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". 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, flushing Leela's pet Nibblonian Nibbler down the toilet, stealing jewelry from Amy, and using Zoidberg in various get-rich-quick schemes, although it is probable he doesn't consider Dr Zoidberg a friend since in "Obsoletely Fabulous" Bender begged the 1X Robot to "save [his] friends...and Zoidberg." 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 Bueraucracy to recover his brain after Morgan Proctor downloaded it onto a disc and sent it away, Hermes Conrad subsequently risking his bureacratic 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, Leela responded with "despite those arguments, we're still going."
Bender is known for his catchphrase "Bite my shiny metal ass", which he uses nearly every episode throughout the series and sometimes varying the phrase. Bender also has the catchphrases "Boned" and "Cheese it!"
Bender's metallurgical composition is occasionally mentioned, and he has inconsistently claimed in various instances to be some combination of 30% Iron, 40% Titanium, 40% Lead, 40% Zinc, and 40% Dolomite (impossibly totaling 190% of his composite material). His titanium composition is confirmed in "A Head in the Polls", in which he sells his body during a titanium shortage. His dolomite composition is supported in "Jurassic Bark" when he survives a swim through a pool of magma, which the Professor suggested was only possible for objects made of this mineral (In the commentary for this episode, David X. Cohen points out that since Dolomite is a mineral, it could be comprised of the other pure metals in his body. However, excluding the Dolomite would still only bring the total composite down to 150%). In "A Pharaoh to Remember", Professor Farnsworth revealed that Bender has a .04% Nickel impurity. In further mathematically incorrect contrast to his metal components he is described as made from an osmium alloy, which would then be exceeding 40%. In Into the Wild Green Yonder, Bender claims to have 40% luck as well. Luck could coexist with his other concrete composite materials since it is immaterial, thus not adding to his previous inconsistency.
Due to complications in the episode "Roswell That Ends Well" Bender's head is 1055 years older than the rest of his body, and since "Bender's Big Score", Bender's age is possibly millions of years.
External links
- Bender at Wikipedia
- ↑ Cohen, David X. (2003). Futurama season 4 DVD commentary for the episode "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles" [DVD]. 20th Century Fox.
- ↑ http://www.imsdb.com/transcripts/Futurama-Anthology-Of-Interest-II.html
