Bender (full name: Bender Bending Rodriguez) is the beer-guzzling, cigar-smoking, perpetually-scheming
robot on
FOX's
Futurama. Bender is a class 22 bending robot, built in 2999 at a facility in
Mexico to bend girders for
suicide booths. Once he found out the girders were for the booths, he became depressed and tried to kill himself (using said booth, ironically). However when the attempt failed he met
Fry and the two became friends and coworkers at
Planet Express.
Bender's power cells run off of alcohol (which explains why he's always drinking beer). He smokes cigars because he says it makes him look cool. His processor is a 6502, the kind found in Commodore 64s and Nintendo Entertainment Systems. He's also been involved in a number of criminal and shady activities over the years, including...
- Stealing the water from a municipal swimming pool
- Pimping out female robots
- Running a fradulent computer dating service ("discreet and discrete")
- Stealing the jumbonium atom
- Involved with the Robot Mafia's raid on the Planet Express ship
- Dumped sewage into the sewer (where the mutants live)
- Posting nude pictures of Fry on the Internet without permission
- Posting nude pictures of Leela's body on the Internet without permission
- Posting nude pictures of Amy's head on the Internet (attached to Leela's body) on the Internet
- Adopting ten children and attempting to turn a profit with them
- Trying to sell his adopted children to a restaurant for meat
- Converting to robotology, then sinning and being sent to Robot Hell
- Selling his body to a pawn shop, then stealing it back from Richard Nixon
- Stealing a dying soldier's boots and watch right off the battlefield
- Cooking meal after meal of inedible food (rocks sauteed with mud, capers and salt, chicken bones, etc.)
- Killing master chef Helmut Spargel with said horrible food
- Began spiking horrible food with LSD to get people to like his cooking
- Set himself up as pharoah of the Egyptian planet, Osiris IX, and ordered his slaves to make a giant likeness of himself
Bender has also done some noble and heroic deeds in his life. He's met God. He gave up ten children for adoption, thus saving the failing orphanage. He rescued Fry and Leela from Robot Hell. He fought in the war against the Brainballs. He also reunited his twin unit Flexo with long-time girlfriend Angleyne.
Through it all Bender continues to be the driving force behind the exploits on Futurama. Hopefully he'll continue causing trouble until the day he retires. His plans for retirement include turning his on/off switch to "off".