Characters / Futurama: Bender Bending Rodriguez

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The Planet Express Crew (Philip J. Fry, Bender Bending Rodriguez) | Main Recurring Characters | Planet Express Crew Relatives | Antagonists | Other Characters

Bender Bending Rodriguez (Bending Unit 22)

"I'm Bender, baby! Please insert liquor!"

Voiced in English by: John DiMaggio ^{Other Languages}Bernard Tiphaine (French, Seasons 1-3, 5-7), Hervé Caradec (Seasons 3-4, 8-Present) Hans-Rainer Muller (German), Abraham Aguilar (European Spanish), César Soto (Latin American Spanish, Seasons 1-4, 8-Present), Raúl Anaya (Latin American Spanish, Seasons 5-7), Tomasz Borkowski (Polish)

Debut: "Space Pilot 3000"

"Bite my shiny metal ass."

A loudmouthed, kleptomaniac, misanthropic robot who also happens to be Fry's best friend. Despite his abrasive personality, has been known to Pet the Dog on occasion. Bender drinks constantly, because his power cells are fueled by alcohol. He also smokes constantly because he thinks it makes him look cool.

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A-L

• Abusive Dad:
  • When he adopts twelve orphans for the government stipend. He barely feeds them to try and save money, tries to abandon them at a bar to go off with a floozy, and even tries selling them to a Chinese restaurant.
  • He sells his firstborn son to the Robot Devil in "The Beast With A Billion Backs" in exchange for an army to wage war on Heaven and shows no emotion as the child cries for help. This is so evil it startles and impresses the Robot Devil. Bender even says "No backsies".
  • Subverted in "The Bots and The Bees", when Bender accidentally fathers a second son. To his son Ben, Bender is a loving and supportive father.
• Accidental Hero: When an evil little girl defeats him in a tap contest, Bender swears that some day he will dance tap over her grave. The girl has a heart attack and dies to everyone's sorrow — except Bender, who doesn't want to wait, and tap dances over her dead body. The rhythmic hoofing over her heart resuscitates it, and her life is saved.
  • "The Inhuman Torch" begins with Bender, Fry and Leela answering a distress call at a helium mining camp. Bender, fully intending to abandon his coworkers and friends, flees the scene, not realizing that a miner has taken refuge inside his chest compartment until Bender is out of the mine, having inadvertently brought the man to safety. Realizing that his "heroic act" has been caught on television, Bender is forced to run back in and repeat the action, until he has singlehandedly rescued all fifteen miners.
• The Alcoholic: Played with. Bender is constantly drinking, but that's because his system actually runs on alcohol. When he gets depressed, he tends to stop drinking, and the resulting energy shortage causes him to act like he's drunk.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Inverted. Because he powers his batteries with alcohol, it's the lack of alcohol that causes him to act irrational. At one point, he crashed a ship full of dark matter onto the penguins of Pluto.
• Alliterative Name: Played with. His full name is Bender Bending Rodriguez.
• Amazon Chaser: Seems to have a thing for particularly gigantic fembots. He attempts to romance the Crushinator in her first appearance and begins dating the giant vending machine Bev, eventually impregnating her. He even has a brief romance with the Planet Express ship in "Love and Rocket".
  Bender: Fry, in order for me to get busy at maximum efficiency, I need a girl with a big 400-ton booty.
• Ambiguously Bi: He has dated, flirted with, and even slept with several robot women in the series but his obsession with soap opera actor Calculon is filled to the brim with Ho Yay. His friendship with Fry is also a funny one as Bender often gets depressed and weepy when Fry does something that makes Bender feel that Fry is abandoning him.
• Amicable Exes: With Amy; they dated in "Proposition Infinity" but broke up when Amy insisted on a monogamous marriage. In spite of this, they remain good friends to the point of dancing together during the Dance Party Ending in "The Mutants are Revolting".
• And I Must Scream: Played with. Bender's head was stuck in the ground of Roswell for over 1000 years, but he was enjoying it until Planet Express found him again.
• Anti-Hero: Bender is a Nominal Hero. According to the Robot Devil, they looked around and couldn't find a robot worse than him. Yet, he is one of the protagonists and also has quite a few Pet the Dog moments.
  • Even the villains of the show acknowledge his villainy. A prime example is from "A Tale of Two Santas", where the Omnicidal Maniac Robot Santa seeks to recruit Bender for his Xmas "deliveries":
    Bender: Gee whiz, Santa! You want me to help you?
    Fry: Don't do it! He's evil!
    Robot Santa: I know he is, but I have no choice!
• Anti-Role Model: Parodied in "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV". Bender joins the cast of the "All My Circuits" soap opera, and his raucous, outrageous behavior make him an instant breakout star, extremely popular with younger viewers who look up to him and try to emulate, despite (or perhaps because of) his total lack of redeeming qualities. At one point on the show, he says, "Try this, kids at home!" (while a brief disclaimer flashes across the bottom of the screen saying not to try it at home), and then he sets himself on fire. Later in the episode, he protests his own presence on TV and the blame placed upon him. Note that the proverbial last straw for Bender here is that the children who emulated his behavior stole his stuff. At the end of the episode, he gives this gem:
  Bender: And so I ask you this one question. Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting them?
• Anti-Villain: Most of the time he's an alcoholic whore-mongering lunatic with no reservations about any criminal activity you care to name, including adopting ten kids in a welfare scam and then try to sell them as meat when he gets tired of them. But when he cares to be, he can be very heroic and a pretty good friend.
• Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: in "Overclockwise", Bender's intelligence is increased so much that he becomes omnipotent and can see into the future. Although it doesn't last.
• Attention Whore: He'll act out (to varying degrees of violence) if he feels his friends are neglecting him. In fact this is something he falls to so frequently that he has a pre-printed form that he fills out whenever he's about to do something as a cry for attention to keep from having to draft a new one every time he runs away or tries to kill himself.
• Attractive Bent-Gender: In 'Bend Her', Bender gets a sex change as part of a scam and ends up being the target of several romantic advances from male robots, notably Calculon.
• Ax-Crazy: Repeatedly has questioned his sanity, often has an extremely homicidal behavior, especially toward humans. In "The Honking", he strangled Fry simply for drinking his last beer.
• Bell-Bottom-Limbed Bots: Bender has incredibly long, thick, and durable arms and legs. This aspect of his character is so prominent that at one point he considered a legitimate superpower and used it to fight crime as a costumed superhero. Justified because Bender was built for construction work.
• Best Friend: To Fry. While he does regularly rip on him, he seldom enjoys himself with anyone else as much as he does Fry.
• Beyond the Impossible: On occasion, he's been able to bend things he shouldn't, like a brick wall, an unbendable girder, or a door. The last one he justified on the grounds that the door was too stupid to know this.
  Fry: You can't bend that door.
  Bender: You know that, and I know that, but between you and me, this door looks pretty stupid.
• The Big Guy: He's well aware that he's this, but usually goes out of his way to avoid getting pigeonholed (or, less tactfully, he's too lazy to do typical Big Guy stuff).
• Bigotry Exception: Despite Bender's hatred of humans, he does love his friend Fry, and makes a point of declaring him as #1 on his list of humans that he won't ever kill. Though that won't stop Bender from abusing Fry through other (non-lethal) means.
• Bizarre Beverage Use: Like presumably all robots in Futurama, he needs alcohol to fuel his power cells. Drinking it also occasionally makes him burb out fire, essentially making him into a sentient flamethrower.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: The Trope Namer. In "Anthology of Interest I", Bender tries to blackmail Leela after catching her trying to dispose of Hermes' body parts in the garbage disposal. When she asked, he responded with "Blackmail is such an ugly word. I prefer extortion. The 'X' makes it sound cool."
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: When it comes to interacting with humans, he seems to only have a very basic understanding of their limits while missing the fact that approaching those limits is painful. Thus, he's served up a dish of capers and salt (think mashed potatoes except... not), but makes sure that the amount of salt is slightly below a lethal amount.
• Body Backup Drive: Averted. Bender thought he had this type of immortality but discovers he was built without a backup unit. Fortunately (or not) he never needed to use his backup unit before discovering he does not have one. It's later shown when his robot body does die, he turns into some sort of robot equivalent of a ghost or spirit. So it's still not immortality (fortunately for him) but it's not cessation either.
• Bowel-Breaking Bricks: When he's really scared, he literally shits bricks.
• Camera Fiend: Bender has a hobby of taking pictures of horrifying and/or disgusting events.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Bender longs to be the Token Evil Teammate, and his feelings are easily hurt at any implication that he's not the amoral, terrifying (yet fun-loving) killing machine/folk singer he yearns to be. Comes up in "The Farnsworth Parabox" particularly.
  Bender: [sulkily] Ohhhhh, this is awful! Somewhere, there's a more evil Bender than me! I do my best dammit!
• Can't Hold His Liquor: Inverted. Due to being an alcohol-powered robot, if he doesn't get enough alcohol, he'll start to slur his words and stumble around, much like a human who's had too much alcohol. Bender even "grows" a five-o'clock-shadow made out of rust!
• Career Not Taken: Bender is a bending unit who's good at bending gurders and enjoys doing it (since he was literally built for it), but he's expressed multiple times that he dreams of becoming a Folk Musician, a dream he actually gets around to living out in "Bendin' in the Wind" and "Forty Percent Leadbelly".
• The Casanova: Bender's had more flings — with mostly Fembots and the occasional human woman — than any of the other characters, and he also easily gains admirers.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "Bite my shiny metal ass!"^note His first ever line in the series.
  • "♫Let's go already!!♫"
  • "DOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!"
  • "We're boned".
  • "We're/I'm back, baby!"
  • "Me, Bender."
  • "Bender is great!" and variants thereof. Often used in written form.
  • "It's gon' be fun on a bun!"
  • When someone mentions something like a kind of metal or wiring, he says "I'm [X]% [Y]".
  • When Bender takes a photo of something he usually says "Neat!"
  • "Shut up baby, I know it!"
• Child Hater: Bender should never be allowed around children. Ever.
  Bender: I guess if you want children beaten, you have to do it yourself.
• Cigar Chomper: Occasionally, because "they make [him] look cool".
• Cordon Bleugh Chef: He can cook just fine, and in fact the other characters have been eager to eat his cooking in the past, but he really shouldn't be allowed to experiment.
• The Corrupter: Whenever Tinny Tim is involved, Bender tends to involve the kid in home invasions, attempted muggings or inducting him into the robot mafia. And that's without mentioning his antics on "All My Circuits".
• Crazy Jealous Guy: He's so desperate to prove that his devoted girlfriend Angleyne is cheating on him with her Amicable Ex that he actually manages to drive her back into the other guy's arms through his machinations. When it comes to his friendship with Fry, he takes it to Yandere levels.
• Crippling Overspecialization: When Flexo is almost crushed by an unbendable girder dropped on him by the Robot Mafia, the only way Bender can think of to save him is to try to bend it anyway; he doesn't know anything about lifting. Fortunately, he's actually able to do it after applying some "Bend-Gay" to his arms.
• Deaf Composer: Bender loves to cook, but can't taste his terrible cooking.
• Death Glare: Often utilized, but for no real reason; Bender is consistently drawn, both in the series and in promotional images, with a noticeably angry expression, even if his present situation might not call for it. David X. Cohen often lampshades this in the DVD Commentary, claiming it always gives him a laugh.
  Cohen: See this drawing here of Bender's angry eyes? There's something so funny about him for no reason having that evil look...
• Depending on the Writer:
  • While usually a jerk, exactly how much of a jerk Bender is tends to vary based on the episode: sometimes he's a straight-up Jerk with a Heart of Jerk only out for himself, and sometimes he's a grumbling Jerk with a Heart of Gold who will always (albeit begrudgingly) help his friends out.
  • Bender's attitude towards his sons is extremely variable between "The Beast With a Billion Backs" and "The Bots and the Bees". In the former, Bender casually sacrifices his firstborn son to the Robot Devil without a second thought, and in the latter, he sincerely loves Ben and wants him to have a good life.
• Didn't Think This Through: A common habit of his. Bender regularly decides to do whatever vice or idea comes to his head regardless of how reckless it may be, and everything past the initial outcome is either something that horrifies him enough to round about and fix it every so often, or he more likely doesn't give a damn about the consequences and proceeds to keep doing what does at the expense of everyone else. If Bender actually takes the opportunity to think and plan, he's going against his usual habits entirely.
• Dirty Coward: In "Bender's Game", he, Amy and the Professor are trapped by a bunch of orcs in a castle. Bender tells the two of them that he has a plan. The next scene shows him holding them up in the and tells the orcs to take his friends first, just to give him one more second of sweet sweet life. In "Bendin' in the Wind", the crew is plunging off a cliff. Bender grabs a nearby cable, loudly declaring, "I'll save ME!" The rest of the crew is only saved by grabbing his legs just in time.
• Disappeared Dad: He walked out on his first-born son, who never gave up hope he'd come back. Bender did... sort of.
• Do-Anything Robot: Quite literally, but only when he feels like it. Seems Robots in the year 3000 are built for one purpose, but can adapt pretty well to others; Bender himself is Planet Express' resident cook. Bender sees it differently: everything he does is simply a different form of bending, which enables him to bend an entire brick wall (not on the list of approved bendables, apparently).
• Double Agent: Was this during "Bender's Big Score" when he was brainwashed by the scammers and ordered to steal Farnsworth's doomsday device. Despite his condition, he was still able to think on his own and figured that he'd be better off with it, so after retrieving the decoy he replaced the doomsday device with, he then swapped them again which paid off in the climax.
• Drama Queen: With a Body Backup Drive, he is in fact immortal. So then why does he scream as a Dirty Coward when there is danger? Because nobody ever said he can't be a drama queen! (He discovered later that he does not have a backup unit, so when he dies... he dies.)
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Originally, as he explains in the pilot, he was proud of being a Bending Unit. He could bend a girder to a 90 degree angle, 60 degree, you name it. Then he found out that the girders he was bending were being used to build suicide booths. Depressed from this revelation, he tried to use one of the booths himself... which is how he and Fry first met.
  • Though he's mostly lost the urge after befriending Fry, it still crops up sporadically: he mistakes a phone booth for a suicide booth and tries to kill himself after failing to kill Fry in "Bender's Big Score", he attempts to kill himself after being abandoned by Fry in "The Beast With a Billion Backs", and he tries to kill himself out of spite only to be murdered by the suicide booth after she turns out to be his ex in "Ghost in the Machines".
• Eating Machine: He's frequently been shown or at least implied to be capable of eating food. Examples include mourning Fry's demise in "The Sting" because Fry was the only one capable of making waffles the way he likes them and ordering food from Fishy Joe's in "Fry am the Egg Man".
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: The closest Bender has to a "mother" is the industrial robot who built him. Still, he gets kind of choked up when he gets an X-Mas card from "her" in one episode.
  • Like all robots built by Mom's Friendly Robot Factory, he harbors immense affection for its owner.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • He genuinely loved the Countess and was heartbroken by her death aboard the space Titanic. He also loved Angleyne so much he bent an unbendable girder just so she could be with Flexo.
  • Bender has shown times where he genuinely connects with Fry (and other humans too) and doesn't want to see any ill happen to them. Out of all the Planet Express crew, Fry is easily the one Bender outwardly loves the most and their relationship is a focal point for numerous episodes.
  Bender: All those times I said, "Kill all humans", I'd always whisper "Except one". [sobbing] Fry was that one, and I never told him so!
  • In a later episode, he told Hermes that the latter was on his "do not kill"-list. In fact, the whole Planet Express crew are this to him (even Zoidberg though to a much lesser extent), they're the only people he's shown sincere empathy and love for.
  • While it's initially just a scheme to get welfare money, Bender does come to care about the orphan kids and keeps the picture they drew him on the door of his compartment.
  • "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela" reveals Bender once had a pet guinea pig. He is visibly saddened when recounting its death.
  • In the crossover episode with "Simpsorama" (the crossover with The Simpsons), he was fond of Homer and Maggie.
  • While it's subverted hard with his firstborn son, Bender genuinely loved his son Ben and even sacrificed Ben's memories of him just so he could become a bender just like him, one of the most unambiguously selfless things he does in the whole series.
  • In "How the West Was 1010001" he becomes very attached to his pet donkey, Rusty.
• Even Evil Has Standards: There are moments when even he is hesitant or shocked by something.
  • During "Time Keeps On Skippin'", he was the one who tried to point out the danger of chronotons.
  • In "Love and Rocket", he actually looked unnerved on seeing the Lovey Bear "Hospital".
  • In "Spanish Fry", he expressed disgust when the porno-dealing monster says that he videotapes his clients so he can blackmail them later.
  • In the pilot, he was going to kill himself out of guilt for helping to create suicide booths.
• Evil Is Hammy:
  Bender: The cruelty of the old Pharaoh is no more! Let a whole new wave of cruelty wash over this lazy land!!!
• Evil Twin: His twin brother, Flexo, sports a goatee, but Bender himself is actually the evil twin.
  Fry: So Bender is the evil twin? I'm shocked! Shocked! Well, not that shocked.
• Exotic Eye Designs: Looks like typical Cartoony Eyes, until you look closer and realize that he has square pupils. One gag had him playing back a recording, during which his pupils switched to the 'play' symbol.
• Expy:
  • In this interview, Groening says that he's like a "robotic Homer Simpson". This is made especially clear in the crossover when Homer and Bender become best friends, with Bart and Lisa remarking that Homer and Bender had the same basic design but with certain features added or changed.
  • However unlike Homer, Bender's tendency of being a delinquent and kleptomania appear to be taken from Bart.
• Extreme Omnisexual: Bender has shown attraction to various non-robotic items (including a toaster, a torpedo, an old-fashioned PC, and the Planet Express ship), Amy Wong, and Lucy Liu's head.
• Eye Scream: Has fallen victim to it more than once. Fortunately, he's got replacements at hand if they break or melt.
• Face–Heel Turn: Downplayed in that he's still one of the protagonists and he wasn't really a hero to begin with. In the very first episode, Bender was a neutral construction robot attempting to kill himself for his hand in the creation of suicide booths. However — as stated below — the electric shock from the lightbulb in the head museum (particularly the one with the world's most notable criminals) fried whatever was inhibiting him from committing crimes and bending things not on the list of approved bendables.
• Fantastic Racism: He really wants to start a Robot War and Kill All Humans (or at least most of them). He's also not too fond of any other form of organic life, either.
• Farts on Fire: Not only do his burps catch fire, they can go out the other way as well if he wants.
• Fembot: He becomes a female in "Bend Her" and "Neutopia". Both don't last.
• Flanderization: His original character has been displaced by a jokey persona. Could be justified as Character Development, as he's a far rounder character now. Before he met Fry, he had no real friends and worked in constructing suicide booths. Now, he has multiple friends and he's lived out most of his dreams to some extent. It makes perfect sense that his personality would change over time. Confirmed by Word of God — the electric shock from the pilot that removed his block on bending non-girder objects ALSO removed all other inhibitions.
• Funny Robot: Gallows Humor-Black Comedy-type-funny, but makes you laugh your ass off.
• Gasshole: He usually burps every time he takes a drink of beer (and it comes out as fire), fitting his careless, self-centred behaviour.
• Gender Bender: He becomes a fembot in two episodes, once by choice and the other by accident.
• Genius Loci: A result of non-stop overclocking in "Overclockwise".
• A God Am I:
  • In "Godfellas". He doesn't like it much, mainly because his worshipers keep bothering him; they eventually wipe themselves out with nukes.
  • When in "Overclockwise" Cubert overclocks him to improve his video gaming skills, Bender's computing capabilities grow and grow exponentially, until he becomes virtually omniscient and godlike.
• Gold Digger: It's not uncommon for Bender to hook up with female characters because they're rich or have something he wants.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: For a Cigar Chomper like Bender, Smoking Is Cool and Evil Is Cool probably go hand-in-hand.
• Hammerspace: The compartment in his chest can seem to hold anything; beer, the keys to his apartment, a "gay-dar" detector, a tube of "Bend-Gay", and much more. Fry was able to fit in there more than once.
• Hates Everyone Equally: Yeah, totally. In "I, Roommate", the third episode, he openly states that his entire philosophy is that everyone is a Jerkass and he acts like such to everyone, including Fry and the few other people that could be called his friends, only showing he cares about them in very rare moments.
  Bender: Yeah, but everybody's a jerk. You, me, this jerk. That's my philosophy.
• Have You Seen My God?: While he's met the actual God, Bender undergoes many theologically-inspired misadventures as he grapples with topics like of free will and mortality. Mostly by trying to find his direct earthly creators so he can complain about how they did a shabby job, inflict violence towards them for the perceived shabby job, or both.
• He's Back!: Usually whenever he shows up after a brief absence: "I'm back, baby!"
• The Hedonist: Because of his smoking, drinking, and whore-mongering. Of course, he's a paragon of sobriety and chastity compared to Hedonismbot.
  • Bender's segment in "Anthology of Interest II" plays this to its extreme. Bender is turned into a human but doesn't demonstrate any self-control and without the luxury of a robot body that has no metabolism his body spirals out of control into a massive, obese flesh pile that can barely breathe, let alone move. It ultimately kills him by the end, although not before he kicks off a massive party to share his lack of inhibition with the rest of humanity.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Bender has no problem betraying his friends for some petty reason, and then helping again for some incredibly lame reason. For example, he once helped Zapp Brannigan capture Leela, and then helped her escape from prison... because, by helping her, his criminal record would still be higher than hers!
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: With Fry, who's one of, if not the only human who Bender shows genuine affection towards.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Bender has an interest in folk music, art (he has an odd argument with the Planet Express ship early on in 'Love And Rocket'), cooking, and others that really seem out-of-place in a bending unit, much less a sociopathic whore-mongering criminal like him.
  • Bender first met Fry whilst waiting in line for a suicide booth, having become depressed and suffering a crisis of conscience, upon learning that the girders he had been bending were used in their construction.
  • He's really sweet at certain points; for example, when Fry's depressed over Leela's apparent death, he tells him that "The pain slowly fades while the love remains".
• Humongous Mecha: In "Anthology of Interest I", the What-if machine shows him what would happen if he was 500 feet tall. And in "Benderama", he manages to turn himself into a giant Bender with the help of the thousands of smaller microscopic Benders.
• Hypocrite:
  • "I Dated a Robot": Complains all through the episode about Fry dating a robotic version of Lucy Liu. When he deletes her, Bender instantly starts making out with Lucy Liu's head.
  • "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV": Didn't care at all if his stunts on TV were imitated by his younger fanbase. At least until it was his stuff that wound up stolen from their acts. This spurs him to join the protest to get himself banned from TV.
  • "Proposition Infinity": In addition to the above, all of a sudden he now fully supports human-robot relationships since he and Amy were dating. But when all is said and done, he dumps Amy when he realizes he won't be able to date more then one girl.
  • "31st Century Fox": Inverted in this case, he ignored Leela's complaints about fox hunting. But when he realized it was a robot fox, he took up the protesting.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Towards Anglelyne in "Bendless Love". Another non-romantic example in "Bend Her": he backs out of a potentially hugely profitable scam because he doesn't want to hurt or humiliate Calculon, and does it by faking his own death in the most over-the-top way possible because Calculon can handle "soap opera pain" better than anything realistic or commonplace.
• I'll Take Two Beers Too: Bender says "This calls for a drink!" and pulls out three beers, when there are three characters present. He then drinks all of them at once.
• I'm a Humanitarian: On more than one occasion, he's suggested he doesn't mind eating humans — suggesting Fry and Leela fight to the death so he can cook the loser (telling Leela he'd prefer Fry tenderized), and is the only one of the trio to enjoy the food on Cannibalon (the cannibal planet).
• If It's You, It's Okay: With Amy in "Proposition Infinity"; at least, until he discovers Amy wants a monogamous relationship and says "Hasta la vista!" Though of course of he had previously been with one other human: Lucy Liu's head to be exact.
• Immortality: As a robot this is unsurprising but it's the way he exploits it that really pushes it over the top, as he has used The Slow Path several times to jump between the past and the present. At this point his aggregate age probably outdates any known civilization.
• Informed Attribute: Played for laughs. He constantly brags about his lack of emotions but is probably the most emotional person in the series. He's also not above commenting on the flavor of whatever he's drinking, despite having no sense of taste.
• It's All About Me: He loves to be the center of attention. On his worse days, Bender will refuse to acknowledge that anyone else's existence matters more than him ("My life and by extension everyone else's is meaningless").
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: With all his heinously selfish (if not outright sociopathic) tendencies he isn't above an occasional Pet the Dog moment. Bender does sometimes feel guilt for some of his harsher actions, and that doesn't even take into account what Fry and Leela ''really'' mean to him.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: He can fill this trope sometimes. In "Xmas Story", all the others were surprised when Bender says he wants to "volunteer" at a liquor kitchen for homeless robots. It turns out he just wants to pose as a homeless robot to get free booze.
• Jerkass: Bender's callousness reaches such extremes at times it leads even the Robot Devil himself to be taken aback.
• Joke of the Butt: He's subjected to a lot of humor revolving around the rear end.
  • Most notably, his Character Catchphrase is "Bite my shiny metal ass!"
  • In "The Honking", there's his response to Farnsworth pointing out that the portraits with moving eyes at his inherited castle have motorized sensors attached to motion detectors.
  Bender: So does my butt, but I don't frame it and put it on the wall! Although...
  • "Put Your Head on My Shoulders" has Bender upset when the shock-absorbing bumpers the mechanic installed make him look like he has big blue buttocks, claiming the mechanic has "defaced a national treasure". He demands that the mechanic undo this, but not without the mechanic warning that this will result in his ass exploding later.
  • In "A Pharaoh to Remember", he tries to achieve fame by spray-painting a depiction of himself flexing and the phrase "Bender lives large and kicks butt" onto a building, only for it to be ruined by Sal demolishing the building, resulting in the depiction of Bender turning into a giant rear end (with a literal butt crack) and the phrase now reading "Bender licks butt".
  • "Assie Come Home" has Bender wind up in pieces and eventually put back together. His ass remains the one part of him they can't recover for a while, and this makes him rather forlorn.
  Amy: Bender, come join us, we're watching Rear Window!
  Bender: I used to stick my rear out the window...
  Zoidberg: If you prefer, we could watch Behind the Music.
  Bender: My behind used to make music...
  Hermes: Backdraft is on.
  Bender: Even my ass wouldn't watch that.
• Karma Houdini: Due to Rule of Funny, he tends to get away with doing some pretty horrible things. "A Pharaoh to Remember" has him take over Osiris-4 and become a slave-driving tyrant; although he's ultimately driven out and his statue is destroyed, he still gets off with little more than a slap on the wrist and even gets the legacy he desired.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: On occasion, there are instances where he has been punished, such as being beaten up for trying to cheat in a poker game, getting caught for stealing a priceless cigar (even lampshaded by him: "Alright, closure!"), getting chased down by Beck when he tried to scam him for a charity check and losing a crown he tried to take from a king when he forgot it was in the king's compartment when Bender was within his body.
• Kavorka Man: He's a rude, amoral, alcoholic, kleptomaniac robot who's hooked up with several fembots and even a few human women, though this may be chalked up to All Girls Want Bad Boys.
• Kick the Dog:
  • In "A Pharaoh To Remember" he makes the decision to become the next pharaoh of Osiris 4 after its previous pharaoh dies in an accident. He then proceeds to make all the slaves of Osiris 4 take on the grueling task of building him an oversized statue with a flamethrower in a mouth that constantly screams "remember me" as Bender desired to be a remembered figure. His actions in that episode even had him treat Fry and Leela like slaves.
  • In "The Beast with a Billion Backs", to make a Deal with the Devil he sacrifices his firstborn son so readily and so callously even the Robot Devil is shocked.
  • Perhaps the cruelest instance of him doing something bad to another person just because he can would be in "Assie Come Home", where his quest to recover his scattered body parts leads to him discovering that Tinny Tim received his legs as transplants. Caring more about being whole again than he does Tinny Tim's happiness, he saws the transplanted legs off to have them back. For good measure, he even steals the wheeled cart Tinny Tim had to use for transportation now that he had no legs, all so he can use it himself when he already had his legs back and callously toss it into the trash the moment he stopped enjoying using it.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Well, a hero who is also a kleptomaniac, although hero might not be the right term.
  Bender: I love stealing, I love taking things.
• Lack of Empathy:
  • Notable in that he is capable of love, but not empathy. For example, he loves Fry with all his heart, but in a completely narcissistic fashion, as he only cares about Fry being alive and present so that Bender can love him, not about Fry himself being happy.
  • In the episode "I Second That Emotion", Prof. Farnsworth installs an "empathy chip" in Bender in order to teach him to feel for others, forcing him to feel whatever emotion Leela is feeling at the moment. The episode ends with Bender not learning a thing and continuing to be a Jerkass and Leela learning to be more like a jerk.
• The Lancer: To Fry.
• Large Ham: He manages to upstage Calculon. Enough said.
• Lazy Mexican: Played with. Bender is incredibly lazy, usually does nothing but drinking and lying on the couch. The "Mexican" part comes into play since he was literally built in Mexico, and considers himself Mexican.
• Laughably Evil: The Token Evil Teammate and easily one of the most hilarious, entertaining characters.
• Lethal Chef: Being a robot means he doesn't have a sense of taste, which doesn't hinder his aspirations of becoming a chef as much as it probably should. Although he does bake a perfectly edible cake, suggesting he can cook as long as he follows the recipe and doesn't experiment. His problem is that he is utterly unable to realize what humans actually eat, so he'll serve them a meal that consists largely of salt, or suggests trying to cook rocks in mud.
• Living Forever Is Awesome: As revealed in "Lethal Inspection", robots (ones made by Mom, at least) can simply Body Surf into a new body (he acted like they didn't because he's a drama queen), and jokes at humans being capable of (easily) dying. As it turns out, he doesn't have a backup chip, prompting him to be scared of his new found mortality, which is, at most, a billion years.
• Loony Fan: Bender absolutely idolizes Calculon, the star of All My Circuits, and has stalked him and invaded his privacy on numerous occasions.
• Lovable Rogue: To the Planet Express crew, anyway. He even considers himself "the lovable rascal".
  Leela: Bender, we didn't mind your drinking, or your kleptomania, or your pornography ring.
  Zoidberg: In fact, that's why we loved you.

M-Y

• Mad Libs Catchphrase:
  • "I'm [percentage] [substance]!" Which added up to well over 100% over the course of the series.
  • He would often say variations on his "Bite my shiny metal ass" catchphrase, including:
    • "Bite my red hot glowing ass!"^note "Wait a minute. Red hot glowing ass? Excuse me a minute."
    • "Lick my frozen metal ass!"
    • "Bite my colossal metal ass!"
    • "Bite my glorious golden ass!"^note Said by an Alternate Universe version of Bender.
    • "The modern world can bite my splintered wooden ass!"
    • "Bite my shiny metal hat!"^note Said by Fry.
    • "Bite my tiny metal ass!"^note Said by a miniature duplicate of Bender.
    • "Byte my 8-bit metal ass! ^note "That’s byte with a Y. Get it?"
• Made in Country X: Bender was made in Mexico. (See his last name.)
• The McCoy: He's quite impulsive. Also, he usually doesn't do anything moral, but when he does, it usually fits this trope.
• Meaningful Name: "Bending unit" — a robot who was manufactured for the sole purpose of bending metal objects. Also, one slang meaning of "bender" is "a bout of heavy drinking", which is appropriate for Bender since he runs on alcohol.
• Meet My Good Friends Lefty and Righty: He names his hands Grabby and Squeezy, and refuses to trade them with the Robot Devil. He also names his footcups Stompy and Smashy, and his arms Gropey and Cheaty.
• "Metaphor" Is My Middle Name: How his full name was established in the show. The Planet Crew needed someone who was good at bending and Bender replied with "Bending is [his] middle name." It really is.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Bender honestly tried being a benevolent ruler to the Shrimpkins in "Godfellas", but he accidentally started a civil war and made them all kill each other instead.
• Mini-Me:
  • Bender uses a machine that makes two smaller copies of whatever it scans to make three of himself in "Benderama", and then each clone decides to make their own smaller copy of themselves as well. By the third act there are over two thousand microscopic Benders.
  • "Into the Wild Green Yonder" revealed the crew tried to sell "Tickle-Me-Bender" dolls. The sales were abysmal.
• Morality Pet: The Planet Express crew, and especially Fry, are about the only people in the world who he would willingly put himself on the line (or not do something he wants to do) for.
• Multiple-Choice Past: The circumstances of his "birth". Word of God once implied that the viewers were just seeing him getting new bodies built for him as he grew older.
• Must Make Amends: In the same episode as the Fry example, Bender, in a fit of jealousy, kicked said dog's fossil into hot lava. After realizing what he did, he dove into the lava to save it — successfully, though his eyes melted afterwards.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • In the first film when Bender had an obedience virus installed in him, he was ordered to kill Fry. After he thought he killed Fry, he broke down in tears. Subverted when he shifts the blame on anyone else.
  • Played straight in the pilot episode. When he realizes the girders he bends are used to create suicide booths, he attempts to kill himself.
• Narcissist: In "The Farnsworth Parabox" he seemingly falls in love with an alternate gold plated version of himself, stating that he has finally found someone "as great as me".
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain : His attempts to confirm Angleyne's sentiments for Flexo by impersonating him only caused her to go back to her ex-husband.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: Of both the Made of Iron and Spare Body Parts varieties. He can take a swim in molten lava (thanks to being partly comprised of dolomite — the tough black mineral that won't cop out when there's heat all about!), survive at the bottom of the ocean, and even be at ground zero of more than one doomsday device without any ill-effects.
  Bender: What does it take to kill me?
• The Noseless: Though in one episode he says he does have one, he just never wears it.
• Older Than They Look: When the series started, despite his adult appearance and habits he was only a few years old. But thanks to getting stuck in Roswell and LOTS of time travel, by this point he's older than any human alive. Without the time travel and other factors, however, "Overclockwise" stated his model is 12 years old.
• Other Me Annoys Me:
  • Averted. Whenever Bender encounters other instances of himself (via time travel, alternate universes, or other forms of duplication) he usually gets along great with them. Because if there's one thing Bender loves, it's Bender (though he's not above stealing from himself).
  • Played straight during one scene of Bender's Big Score, where all three Benders involved take a dislike to one another. The second Bender even decides once he's done trying to murder Fry he'll even try and murder himself out of nowhere.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: When he dies in "Ghost in the Machines", his disembodied software shows up as a spirit which can possess other technology. Including robots.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When he briefly becomes bored with kleptomania, having stolen everything in Alcazar's Palace:
  Bender: I think I might have finally stolen enough.
  Fry: [slaps him] SNAP OUT OF IT!
  • The idea that Bender might be telling the truth makes everyone scream in terror ("The Honking").
• Parental Sexuality Squick: The "Radiorama" podcast has him grossed out after learning that his mother has merged with Klaxxon, which is humorously depicted as an allegory towards learning that one's parent is dating a new partner.
• Parental Substitute: Played for laughs in "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings", when Fry asks him to come to his holophoner recital, in lieu of Fry's parents, and he's mistaken for being Fry's actual father.
  Mrs. Mellenger: Mr. Bender, I simply cannot train your child!
  Bender: Then good day, madame!
• Pet the Dog: Sometimes, he would do something nice for someone without asking for anything in return; the majority occurs in the comics. One of the biggest is saving Fry's petrified dog in "Jurassic Bark", mostly because he was the one who endangered it in the first place.
• The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Despite being a Bending Unit, his laziness means we rarely see Bender actually bend things. It's later revealed in "Bendless Love" that his pent-up urge to bend caused him begin bending things in his sleep. Even Bender assesses his own skills thusly:
  Bender: I need a calculator.
  Fry: You are a calculator?
  Bender: I mean a good calculator!
• Please Put Some Clothes On: In one episode, Bender becomes a human. Since he never developed the concept of modesty, he doesn't think to cover his crotch. Hermes does it for him.
• Psychopathic Manchild: An alcoholic, amoral gambler who deals porn and has no qualms with selling children as food. He occasionally becomes incredibly childish, most notably in the Mom-centric episodes.
  Bender: Mom! Mom! Look at me, Bender! Hey-ho, I want attention!
• Punny Name: "Bender" can also mean a drinking spree. So Bender is a bender who goes on benders.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: "I'm so embarrassed, I wish everybody else was dead!"
• Real Men Wear Pink: Despite being a rude, alcoholic, kleptomaniac womanizer, he has his moments.
  • He fits this temporarily in his stint in the Ultimate Robot Fighting League. He's forced into the character of The "Gender Bender", complete with a pink tutu and curly, blond wig. Though he appears to hate the outfit, he DOES take the time to carefully put it on a hanger and store it in his personal storage space, in the middle of a fight no less.
  • He has many straight up examples: he earnestly enjoys the robo soap opera All My Circuits, he was once "pregnant" with beer, his number two most repeated word is "daffodil", he has a deep love of cooking (and is extremely hurt when told it sucks), he's obsessed with (and has stalked) the aforementioned soap-opera's star, and once ALMOST MARRIED SAID STAR, and displays some emotional aftermath at episode's end.
  • How much of the personality of Planet Express Ship, his one-time girlfriend, stuck with him?
    Bender: Bender is a lone wolf, a solitary eagle, a cuddly baby tapir, and that's the way I like him.
• Really 700 Years Old: And then some. It's subtle, but post-Bender's Big Score, he has actually existed for eons due to various time travel incidents where he goes into the past then waits until the present day (from where he came) arrives again. Even before that, as a result of the time traveling in Roswell That Ends Well, his head is over a thousand years older than his body (his head fell out of the ship just before they returned to the future).
• Really Gets Around: He has numerous flings with robot floozies. And Amy.
• Repetitive Name: His first and middle names are "Bender" and "Bending".
• Required Secondary Powers: Bender's super strength and invulnerability are all side-effects of his ability to bend. He can also do anything as long as it's an extension of bending (like pumping, unlike turning).
• The Rich Want to Be Richer: In "A Head in the Polls", he becomes rich after literally selling his body, then tries to get even richer by cheating at a casino.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: The poster boy for this trope. He himself considers robots as a separate race rather than man made tools. To be fair though, the robots in this series practically are.
• Robosexual: Initially, Bender was against robosexuality, but this all changed when he started dating Lucy Liu. Later on, he falls in love with Amy and even goes so far as to propose to her. Ultimately, he decides to not marry her upon learning that their marriage would be monogamous.
• Robosexuals Are Creeps: Bender doesn't want others to mistakenly believe that he's dating Fry and be disliked for it.
  Bender: Well, ok. But I don't want people thinking we're robosexuals. So if anyone asks, you're my debugger.
  • In "I Dated a Robot", he makes it clear how much he's against robosexuality when Fry starts dating a robot version of Lucy Liu. However, by the end of the episode, Bender hooks up with the actual Lucy Liu, much to Fry's annoyance. Then, in "Proposition Infinity", he falls in love with Amy and decides to lead a campaign in favor of robosexual marriage so that he can marry her (without having to go to Space Massachusetts, where it's already legalized).
• Robot Buddy: The best buddy of Fry, and the worst Robot Buddy ever.
• Robot Soldier: He is forced to go into war in "War is the H-Word", within only a second of becoming eligible for the draft.
• Sadist: He has no qualms when he has the opportunity to hurt someone, and is very implied to enjoy doing that.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Whenever his plans go awry or the cops show up:
  Bender: Cheese it!
• "Second Law" My Ass!: Or shiny metal ass, as he might put it. Bender is profoundly lazy, and staunchly refuses to do any kind of work whenever he can avoid it. He once declared that robots aren't made to make people's lives easier, because "I've never made anyone's life easier, and you know it!"
• Second Place Is for Losers: Really hates coming in anything below first place. Examples: Entering Zoidberg as a pet in a Pet Show and getting second place (which in his own words, "is a fancy word for losing!"). And getting third in a cook-off contest. So much so he murders the top two winners just to get the first place trophy during the commotion with the neanderthals.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: Manly Man to Fry's Sensitive Guy. Fry is the Socially Awkward Hero while Bender is the boisterous hedonist.
• Series Mascot: Bender is treated as the face of the series for being the source of much of the darker humor, and for his very recognizable Tin-Can Robot design.
• Silicon Snarker: Bender is as sarcastic as they come. And he would object to the trope being a case of Servile Snarker, as, when Fry suggests robots are built to make humans' lives easier, Bender protests that he'd never made anyone's life easier, and they know it.
• Single-Task Robot: Bender was designed and built specifically for bending metals. Of course, the show itself subverts and plays with this.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: To the point of being weaponized in "War Is the H-Word" when he's unwittingly wired with a bomb that will go off when he utters his most frequently-used word, which, unsurprisingly, is "ass."
  Bender: Bite my shiny metal—
  Fry: [bursting in] Stop! You can't say the next word!
  Bender: Up yours, chump. I said it nine hundred and six times before lunch.
• The Slow Path: This is Bender's preferred method of time travel. For whatever reason, he never, ever gets bored or runs out of power, and has declared with regards to being buried in the New Mexico desert for a thousand years that "I was enjoying it until you guys showed up!"
• Small Name, Big Ego: Bender has a Big Ego constantly at odds with his Small Name, as most vividly seen in "A Pharaoh to Remember". Pointing the latter out is one of his biggest Berserk Buttons.
• Smoking Is Cool: Invoked.
  Bender: I need plenty of wholesome, nutritious alcohol. The chemical energy keeps my fuel cells charged.
  Fry: What are the cigars for?
  Bender: They make me look cool.
• Snarky Non-Human Sidekick: A robotic sidekick who indulges in vices ranging from gambling, whoring, robbery, and casual violence, and often expresses a desire to kill or maim his friends as a punchline. That said, his friends do explicitly like him for his personality.
• Sociopathic Hero: Zigzagged. He's a selfish kleptomaniac with signs of addictive personality disorder, additionally indulging to excess in gambling, women, and drugs. A recurring joke is his unconscious desire to "kill all humans". However he would by no means be diagnosed as sociopathic in real life, as he values the lives of others and considers his own life less meaningful without them. He's even risked his life for them a few times - a true sociopath considers even long-time 'friends' completely replaceable.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad:
  • He had dozens of episodes focusing on him, whereas characters like Leela and Zoidberg only had a handful. In addition to that, almost every episode that doesn't have him as the main character has him in a subplot, two of the movies have his name in the title (Bender's Big Score had more to do with Fry and Leela), and the two that don't have very long subplots involving him.
  • Amy and Hermes are easily the most underused characters in the series. Season 6 tries to correct this by having one Hermes episode and two Amy episodes. The catch? Both the Hermes and one of Amy's episodes are centered on Bender.
• Sticky Fingers: Stealing is one of his hobbies. If he's not seen actively robbing or pickpocketing someone in an episode, odds are good that he either brags about or openly displays something previously stolen, up to and including human remains.
• Strong as They Need to Be: Being a robot makes him stronger than a normal human, but exactly how strong he depends on Rule of Funny or whatever the plot requires at the moment. On the high end, Bender can bend explicitly unbendable metal alloys, punch through walls, and carry several peoples' weight, plus his own, on his retractable arms. On the other end, Leela is occasionally able to beat him up. On bad days, he can't even do a push-up without his arms spontaneously falling off.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Bender's two sons ^note His firstborn from "The Beast with a Billion Backs" and Ben from "The Bots and the Bees" look almost exactly like him. Probably justified with of all of them being Bending Units.
• Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids He was designed for bending struts, yet...
• Team Chef: Officially Planet Express' cook.
• The Team Wannabe: Wanted to join the Harlem Globetrotters in "Time Keeps On Slipping". Sadly, he wasn't funky enough.
• Teeny Weenie: Hinted at. His antenna is often used as a euphemism for male genitalia and he gets very defensive whenever the size of it is questioned.
• This Is Gonna Suck: "Well, we're boned!"
• Time Abyss:
  • Due to hundreds of repeated one-way time travel, Bender would clock in at the thousands of millennia. This may be a Shout-Out to Marvin.
    Fry: Bender! What was it like to spend a thousand years buried in the sand?!
    Bender: [scowling] I was enjoying it 'til you guys showed up!
  • The What If? Christmas episode seems to indicate he can last at least another 500 million years.
• Tin-Can Robot: Looks like a robot out of the 1950s, since he's supposed to be a industrial girder-bending robot. This has the added advantage of making him durable and fairly easy to repair, to the point that he has (or can easily acquire) replacement arms and legs.
• Token Evil Teammate: Even his best friend, Fry doesn't hesitate to call him evil — nor does Bender seem particularly affected by the statement. Though other characters have their shady moments as well, none of them is as openly (and proudly) callous as Bender.
• Token Robot: He's the only robot on the crew. Averted when the Planet Express Ship temporarily gained sapience and a personality.
• Too Dumb to Live: Compared to Fry's literal lack of deeper thought past his impulsive actions, Bender straight up doesn't care about consequences. The results can be self-detrimental, like selling his body for quick cash only to realize he's just a talking head with no way to spend it, to nigh-suicidal, like yet another probable reason he causes himself to explode once again. Were it not for the Negative Continuity kicking in with some episode outcomes, he'd have doomed the Planet Express crew multiple times over.
• Took a Level in Cheerfulness: Bender started the series off as a depressed, sullen robot who wanted to kill himself out of guilt for building suicide booths. However, after meeting Fry and losing his bending limitations, he becomes much more gleeful and content with life.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Later episodes, particularly in the show's Un-Canceled era, increased his sociopathic tendencies, where he goes so far as to commit outright murder and at one point even damns his own son to Robot Hell, something that surprises the Robot Devil.
  [Bender goes to Robot Hell to strike a deal with the Robot Devil and get his army of the damned]
  Robot Devil: I rather think we could strike a deal, Bender. I shall give you your army of the damned and in return I ask just one thing, just one itty-bitty thing; your first born son! [laughs evilly]
  Bender: Jus' a sec.
  [in a suburban neighborhood, Bender approaches a small robot with a blue cap and shorts on]
  Robot: Daddy! I knew you'd come back! [Bender gives the boy a huge hug]
  Bender: [to the Robot Devil] Here ya go!
  [Bender boots his son out of a window and into a vat of liquid which bursts into flames upon contact with the child]
  Robot Devil: Wow! That was pretty brutal, even by my standards.
  Bender: No backsies!
• Treasure Chest Cavity: He can hide all kinds of stuff inside his robot body — children, robot clowns, Fry... At one point he proved to have so much space available that a small doomsday device went off inside him and didn't damage him. But when it came to carrying around an entire castle's worth of loot he started to show difficulties.
• Troll: Most of the time he's just an ass just because he enjoys pissing people off.
  Bender: Ha ha haw ha ha!... oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder. Haw ha ha haw ha ha!
• Turn to Religion: In "Hell Is Other Robots", Bender finds religion after becoming addicted to electricity and becomes extremely pious. The others get tired of the new Bender and conspire to have him go back to being a sleazy lowlife, after which Bender gets sent to Robot Hell.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: Any time Bender is given an ounce of authority. Like on Osiris 4, when he makes the entire planet build a ludicrously oversized statue of him, then complains when they do just that.
  High Priest: But, sire! We built it to your exact specifications!
  Bender: Too exact if you ask me! Now tear it down and start again. But this time, don't embarrass yourselves.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Played with. Bender is talented at dancing, theft, burglary, and fraud; skills which do not require strength. However, he is only able to fully utilize his considerable robotic strength in applications related to bending.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: "Bite my shiny metal ass". Most of the main cast have strong Jerkass tendencies (except for Fry and Zoidberg), but Bender is easily the worst.
• Verbal Tic: Whenever Bender refers to himself as "me", he always tacks on his name to make it "me, Bender", seemingly just to make sure no one forgets who they're talking to.
• Villain Protagonist: He has committed many crimes, including outright murder.
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • With Leela, on occasion, even moreso as the seasons go on and both take Levels In Jerkass. Starting in Season 1, she admits she likes Bender for his "in-your-face personality". In Season 2, when prophesied to murder his best friend while a were-car, Bender goes straight for Leela, rather than Fry. The two hang out, but Leela is more than willing to respond with violence whenever Bender's a jerk.
  • With Fry; the two may insult and occasionally mutilate each other, but they care for each other and will always have the other's back.
• Vocal Evolution: In the first season, Bender's voice sounded noticeably slurred and nasally. Starting with the second season, his voice is higher-pitched, much clearer, and has a faint accent.
• What, Exactly, Is His Job?: It's been noted a couple of times that, while Bender is employed by Planet Express, he doesn't have a clear role in its hierarchy. He has a self-appointed role as the crew cook, but being a Lethal Chef means this role isn't given much respect, and though he tends to work with Fry, he isn't considered a "delivery boy" the way Fry is. Most of the time, he's just hanging around doing anything from load-lifting to interfacing with computers to folding sweaters (when he can be bothered, anyway). Bender's Big Score labels him as "Assistant Manager of Sales"—something he's never been shown acting as, suggesting it's an empty title. "Möbius Dick" has Hermes claim that he's considered one of Planet Express' appliances. Whenever Fry is absent—due to him quitting, being presumed dead, or some other reason—Bender continues to accompany Leela on deliveries, but they are shown to have nothing to talk about without Fry (although when Leela's memories of Fry were erased she observed that a two-man crew felt too small).
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: He's programmed strictly for bending purposes, which turns out to be more than enough. When necessary, his bending even allows him to perform explicitly impossible feats, such as folding a wooden door in half.
  Bender: [about to use a water pump] Like everything else in life, pumping is just a primitive, degenerate form of bending.
• With Friends Like These...: While he usually has lines he won't cross towards his friends, he's still liable to do some nasty things to them, like rob them, con them, or strangle them in anger. He even had Fry and Leela enslaved during his brief stint as a Pharaoh.
• Wolverine Publicity: Given his status as the Series Mascot, Bender tends to be prominently advertised even in episodes or movies where he plays a minimal role. Notably, his name is on the titles for Bender's Big Score and Bender's Game, even though he's a Decoy Protagonist in the former and despite setting up the titular world is ultimately little more than comic relief in the latter.
• Would Hurt a Child: "If you want kids beaten, you have to do it yourself." Aside from the incident with his first-born mentioned above, he's the most willing to hurt Cubert for being annoying, tries to sell children as food, and gleefully joins Robot Santa on his rampage.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Done as a joke when explaining Bender's composition. He is 40% titanium, 40% zinc, 30% iron, 40% dolomite, 40% luck, 40% chromium, 60% storage space, 40% scrap metal, and 40% wire. That adds up to 370%!
• Yandere: A non-romantic example with Fry. He likes hanging out with Fry and looks forward to spending time with him doing things watching TV shows together. However, Bender has proven that he can get jealous over Fry spending time with someone or something else. When Fry found the remains of his dog Seymour and plans to clone him, Bender gets so jealous of Fry is spending time with his dog that he throws Seymour in a volcano and boasts about how he’s all Fry has while hugging a shocked Fry.
• Yellow Eyes of Sneakiness: He's very mischievous and his eye bulbs are a light yellow.
• Younger Than They Look: Before "Roswell that Ends Well", Bender was actually the youngest Planet Express member, being built a mere three years before his first appearance. If it weren't for time travel, he'd be in his late teens by the series finale.
• Your Answer For Everything: If Bender can't find a more obvious answer to a problem, his next best thing is to bend it. In the fourth movie, this included a brick wall.
  Bender: All situations have the same Plan C: bending.

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