Raging Bender

"**Raging Bender**"
"Raging Bender"
Lewis Morton
Production code	2ACV08
Original air date	February 27, 2000
Guest appearances
	Rich Little as himself; Russ Leatherman as Mr. Moviefone;
Episode features
Opening caption	Nominated For Three Glemmys
Opening cartoon	"Hollywood Capers" (1935)
Episode chronology
← Previous; "Put Your Head on My Shoulders"	Next →; "A Bicyclops Built for Two"
	Futurama season 2
	List of episodes

"Raging Bender" is the eighth episode in the

Lewis Morton and directed by Ron Hughart. The story focuses on Bender becoming a professional robot wrestler

.

Plot

At the morning Planet Express meeting, the crew discovers

Brain Slugs

. To avoid being assimilated themselves, the rest of the staff takes off for the movies.

While watching All My Circuits, The Movie, Bender picks a fight with a robot that turns out to be the Ultimate Robot Fighting champion The Masked Unit. The Masked Unit trips on Bender's oil-soaked popcorn, and is knocked out by the fall. Coincidentally, the commissioner of Ultimate Robot Fighting, Abner Doubledeal, is at the movie, and hires Bender on the spot.

After training with Leela, Bender has his first fight against a chainsaw-equipped robot called The Clearcutter. Seemingly by a stroke of luck, Bender defeats his opponent, causing The Clearcutter to explode into a pile of parts. However, Bender runs into the robot backstage, and the commissioner reveals that Ultimate Robot Fighting is fixed, and that the most popular robot always wins. Bender is shocked at first, but then celebrates the fact that he is popular.

Bender spurns further training from Leela, and proceeds to win several fights, but eventually, his popularity wanes, and he is told that he can either take a dive in his new role as 'The

kung-fu Master Fnog, she changes her mind. The misogynist

Fnog had ruined Leela's dream of competing in the Arcturan Kung-fu junior championships years ago, and Leela still holds a grudge.

Bender tries to fight Destructor, but takes a merciless beating in the ring. He begs

Bed Bath & Beyond

discount card, and Fry and Leela roll him up and carry him home. Fry's Brain Slug is found on the arena floor, having starved to death.

Production

According to the DVD commentary,

brain slug

for the rest of the season. However, this idea was scrapped because everybody "just sort of forgot about it".

Cultural references

When Fry, Bender, and Leela are riffing through the newsreel, they are ironically shushed by Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo from Mystery Science Theater 3000. The film's opening sequence is a homage to Maurice Binder's iconic James Bond gun barrel sequence.

Destructor's final blow to Bender's head is shot in black-and-white slow motion in a recreation of a famous shot from Raging Bull.

Reception

The A.V. Club gave the episode a B+, stating "The story of Bender’s rise and fall in the fine art of (staged) Robot Wrestling is a time honored comedy tradition… “Raging Bender”’s conclusion is pretty much all silly… The subplot is the closest the episode comes to having a legitimate emotional component… Still, if you can put that aside, this is a solid episode. Leela kicks some ass, Bender gets crushed by a giant robot, and Fry starves a brain slug to death. So that’s cool."^[1]