I know continuity isn’t a big thing with Matt Groening, but I’m still curious as to how this apparent discrepancy has been reconciled, if not by the creative team that produced Futurama, then at least by the fans.
Bender is a robot manufactured in Mexico. This has been established in a number of episodes.
But in “The Honking,” Bender suddenly has a wealthy robot uncle who leaves him a castle in the Robo-Hungarian Empire, which I would assume is somewhere in central Europe.
So if Bender is manufactured in Mexico, how is it that he has relatives in central Europe? For that matter, considering that he was manufactured, how is it that he has any relatives at all??!?
Mom, of Mom’s robot company is the only reference to any lineage that I’ve ever seen. His uncle was either made by the same machines, or more likely, is just a meaningless nod to those old haunted castle movies and TV episodes.
However they’re determining relations (my guess, his uncle is an earlier variant on his model), the fact that his uncle is in Europe doesn’t seem that odd. Bender’s in New New York, it seems likely that the Tijuana robot factory ships world wide.
And, of course, leaving the spirit of the OP:
It’s a very, very bad idea to try to apply logic to Futurama robots. They make no logical sense whatsoever. There’s MOB BOTS, for crying out loud! And Hedonism Bot…who would build that?
He has a picture of his mother, not Mom. She appeared to be some sort of crane. Perhaps she assembled his parts in Mexico. Maybe she was manufactured in Europe before moving to Mexico. Then Bender’s uncle was manufactured in the same place but stayed. And he made his kids. But all his relatives seemed to be bipeds whereas his mother wasn’t. So maybe he’s on Bender’s father’s side. And Bender’s father was on vacation in Mexico and made love to the crane thingy then split which is why Bender never mentioned him. Which I suppose is possible since Bender and the PlanEx ship were about to do it. Robot sex is weird and sparky.
Bender seems to regard both the crane and Mom[sup]TM[/sup] as his mother. Mom[sup]TM[/sup] demands that loyalty from all her robots, as far as we can see. Maybe he thinks of her as his foster mother and the crane as the biological mother who isn’t really involved in his life. Like an awful lot of things related to robots in the Futurama-verse, this part of robot life doesn’t appear very logical or well-thought out. Then again, Professor Farnsworth invented the ‘modern’ robot and he’s a loon, so why would it make sense?
Mom[sup]TM[/sup], love[sup]TM[/sup] and screen door[sup]TM[/sup] are registered trademarks of MomCorp.
Doesn’t Bender at one point say that his last name is Rodriguez?
Paraphrasing from memory: Bender: I can bend that. Bending is my middle name. Somebody: I thought “Bender” was your first name. Bender: It is: Bender Bending <accent style=mexican>Rodriguez!</accent>
Bender also has a “screwy” aunt named Rita. She’s a screw. Farnsworth said that the robot genders are “already ill-defined,” and the same obviously goes for their families, since we don’t even know if she’s an animate object.
There’s a fairly direct contradiction between Bender having a picture of himself when he was one month old (showing him in his current “adult” form, complete with beer bottle and cigar) and the episode when he was reverse-aging and morphing into a child-like form.
Of course, both Star Trek and Christmas were referenced before later episodes revealed these subjects to be taboo or outdated.
Anyhoo, didja notice the painting in Bender’s Uncle’s castle of a naval officer in full dress uniform, titled “Commodore LXIV”? Also, the uncle’s innumerate son had a shirt on that said “Euro-TRaSh-80”. I love geek references.
I Second That Emotion, three episodes before X-Mas Story. Leela, Bender and Fry explore the sewers under New New York in search of Nibbler (who Bender had earlier flushed down a toilet) and encounter the sewer mutants, who show them around. The tour wanders through the mutants’ cathedral, which has a large nuclear warhead on the altar (in obvious tribute to Beneath the Planet of the Apes):
Fry: You worship an unexploded atomic bomb?
Female mutant: Yeah, but nobody’s that observant. It’s mostly a Christmas and Easter thing.