Bender 2.0
Victoria Steigerwald
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").[3] However, Bender is also occasionally portrayed as possessing a sympathetic side, suggesting that he is not as belligerent as he claims, a view often echoed by his friends.[4][5]
Bender, a high-tech industrial metalworking robot, was built in 2996 at Fbrica Robtica De La Madre (Spanish: "Mom's Robot Factory"), a manufacturing facility of Mom's Friendly Robot Company in Tijuana, Mexico.[3] 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,[3] and also by a reverse aging process shown in the episode "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", 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 chip 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.[6]
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.[3]
At the factory, Bender was programmed for cold-bending structural steel. Bender 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 (ERR), 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 58 people into a telephone booth (although he concedes they were mostly children).
Before meeting Fry and Leela and joining Planet Express (where he currently works as the assistant manager of sales and as company chef),[7] 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 Season 2 Episode 13. 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.
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.[8]
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".[9]
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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12]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".[13] 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.[14]
Bender's factory-set height is just over 6 feet (1.8 m) 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.[17]
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.[19] His body has a socket for a microphone jack, a dual-socket power receptacle,[4] a reset button,[20] a kill switch,[5] and a self-destruct button. Having the hardware-based self-destruct control on his body, rather than in his software, prevents Bender from killing himself in "A Head in the Polls" when he pawns everything but his head, grows desperate without it and desires 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. His head can be used for a wide range of functions, whether attached to his body or not. In one episode, Leela reassembles Bender into a functioning go-kart (albeit in an event shown in the "What-If" machine).
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