Bender Bending Rodríguez (designated in-universe as Bending Unit 22, unit number 1,729, serial number 2716057) is a fictional character and one of the main protagonists in the animated television series Futurama. He was conceived by the series' creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, and is voiced by John DiMaggio. He fulfills a comical, antihero-type role in the show, and is described by fellow character Leela as an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler".
According to the character's backstory, Bender was built in Tijuana, Mexico (the other characters refer to his "swarthy Latin charm"), his name a reference to bending in Mexican maquiladoras.
Bender is known for being prejudiced against non-robots. For example, one of his signature expressions is "kill all humans". Those who are not subject to Bender's prejudicial attitude are documented on his "Do Not Kill" list, which includes only his best friend Philip J. Fry and his colleague Hermes Conrad (added after the episode "Lethal Inspection").
Character biography
Bender, a high-tech industrial metalworking robot, was built in 2996 at Fábrica Robótica De La Madre (Spanish: "Mom's Robot Factory"), a manufacturing facility of Mom's Friendly Robot Company in Tijuana, Mexico. However, the story of his construction remains a mystery. Although different creation processes have been shown, Cohen has stated that the viewer has only been shown Bender emerging from the machine that created him, while what happened inside the machine has not yet been revealed. According to one version, suggested by Hermes' flashback,
Unlike most 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 or uploaded to another robot body. 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. Bender had a job at the metalworking factory, bending steel girders for the construction of suicide booths.
Bender has an apartment (00100100, the ASCII code for the dollar sign "$") in the "Robot Arms Apts." building, where he eventually invites his best friend and coworker, Fry, to live with him. Although the pair enjoy living together, Bender is sometimes portrayed as manipulating his guileless friend. In the series' early episodes, Bender is shown preferring to occupy smaller areas of their apartment, like the closet, referring to them as "cozy", although in later episodes he is shown to have his own individual bedroom, like Fry.
Throughout the series, he enters many romantic relationships of varying duration, and is commonly referred to as a womanizer by his friends. He does not seem to discriminate between human women and their robot or "fem-bot" counterparts, and is shown actively pursuing both. Likewise, his taste in fem-bot partners does not seem to be affected by the fem-bot's height or weight, and he is shown numerous times chasing fem-bots of all builds. In "Proposition Infinity", Bender's secret affair with coworker Amy Wong leads to a referendum that, once approved, legalizes robosexuality. In "The Bots and the Bees", he has a sexual encounter with a fem-bot soda vending machine that leads to the almost-instantaneous birth of a son, whom he names Ben, after the first part of his own name.
Professor Farnsworth describes Bender to be constructed of an alloy of iron and osmium - despite Bender himself claiming to be made of 40% titanium in "A Head in the Polls". The Professor also states Bender contains a 0.04% nickel impurity, a trait which he claimed made himself unique. Bender hates magnets, as magnets interfere with his inhibition unit, causing him to uncontrollably start singing folk music/folk songs when near his head, and also causing him to reveal his secret ambition to be a folk singer. He once was able to attach a magnetic small faux-beard underneath his mouth without breaking into song. Bender also has a near-pathological fear of electric can openers due to the death of his father, caused by one, and the fact that it once ripped open the top of his head as it would a can.
Character
Creation
The name Bender was chosen by creator Matt Groening as an homage to John Bender (played by Judd Nelson), a character in The Breakfast Club. In that film, John Bender told Principal Vernon (Paul Gleason), "Eat my shorts," an eventual catchphrase for another Groening creation, Bart Simpson.
Bender's visual design went through multiple changes before reaching its final state. One of the decisions which 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 the year 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
thumb|250px|right|DiMaggio at [[E3 2008]]
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 robots should sound like. Because of this, every voice actor who auditioned, no matter for what role, was also asked to read for Bender. After about 300 auditions, even series co-creator Cohen attempted to audition after being told he sounded like a robot. John DiMaggio was eventually chosen for the role after his second audition.
DiMaggio originally auditioned using his Bender voice for the role of Professor Farnsworth and also 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 one of his college friends 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.
On March 1, 2022, following publicized contract negotiations, DiMaggio confirmed he would reprise his role for the Hulu revival.
Design
Bender's factory-set height is just over tall, including his antenna, and just under it without. In "The Farnsworth Parabox", Bender states that he flipped a coin to decide his color, ending up with foghat gray rather than gold. In "The Cyber House Rules", Bender shows the kids a black-and-white mug shot of himself taken after his arrest for theft. In "Time Keeps on Slippin'", Bender is shown trying to join a basketball team and makes himself taller by simply extending his legs. His body has a "shiny metal ass", two legs, two "Extens-o-matic" arms (right called "Gropie" and left "Cheatie" by Bender) 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 claims he also has a nose, but he chooses not to wear it. Bender's human-like characteristics are reinforced by his display of behaviors often regarded as exclusive to humans, such as whistling, snoring, having bloodshot eyes, crying, feeling 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, implying that all bending robots are somewhat prone to theft and amoral by design. However, another unit, Billy West (named after the series voice actor of the same name), is helpful and kind, though he lives as a farmer on the Moon and insists on not being a bending unit.
Bender's serial number, 2716057, can be expressed as the sum of two cubes (952<sup>3</sup> + (-951)<sup>3</sup>), which is humorous to Bender and Flexo after Flexo reveals that his serial number (3370318) has the same characteristic (119<sup>3</sup> + 119<sup>3</sup>) (also, Bender's designation 1729 is a taxicab number).
Functions
Bender was designed specifically for the relatively simple task of bending straight metal girders into various angles. Despite this apparent simplicity, he possesses numerous features superfluous to his original purpose, which become more apparent after an electric jolt to his antenna from an overhead light socket in the pilot episode. The scope of Bender's functionality is impressive; he often acts as if he were a multifunctional gadget rather than a special bending machine. Similar to a contemporary computer, he hosts a number of input/output devices: 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 kill switch, 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 sensors detect a colony of penguins, prompting his boot loader to re-initialize him with penguin-like behavior and language.
He is equipped with a vast capacity of computer data storage, in excess of 100,001 terabytes: 1 TB for general storage and 100,000 TB for the storage of pornography, though in "Overclockwise" Cubert Farnsworth deletes 12 TB of outdated catchphrases from Bender. Presumably either Bender has a separate "catchphrase drive" or the majority of the catchphrases are also pornographic.
Source of energy
Bender is powered by alcohol-based fuels, which he can convert into an electrical power source sufficient to operate not only himself, but also small household appliances plugged into his power receptacle. Low alcohol intake levels decrease his production of electricity: when he stops drinking and begins to "sober", his behavior grows increasingly ebrious and dysfunctional, and he grows a red beard of rust. He is also, apparently, able to sustain himself by consuming mineral oil, though he considers this to be only 'functional'.
Due to Professor Farnsworth's flawed design, the energy conversion process inside Bender's body produces an inordinate amount of waste gases and heat. He can expel these products from his rear end In his very first appearance, he tries to commit suicide via a suicide booth out of guilt for having unknowingly contributed to their creation. He has also been known to be nonchalant to the point of appearing both uncaring and incredibly brave, even in life-threatening situations.
Bender is a classic narcissist. He considers himself flawless, a "towering inferno of physical perfection",
The song "Bend It Like Bender!" from the Devin Townsend Project album Addicted, is a direct reference to Bender. One of the lyrics in the song is "Game's over, losers! I have all the money!", which is a line Bender says in the episode "A Head in the Polls".
Appearances in other media
Being the show's breakout character, Bender 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". Bender, along with Professor Farnsworth and Fry, also makes a cameo appearance in Matt Groening's latest series Disenchantment, in the episode "Dreamland Falls" as a hologram from a crystal ball, within the one-way time machine from the Futurama episode "The Late Philip J. Fry".
In the Simpsons-Futurama crossover episode "Simpsorama", Bender travels back in time in the 21st century to Springfield to kill Homer Simpson, whose DNA is tied to the creatures rampaging in the 31st century. Bender ends up befriending Homer before learning that the creatures are in fact Bart's genetic offspring. Once the crisis is averted, Bender goes into shutdown mode in the Simpsons' basement. Bender was still resting inert in the Simpsons' basement as of 2015 episode "Cue Detective" in which his empty body cavity was used to store the family's cash nest-egg. Bender also makes a background cameo appearance in the Simpsons episode "My Fare Lady", holding a shovel and bucket at the end of Homer's dream about The Jetsons. Bender briefly appears in the episode "Simprovised" holding a sign that says "Bring Back Futurama Again".
In the episode "Real Veal / Celebrity Wife Swamp" of the TV show Mad, Bender makes a cameo appearance in the segment "Real Veal", a parody of the 2011 film Real Steel. He is seen in a robot boxing championship losing to "Real Veal", a robot-cow hybrid.
He also appears as one of the enemies, along with Doctor Zoidberg, in The Simpsons Game.
Bender's head is featured in the background of the level "Clockwork Factory" in the tower defense video game, Kingdom Rush: Vengeance.
Bender makes cameo appearances in several Family Guy episodes. In "Blue Harvest", he can be seen at the Mos Eisley cantina, and in "The Splendid Source", he is one of the repeaters of a dirty joke whose original author Peter Griffin, Joe Swanson, and Glenn Quagmire are seeking. In the episode "Boopa-dee Bappa-dee", Peter attempts to use the guide on the television remote, turning Stewie Griffin into a host of past and present Animation Domination characters, including Bender. In "Throw It Away", Lois Griffin drags Stewie's time machine down the stairs which takes them to, in order, the 1950s, the 18th century, the future, with Chris Griffin replaced by Bender, and the prehistory.