The Futurama Bender Detail That Makes No Sense
Let's start out with a clarification: There's a lot that doesn't make sense about Bender Bending Rodriguez. The bending robot, also known as Titanius Anglesmith, Bender the Offender, and, for a brief moment, Coilette, is a walking labyrinth of enigmas. Each added detail of his life only serves to raise more questions. What did he do with John Laroquette's spine? Was his personality truly altered by his accidental electrocution in the series pilot, as one particularly dark Futurama fan theory attests? Most mysteriously of all, why does he sound so similar to Jake the Dog from Adventure Time? That last one will probably never be explained.
But more than anything, the biggest unsolved mystery in the life of B.B. Rodriguez's life lies at the character's very core. Also his other bits. Really his whole body. Or, at the very least, 40% of it.
Throughout Futurama's 140-ish episodes, Bender never shies away from describing himself as "(x)%" something. Exactly what that thing is varies wildly over the course of the series. Starting in the season 1 episode "Fry and the Slurm Factory," Bender announces that he's 40% zinc. The next season, in "A Head in the Polls," he mentions that he's 40% titanium. "Jurassic Park" in season 4 reveals that Bender is 40% Dolemite, which explains how he keeps so cool, and in "Into The Wild Green Yonder," he declares himself 40% luck, or possibly 40% horseshoe. That only puts us at around the halfway mark of the series. We could go on.
For Bender's sake, we're 40% gonna go on!
And we will. Season 6's "Attack of the Killer App" saw an Antarian describing Bender as 40% chromium. A scant seven episodes after that, he was 60% storage space. "All the Presidents' Heads" later that same season labeled him 40% scrap metal. In season seven, he was said to be 40% wire and 40% empty, and, just for flavor, he also has a .04% nickel impurity, as described in "A Pharaoh to Remember." "Assie Come Home," in which Bender is disassembled and has to be put back together, sees his partially reassembled body shouting "I'm 40% back, baby!" That one probably doesn't count.
All told, the fan-run Futurama wiki Infosphere estimates that, depending on which claims you take into consideration, Bender Bending Rodriguez boasts a total composition of between 150 and 370% ... stuff. A lot of thought clearly went into their analysis — whether the 40% horseshoe claim could be explained away by Bender's being 40% a different metal, for example, and whether or not his assertion that he's 40% lead in a Futurama video game is considered canon. When a show puts as much effort into hidden messages as Futurama did, it only makes sense that the fanbase might get a little extreme. Confusing things even further: In a Reddit AMA, series co-creator David X. Cohen claimed that Bender is actually composed of 40% "all metals." That's quite the accomplishment, and probably impossible to replicate, explaining why certain parts of the beloved character are so tantalizingly shiny.