Gameplay.

"Panzer Dragoon" spans six levels, each lasting about five minutes, with a variety of boss battles. Over the course of the game, the plot is revealed through cutscenes using the game's own graphic engine. Gameplay consists of a player controlling a flying dragon and his rider through an aiming reticle that can be moved over the whole screen with the D-pad; the player must shoot a variety of enemies (ranging from machines to monsters) in a 3D post-apocalyptic fantasy environment of barren landscapes and mysterious ruins of a fallen civilization. Progression through the levels is made at a predetermined pace, as the player is constantly set along a rail of gameplay. The only time the game pauses is during boss battles. The field of vision can be directed with the aiming reticle on the x and y-axis, but the overall direction of travel is predetermined. The dragon follows the reticle movements, allowing the player to avoid enemy projectiles and obstacles.  The player has a full, 360-degree field of view, and can quickly look left, right, forward, and behind the dragon. Enemies come from all directions, varying in size and health, and also appear on an on-screen radar that monitors the dragon's surroundings. Two weapons are available: the rider's handgun, which can be fired with a single button press when an enemy enters the aiming reticle, and the homing laser fired by the dragon, which can lock on up to eight enemies by moving the reticle over them while holding down the fire button. Some situations with many enemies on screen require the use of the lock-on laser, while in others, quick gunshots to weak spots will prove more efficient.

Plot.

In the distant future, thousands of years after a great war between humans and their biologically engineered weapons, humans live in everything from small tribes to large nations. One nation, the Empire, has discovered a black tower in the middle of a lake near their capital, which gave them access to large amounts of ancient weapons which they used to beat back and control the ever present monsters in the world. The Imperials were corrupted by this power and became conquerors of others as opposed to liberators from a violent world.  The introduction movie opens with the protagonist, Keil Fluge (unnamed in the North American version), hunting in a canyon. After seeing an Imperial flying battleship in the sky, he is attacked by two creatures and chases one of them to a large, ancient complex built directly into the rock. He explores the ruin, and sees relics of old technology still hanging from the ceilings. Another gigantic creature suddenly attacks him, and though his weapon is useless against the armored creature, a rumbling triggers a cave in, which crushes the monster and saves Keil. From the newly created hole, an armored, blue dragon flies down the cavern with a rider across its shoulders, being chased by an even bigger black dragon as the cavern is destroyed in an explosion. Regaining consciousness outside, Keil sees the two dragons locked in combat in the air before him. Dodging a blast from the black dragon, the blue dragon's rider is then hit by single shot to the chest, and the black dragon flies away. The blue dragon flies towards Keil. A psychic connection is made between the rider and Keil, who is told not to let the black dragon reach the black tower. The rider then dies and Keil picks up his fallen gun, climbs atop the dragon and flies away, determined to finish the rider's quest.  During the first level of the game, Keil and his dragon fly through a drowned city, where they encounter a small Imperial patrol ship. That ship sends a report to a large fleet of ships flying above the clouds. It is revealed that the Imperial forces are specifically searching for the blue dragon. The second level is a desert, where Keil and the dragon encounter gigantic worm-like creatures. At the stormy edge of the desert, they are confronted by the Black Dragon, which is defeated and speeds away. The third level is a mountainous landscape at night-time where Keil and the dragon get reacquainted with the Imperial forces, which were exploring ancient ruins. These encounters illustrate the ongoing conflict between the Imperial forces and the ancient machines and creatures. The fourth level is an ancient facility in which Keil and the dragon are pursued by both Imperial airships and cybernetic sentinels left behind by the ancient civilization. During the fifth level, they defeat a large armada of the most powerful Imperial ships over a forested area. A cutscene then shows a fleet of dragon-like creatures coming out of the tower to attack the Imperial forces. The sixth level features the black dragon and Keil racing through the battle-scarred Imperial capital. During this, they are both waylaid by the creatures and machines seen attacking the Imperial fleet around the tower while also being fired on by Imperial defenses. The black dragon then reaches the Tower and is mutated into a gigantic super-dragon and begins a climactic battle with Keil and the blue dragon, after which the black dragon is defeated and falls into the ocean.  In the ending cutscene, Keil and the dragon enter the tower. While traveling down a long corridor, the dragon surrounds Keil in a force field, lifting him from the saddle and suspending him in the hallway. Keil watches as the dragon continues on to the core of the tower, then a blinding light is seen and the tower explodes. Keil wakes up some time later in a desert area abutting the ocean. Looking down, he sees the foot prints of the blue dragon around him, indicating that after the explosion, the dragon carried him to safety and flew away.

Development.

"Panzer Dragoon" was created in the early 1990s as the Japanese video game company Sega was preparing to release its Saturn console. In 1993, as the Saturn lacked third-party games, Sega asked its developers for game ideas; according to art director Manabu Kusunoki, Sega asked for shooting game ideas to add variety to the Saturn's launch library. Twenty-three-year-old Yukio Futatsugi, who had joined Sega only two years before, proposed several concepts, including "Panzer Dragoon". Futatsugi became the head of Team Andromeda, a development team that Sega assembled for the project in early 1994 and was built around the duo formed by Futatsugi and Kusunoki. Development lasted almost a year, with a staff of 15.  The project was designed as arcade-style, as core members of the team like Kusunoki came from Sega's arcade department. Team Andromeda wanted to create a fully 3D arcade game, having worked on similar games such as "Out Run" which were not truly 3D. With influences including "Space Harrier", "Starblade", "Star Fox", and "RayForce", the project became a 3D rail shooter. Usually, in 3D shooters, the player rides a 3D object like a jet fighter or a tank. Futatsugi and Kusunoki decided, however, that it would be more original for the player to ride an armored dragon, a living creature which would also allow for richer animations. The game's name originates from its original concept, referred to as "armored dragon" ("kiko-ryu" in Japanese), but Futatsugi, feeling that this was too bland, decided to translate it to German.  With this basic concept in mind, the creators had 3 months to define a visual identity and a setting for their game, prior to development. The game would be set in a post-apocalyptic science fantasy world, featuring ruins and relics of a fallen civilization and mankind struggling for survival, something typical in anime at that time. Futatsugi was particularly influenced by one of his childhood readings, "The Long Afternoon of Earth", a science-fiction novel by Brian Aldiss, in which one side of the earth became perpetually hot, the other perpetually cold. The first presentation video featured a green dragon, in line with traditional European/medieval depictions, however the team quickly decided to change it and make it "more sci-fi". In order for the dragon to be more original, it was made blue and covered in a white, bone-like armor. The dragon was supposed to come from the ancient times, so ruins and ancient flying technology also featured this white, shell-like material.  The overall fantasy look of the game's world, which mixed natural and technological elements, was also chosen in order to set it apart from classic science-fiction 3D games of the time. This world, as well as dragon and character designs, were mainly the work of Manabu Kusunoki, who took inspiration from various sources, including anime and manga, and who pushed the art direction toward a more Turkish/Ottoman style to avoid the European aesthetics of the early presentation video. Critics have noted similarities with the works of French artist Moebius (notably his comic book "Arzach",) of whom Kusunoki was a fan, as well as with Hayao Miyazaki's "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind", and David Lynch's "Dune" movie. Kentaro Yoshida, texturing and modeling artist, described the creation process as similar in style to "Star Wars", in that it "made an unearthly world appear so real". Takashi Iwade, in charge of the opening cutscene and character models, designed the enemies using a lot of various influences: "I got inspiration from antique clocks and various industrial products from the era of the industrial revolution for mechanics, and myriapods, marine mollusks, ammonite, and a rusty fishing boat for creatures when I started thinking of the original battleship". The team wanted a famous artist to make the game's cover art. Manabu Kusunoki suggested Moebius, who accepted, and the team sent him designs that he was to interpret. The resulting illustration was used as the cover art for the Japanese release of the game.  The Saturn's hardware was new to the team, and it was their first attempt at creating an original environment. It was also Futatsugi's first year working as a full developer at Sega, so he was only able to do simple things while having a clear vision of what he wanted, which helped him to keep the overall style pure, with stark and minimalist cutscenes. Similarly, Iwade kept the enemies easy to understand visually, with simple shapes, and this overall simple style ended up fitting well with the Saturn's hardware. Then, Team Andromeda set to work on elaborating an extensive back story, and Futatsugi, to be original and to avoid using Japanese or English, went so far as to create a new language for the game: a mix of Ancient Greek, Latin and Russian. This was apparently inspired by the anime "The Wings of Honneamise", of which team members were fans and which also features an invented language.  After the story and art were established, the team set to work on the graphics. Working on new hardware proved difficult for the young team, and the game ended up missing the initial deadline given by Sega, which was the Saturn Japanese launch on November 1994. One of the problems was that the Saturn hardware was only finalized in mid-1994, and without actual Saturn prototype to test their progress, the programmers initially had to work with hypothetical hardware performance. Team Andromeda created its own graphics library and mapping tools instead of using Sega's, in order to make the most of their first game on the new system. The game's graphics and cutscenes were done with Softimage, and the 3D elements were programmed on SGI workstations using OpenGL. The programmers were eventually able to transition to the debug Saturn they had received, but the process was difficult and the game had a very low frame rate at first, before it could be locked at 20 FPS. The six levels of "Panzer Dragoon" are barren landscapes with ancient ruins, which is consistent with the "simple" style appropriate for the Saturn. The first two levels that the team programmed, a desert (level 2) and a forest (level 5), did not have any objects or anything besides sand and forest effects, again because the team was unsure how far the hardware could be pushed. Keeping CPU limitations in mind, simple tornado effects were added to level 2, so that it did not look too bland.  Work on the soundtrack began after completion of the game, similar to the way movie soundtracks are made. The idea was to create music that would specifically reflect each level art-style and events. As the game had an "on rail" progression system, the developers knew exactly where the player would be at any given time, so they showed videos to the composer and asked him to write specifically timed pieces that would match the player's progression in each level. The soundtrack was outsourced to Yoshitaka Azuma, who was composing music for NHK TV programs at that time. The music of "Panzer Dragoon" is a mix between orchestral and synthesizer tracks.  Sega of America made several alterations to the game to make the North American release more challenging. These alterations were retained in the PAL version.

Releases.

"Panzer Dragoon" was released in Japan on March 10, 1995, North America on May 11, 1995, and Europe on August 30, 1995, on the Sega Saturn console. It was followed by "Panzer Dragoon II Zwei" (1996) and "Panzer Dragoon Saga" (1998), both for Saturn, and "Panzer Dragoon Orta" (2002) for Xbox.  In 1996, "Panzer Dragoon" was ported to Windows. Identical to the Saturn version except with a higher resolution, this version was also included as a bonus in "Panzer Dragoon Orta". Aside from providing the source code, Team Andromeda had no involvement in the development of the Windows version.  An updated version of "Panzer Dragoon" was included in the Japan-only "Sega Ages 2500" collection for PlayStation 2 in 2003. The port was handled by development studio Land Ho!, and features the original Saturn game and an "arrange" version with anti-aliasing filter, better texturing, and improved 3D models for the dragon and some enemies. The "arrange" version also adds unlockable extras such as level selection and artworks, in the form of a "Pandora's Box" option menu.

Reception.

"Panzer Dragoon" received positive reviews, both in 1995 and in retrospective coverage. Though sales were not as high as Sega expected, possibly due to the success of Sony's PlayStation console over the Saturn, they were substantial enough for Sega to develop sequels.  As one of the first Saturn titles, the game was highly anticipated by journalists after its appearance in promotional material. A reviewer for "Next Generation" said the game "orchestrates incredible story animation with brilliant, 3D flight graphics to create what is, basically, the ultimate evolution of "Space Harrier"." He also highly praised the gameplay, particularly the variety of enemies, the difficulty slope, and the controls. Ed Semrad and Danyon Carpenter from "Electronic Gaming Monthly" praised the game for its "innovative game play" and its "awe-inspiring visuals" from the opening cinematic to the backgrounds and the dragon's animations. Al Manuel and Ken Williams criticized the game's lack of diversity in weapons and its predetermined progression; but the four "EGM" reviewers agreed that it was a must-have game for Saturn owners. Similarly, The Unknown Gamer from "GamePro" called the game a "masterpiece", highlighted its high-quality graphics and music, and described the story as "captivat[ing]". However, the journalist noted the game's overall difficulty "will single out all but advanced players" with its lack of power-ups or extra lives of any kind. Nevertheless, the game was seen as a good example of the Saturn's capabilities. In contrast, a reviewer from "Maximum" said that the game was much too easy even on the highest difficulty setting, greatly reducing its already low longevity. He also said the gameplay would be too simplistic for many players, with its on-rails shooting and selection of only two weapons, but was overall very positive in his assessment of the game, highly praising the 360 degrees of rotation and most especially the textured 3D graphics of the enemies, settings, and bosses.  Patrick Baggatta from "Game Players" stated that while the game may come off as "just a simple shooter", it is at least a "very good one" that "puts a twist on the tired formula", again praising the game play and the variety in camera angles. Chris Gore from "VideoGames & Computer Entertainment" named the game "the best shooter since "Star Fox"", and a must-have for fantasy and sci-fi fans, with its "eerie" atmosphere noted by editor Betty Hallock. While the story itself was said to be "somewhat typical" and editor Chris Bieniek criticized the on-rail aspect, Gore noted the game's "spectacular visuals", and presented it as one of the Saturn's system sellers. "Famitsu" magazine's Reader Cross Review gave the game a 9 out of 10 in April 1995, and it was named "Best Saturn Game of 1995" by "Electronic Gaming Monthly" in their 1996 "Buyers' Guide". The game's universe itself was deemed "coolly surreal" by Entertainment Weekly reviewer Albert Kim, who thought the game's seven-minute "movie-quality" introduction was "gorgeous" and "nearly overshadowed the game itself". Kim argued that "Panzer Dragoon" could be seen as a "lyrical and exhilarating epic", a "story, not just a game" which could pave the way for a "transformation" of the videogame industry. Film director Steven Spielberg approached Team Andromeda to say he was impressed by the game's presentation at the 1995 E3 show.  James Mielke from online game magazine 1UP.com gave "Panzer Dragoon" a retroactive review of 8/10 for what the game offered in 1995, but gave it a modern score of 6/10. Mielke highlighted the music as "one of the finest game soundtracks ever produced," but said that the game itself "staggers a bit under the glaring light of a critical rereview[sic]", arguing it is "little more than Space Harrier with a 3D camera and cut-scenes." By contrast, Levi Buchanan from IGN gave the game a retrospective score of 9/10, opining that "the fact that Panzer Dragoon holds up as well in 2008 as it did in 1995 is a just testament to the staying power of good art and tight gameplay." Kurt Kalata, in a Gamasutra retrospective, also praised its art and universe, but said the actual game looked "a bit cut and dried" compared to its sequels. "Panzer Dragoon" ranked 140th in "EGM"′s "The Greatest 200 Videogames of their time" feature published in 2006.

Remake.

A remake of "Panzer Dragoon" was developed by MegaPixel Studio and published by Forever Entertainment in March 2020 for Nintendo Switch. It was released on Google Stadia on 1 June, with a Windows version scheduled later in 2020.  The remake features updated graphics and an optional new control system that allows players to aim independently of movement with the second control stick. Switch reviewers criticized the updated controls and short length, and "Metro" felt the art direction was inferior, with "extraneous detail that ruins the mood and makes the fantasy world seem a lot more generic". "Nintendo Life" concluded that it was "a decent take on an all-time classic that goes some way to modernising it, but doesn't quite nail the landing".

As one of six games available at the Sega Saturn's surprise North American launch, "Panzer Dragoon" was the first game created by Team Andromeda. The game also marked the directorial debut of game designer Yukio Futatsugi, who was 25 years old at the time of the game's release.

Panzer Dragoon est un "shoot 'em up" en 3D développé par Team Andromeda pour Sega, sorti sur Saturn le au Japon, puis le et le de la même année, respectivement aux États-Unis et en Europe. C'est le premier épisode de la série "Panzer Dragoon".


Biography.

Early life and career.

Raymond was born in 1909 in New Rochelle, New York; his parents were Beatrice W. (née Crossley) and Alexander Gillespie Raymond, Sr. The boy was raised in the Roman Catholic faith.  His father was a civil engineer and road builder who encouraged his son's love of drawing from an early age, even "covering one wall of his office in the Woolworth Building" with his young son's artwork. Raymond's father died when he was 12, after which he felt that there was not as viable a future in art as he had hoped. He attended Iona Prep on an athletic scholarship. There, he played fullback on coach "Turk" Smith's 1926 football team.  Raymond's first job was as an order clerk in Wall Street. In the wake of the 1929 economic crisis he enrolled in the Grand Central School of Art in New York City and began working as a solicitor for a mortgage broker.  Approaching former neighbor Russ Westover, Raymond soon quit his job and by 1930 was assisting Westover on his "Tillie the Toiler" comic strip. As a result, Raymond was "introduced to King Features Syndicate", where he later became a staff artist, and for whom he would produce his greatest artwork.  Raymond was influenced by a variety of strip cartoonists and magazine illustrators, including Matt Clark, Franklin Booth, and John La Gatta. From late 1931 to 1933, Raymond assisted Lyman Young on "Tim Tyler's Luck", eventually becoming the ghost artist in "1932 and 1933... [on] both the daily strip and the Sunday page", turning it "into one of the most eye-catching strips of the time". Concurrently, Raymond assisted Chic Young on "Blondie".  In 1933, King Features assigned him to do the art for an espionage action-adventure strip, "Secret Agent X-9", scripted by novelist Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond's illustrative approach to that strip made him King Features' leading talent.

Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim and Secret Agent X-9.

Towards the end of 1933, King Features asked him to create a Sunday page that could compete with "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", a popular science fiction adventure strip that had debuted in 1929 and already spawned the rival "Brick Bradford" in 1933. According to King Features, syndicate president Joe Connolly "gave Raymond an idea... based on fantastic adventures similar to those of Jules Verne".  Alongside ghostwriter Don Moore, a pulp-fiction veteran, Raymond created the visually sumptuous science fiction epic comic strip "Flash Gordon". The duo also created the "complementary strip, "Jungle Jim", an adventurous saga set in South-East Asia", a topper which ran above "Flash" in some papers Raymond was concurrently illustrating "Secret Agent X-9", which premiered January 22, 1934, two weeks after the two other strips. It was "Flash Gordon" that would outlast the others, quickly "develop[ing] an audience far surpassing" that of "Buck Rogers". "Flash Gordon", wrote Stephen Becker, "was wittier and moved faster," so "Buck's position as America's favorite sci-fi hero", wrote historian Bill Crouch, Jr., "went down in flames to the artistic lash and spectacle of Alex Raymond's virtuoso artwork." Alex Raymond has stated, "I decided honestly that comic art is an art form in itself. It reflects the life and times more accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration—since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business—he is playwright, director, editor and artist at once." A. E. Mendez has also stated that "Raymond’s achievements are chopped into bite-sized pieces by the comic art cognoscenti. Lost in the worthwhile effort to distinguish comics as an art form, the romance, sweep and beauty of Raymond's draftsmanship, his incomparable line work, is dismissed. To many, it's just pretty pictures. Somehow or another, it's OK for people like Caniff and Eisner to borrow from film. That’s real storytelling. But for Raymond to study illustrators, well, that's just not comics."  Debuting on January 7, 1934, Raymond's first "Flash" strip introduced the "world-famous polo player", improbably roped into a space adventure alongside love-interest Dale Arden and scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov. Transported by rocket to the planet Mongo, "which was about to collide with Earth", the trio "immediately became embroiled in the affairs of Mongo's inhabitants—particularly those of its insidious warlord, Ming", who would become Flash Gordon's nemesis throughout the franchise's many incarnations.  Early in 1935, Hammett decided to depart as writer of "Secret Agent X-9" in order to pursue a career in Hollywood. While it has been presumed that Raymond took on the writing duties of the strip until a replacement could be found, biographer Tom Roberts instead believes that the strip was written by committee during editorial conference, a view R. C. Harvey believes is supported by the strips themselves. "Saint" author Leslie Charteris was hired to take over the writing of the strip in September 1935, but the pair would only collaborate on one storyline. By the end of 1935, "the [work]load was too much for Raymond," who left "Secret Agent X-9" to artist, in order to devote more time to his meticulous Sunday pages.  Raymond's work on "X-9" is said to particularly reach for "the feel of the best pulp interior art of the time," a style that would evolve with his own so-called "great flourishes" and "later blossom to full effect in "Flash Gordon" and "Jungle Jim"". "Under his pen," writes Maurice Horn, his Sunday pages "became world famous (especially "Flash Gordon")." However, historian and critic R.C. Harvey argues that "despite Raymond's great talent as an illustrator, his deployment of the comic-strip medium (on "X-9") was not very impressive." Harvey feels that Raymond's work suffers in comparison to Milton Caniff's contemporaneous work, with Raymond's failings as a visual storyteller less noticeable on a weekly Sunday strip, where the space afforded played to his skills as an illustrator. Raymond's sensual artwork—for which the artist particularly "studied popular illustrators," including pulp artist Matt Clark, whose work Raymond's male figures particularly evoke—outshone its borders and "attracted far more loyal readers than... [the] rather contrived and unconvincing adventure stories" his work depicted. Raymond swiftly became "among the most highly-regarded—and most imitated—in all of comics" for his work on the weekly strip, with Harvey declaring his work on the strip "a technical virtuosity matched on the comics pages only by Harold Foster in "Prince Valiant"." Raymond evolved the layout of the strip from a four-tier strip in 1934 to a two-tier strip in 1936, reducing the number of panels but doubling their size. Combining this with a removal of dialogue from speech balloons to captions at the bottom of the panel afforded Raymond the space to create detailed and atmospheric backgrounds. Against these spacious backgrounds, the placement of characters in heroic pose "lent the entire enterprise a mythic air."  "Flash Gordon" gained a daily strip in 1940, illustrated by Austin Briggs. Raymond left the Sunday strip in 1944 to join the Marines, whereupon the daily strip was cancelled and Briggs assumed Sunday duties, continuing until 1948. Briggs was succeeded on the Sundays by Emanuel "Mac" Raboy, while the daily strip was revived in 1951 by Dan Barry. Barry also took over Sunday duties after Raboy's death in 1967.  Run above "Flash Gordon", Raymond's "Jungle Jim" is described by Armando Mendez as "a thing of beauty... always more than just a topper or a shallow response to Hal Foster's exquisite "Tarzan"". The companion strip evolved over time, morphing from an initial "two tiers and up to six panels [layout], with speech balloons" into "a single row, of four very tall panels with declamatory text and static, vertical composition". Raymond's skill and artistic dexterity, however, kept the storytelling constant and the artwork vibrant. "Jungle Jim" was "set in contemporary times and the exotic Malay peninsula of islands, [but] was intended to hark back to the original tales of Kipling, Haggard and Burroughs".

Military career.

Raymond took the war in Europe seriously enough to incorporate it into his strips, with Flash returning to Earth in the Spring of 1941. Jungle Jim found himself involved in the conflict too, fighting in the U.S. Army. Raymond was becoming "restive about doing his duty", a restlessness increased by the knowledge that four of his five brothers were already enlisted. In February 1944, Raymond left King Features and his work on the Sunday "Flash Gordon"/"Jungle Jim" pages to join the US Marines, commissioned as a captain and serving in the public-relations arm. Raymond is quoted as stating "I just had to get into this fight... I've always been the kind of guy who gets a lump in his throat when a band plays the 'Star Spangled Banner'".  Shortly thereafter, he "was sent to Quantico for training in the curriculum of the Aviation Ground Officer's School," and was soon producing "posters and patriotic images from a government office in Philadelphia." His most famous image from this time is "Marines at Prayer," which "was destined to become a well-known and well-circulated image of Marines on a battlefield pausing for worship." Raymond also "designed the official 1944 Marine Corps Christmas card." Desiring "to get closer to the action," he then trained at the Marine Corps Air Station in Santa Barbara before serving in the Pacific Ocean theater "on the 1945 cruise of the escort carrier USS "Gilbert Islands"." Treated by his fellow marines (who had been raised on "Flash Gordon") as a celebrity, he was nonetheless seen as "a down-to-earth fellow," and well liked. He saw "a period of intense combat in June 1945," and was "made an honorary member of VMTB-143 in August 1945." Raymond had, in May 1945, designed a squadron patch for the men of VMTB-143, after which the "squadron adopted the new name 'The Rocket Raiders'."  He was demobilized as a major in 1946. Upon his return, Raymond was unable to return to "Flash Gordon". King Features were not prepared to usurp Austin Briggs from the Sunday strip and pointed out that Raymond had left voluntarily to enlist. Relatives of Raymond recall the artist as resenting this decision, which left him feeling "cast off with so little regard." However, King Features offered Raymond the opportunity to create a new strip.

Rip Kirby.

Raymond's "police daily strip," named after its central character – J. Remington "Rip" Kirby – debuted on March 4, 1946, conceived (and initially scripted) by King Features editor Ward Greene. The plotting of the strips is harder to attribute, the scant evidence available supporting the notion that Raymond was more than simply an illustrator. However, as was relatively commonplace on such strips, published credit went to Raymond, whose name was the major selling feature; the artist even managed to gain a part-ownership deal with King and a better split of the profits than was usual. "Rip Kirby" was Raymond's reintroduction to newspaper strips after the war, and he was quick to forge a new "up-to-date" style for the strip, while keeping ties to the audience he had built up with "Flash Gordon", "Jungle Jim", and "Secret Agent X-9".  Running alongside the post-World War II reintegration of America's military into civilian life, Rip (like Raymond) was "an ex-Marine," who "set himself up as a private detective" a vocation tailor-made to provide daily thrills.  Described by Stephen Becker as "modern and almost too intellectual", the strip eschewed many of the pulp fictional detective tropes (e.g. alcoholism, two-fisted assistants, and an assortment of interchangeable femmes fatale). Instead, "[Rip] did more cogitating than fisticuffing, and smoked a leisurely pipe while he did it;" "had a frail, balding assistant... instead of a two-fisted sidekick;" "had a steady girlfriend... [and] [i]f that wasn't enough, he even wore glasses! Rip "lived and worked in a recognizable, glamorous, modern New York City on cases involving very human frailties and vice", and "grew older as the strip progressed", a continuity advancement little seen in the strips of the time (although pioneered in "Gasoline Alley" and "Mary Worth"). Raymond noted the change in subject matter, commenting that "I wanted to do something different and more down to earth."  Stylistically, "Raymond turned to the Cooper Studio-Al Parker advertising style for inspiration, spurring a new generation of comic artists to follow a fresh direction", that of "glorify[ing] contemporary post-War American life". Although the strip was published entirely in black and white, Raymond worked hard to add tone through artistic technique. "Raymond nevertheless [colored] through his use of varying linework... [creating] color through contrast". His new style was much imitated throughout the industry and became known as 'the Raymond style'.  Circulation of the strip rose steadily, and it was the artist who was apportioned most of the praise – including being awarded the fourth Reuben Award in 1949. He also served as the National Cartoonists Society's president from 1950 until 1952, putting into place the committee structure responsible for overseeing the organization, and threw himself into championing the medium as an art form. Raymond profited in recognizability as well as financially, and continued on the strip until his untimely death in September 1956. His collaborator from 1952 was writer Fred Dickenson (who wrote the strip for a further 34 years), and he was succeeded artistically by magazine and Prize Publications' "Young Romance" illustrator John Prentice. Commentators have said that Prentice echoed the "Rip Kirby" artistic style, but lacked "Raymond's excellent design sense," although he continued to draw the strip until his retirement in 1999, the strip itself concluding shortly after.

Legacy.

In 1967, Woody Gelman reprinted in hardcover some of Raymond's earlier comic strip work under his Nostalgia Press imprint. Regarded by "Time" magazine in 1974—alongside "Prince Valiant" author-illustrator Hal Foster—as "some sort of genius", and described in Jerry Bails and Hames Ware's "Who's Who in American Comic Books" as "[p]ossibly the most influential artist on early comic books", Raymond's legacy as an artistic inspiration is immense. Harvey argued that it is because of Raymond and Foster that the illustrative style became the dominant one used for adventure strips. "His work and Foster's created the visual standard by which all such comic strips would henceforth be measured." Biographer Tom Roberts also believes Raymond's work on Rip Kirby "inspired all the soap opera style strips of the fifties and sixties". Roberts argues that strips such as "Apartment 3-G" "can trace their origins to the success of Raymond's strip". Although his work was rarely seen outside of the newspaper "funny pages", as Raymond preferred to focus his energies on strip work, he also produced a number of "illustrations for "Blue Book", "Look", "Collier's" and "Cosmopolitan"". as well as "Esquire".  The "heightened realism" of Raymond's photorealistic style has been "chastised for making his pictures too realistic, too gorgeous for its own sake", although many commentators believe that this very method "plunges the reader into the story". Raymond's work has a "timeless appeal," many aspects of which—including the use of feathering (a shading technique in which a soft series of parallel lines helps to suggest the contour of an object)—have inspired generations of cartoonists, his work becoming "the raw material for the swipe files of future generations". His work on "Rip Kirby" is especially noted for its use of "sophisticated black spotting", a technique Raymond used from c.1949 "for pacing" reasons. Fellow-cartoonist Stan Drake recalled that Raymond called his black areas "pools of quiet", serving as they did "as a pause for the viewer, something to slow the eye across the strip's panels".

Specific influences.

Alex Raymond's "influence on other cartoonists was considerable during his lifetime and did not diminish after his death". George Lucas has cited Raymond's "Flash Gordon" as a major influence on his "Star Wars" films (which, cyclically, inspired the 1980 "Flash Gordon" film), while Raymond's long shadow has fallen across the comics industry ever since his work saw print. Comics artists who have cited Raymond as a particularly significant influence on their work include Murphy Anderson, Jim Aparo, Matt Baker, Frank Brunner, John Buscema, Gene Colan, Dick Dillin, Lou Fine, José Luis García-López, Frank Giacoia, Bob Haney, Jack Katz, Everett Raymond Kinstler, Joe Kubert, Russ Manning, Mort Meskin, Sheldon Moldoff, Luis Garcia Mozos, Joe Orlando, Mac Raboy, John Romita Jr., Kurt Schaffenberger, Joe Sinnott, Dick Sprang and Alex Toth, among many others.  In particular, Raymond has been named as a key influence by many of the most influential and important comic book artists of all time. EC Comics-staple Al Williamson cites Raymond as a major influence, and is quoted as saying that Raymond was "the reason I became an artist". Indeed, Williamson ultimately assisted on the "Flash Gordon" strips in the mid-1950s, and "Rip Kirby" in the mid-1960s (all post-Raymond). Key Golden Age artists credit Raymond with influencing their work. The artistic creators of Batman (Bob Kane) and Superman (Joe Shuster) credit him (alongside Milton Caniff, Billy DeBeck and Roy Crane) as having had a strong influence on their artistic development. Decades later, the herald of the Silver Age (and co-creator of most of Marvel Comics's pantheon of heroes), Jack "King" Kirby also credits Raymond, alongside fellow strip artist Hal Foster, as a particular influence and inspiration.  Cerebus creator Dave Sim has published a comic book since 2008 called glamourpuss which is an examination of Alex Raymond's career (and the techniques of other photorealists like Stan Drake and Al Williamson) structured around a hypothetical storyline set during the last day of Raymond's life.

Personal life.

Raymond married Helen Frances Williams on December 31, 1930, with whom he had five children. The names of his three daughters—Judith, Lynne and Helen—were immortalized in that of Rip Kirby's girlfriend, Judith Lynne "Honey" Dorian. The Raymonds also had two sons: Alan W. and Duncan. He was the great-uncle of actors Matt Dillon and Kevin Dillon. His younger brother, Jim Raymond, was also a cartoonist, and also an assistant to Chic Young on "Blondie".

Death.

On September 6, 1956, Raymond was killed in an automobile accident at age 46 in Westport, Connecticut. He was driving fellow cartoonist Stan Drake's 1956 Corvette at twice the speed limit when he hit a tree and was killed. In his biography, Roberts described the circumstances as a result of the weather. Raymond was driving the convertible with its top down when the rain started to fall. He decided to reach his destination quicker rather than stop the vehicle to put the top back up. The car crashed and Drake was thrown clear, but Raymond, who was wearing his seat belt to no avail, died instantly. Speculation surrounded the nature of his death. Drake and some others believed that Raymond was suicidal. Raymond had been involved in "four" automobile accidents in the month prior to his death. This led Drake to say that Raymond "had been trying to kill himself". Author Arlen Schumer ascribed Raymond's personal life as the motive for suicide. Schumer alleged that Raymond had been having affairs and that his wife was refusing to grant him a divorce. R. C. Harvey dismissed this motivation: "Committing suicide strikes me as an odd way for a man of Raymond's sophistication to react to his disappointment in romance". Harvey also noted that no mention of any alleged affairs appears in Tom Robert's biography, "probably out of consideration to Raymond's surviving family". Drake has also been quoted as speculating that Raymond "hit the accelerator by mistake". Raymond was buried in St. John's Roman Catholic Cemetery in Darien, Connecticut.

Awards.

Alex Raymond received a Reuben Award from the National Cartoonists Society in 1949 for his work on "Rip Kirby", and he later served as president of the society in 1950 and 1951. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1996. He was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2014.  Maurice Horn calls Raymond "one of the most celebrated comic artists of all time as the creator of four outstanding comic features (a feat unequaled to this day)," noting that he "received many distinctions and awards during his lifetime for his work, both as a cartoonist and as a magazine illustrator."

Bibliography.

Raymond's work includes:

Collected editions.

Raymond's work has been collected a number of times. Most recently:

Alexander Gillespie Raymond Jr. (October 2, 1909 – September 6, 1956) was an American cartoonist who was best known for creating the "Flash Gordon" comic strip for King Features Syndicate in 1934. The strip was subsequently adapted into many other media, from three Universal movie serials in 1936, 1938, and 1940,) to a 1970s television series and a 1980 feature film.

Alexandre Gillespie Raymond (dit Alex Raymond) ( à Nouvelle-Rochelle, dans l'État de New York - à Westport, dans le Connecticut) est un dessinateur et scénariste américain de bandes dessinées, qui a notamment créé le comic strip "Flash Gordon" pour King Features en 1934. La bande dessinée a ensuite été adaptée à de nombreux autres médias, un serial de 1936 à 1940, une série télévisée dans les années 1970 et un film en 1980.


Name.

According to the company founder Ren Zhengfei, the name "Huawei" comes from a slogan he saw on a wall, "Zhonghua youwei" meaning "China has promise" (中华有为, "Zhōnghuá yǒuwéi"), when he was starting up the company and needed a name. "Zhonghua" or "Hua" means China, while "youwei" means "promising/to show promise". "Huawei" has also been translated as "splendid achievement" or "China is able" which are possible readings to the name. In Chinese pinyin, the name is "Huáwéi", and pronounced in Mandarin Chinese; in Cantonese, the name is transliterated with Jyutping as "Waa-wai" and pronounced. However, pronunciation of "Huawei" by non-Chinese varies in other countries, for example "Hoe-ah-wei" in the Netherlands. The company had considered changing the name in English as it was concerned that non-Chinese may find the name hard to pronounce, but decided to keep the name, and launched a name recognition campaign instead to encourage a pronunciation closer to "Wah-Way" using the words "Wow Way".

History.

Early years.

During the 1980s, the Chinese government tried to modernize the country's underdeveloped telecommunications infrastructure. A core component of the telecommunications network was telephone exchange switches, and in the late 1980s, several Chinese research groups endeavored to acquire and develop the technology, usually through joint ventures with foreign companies.  Ren Zhengfei, a former deputy director of the People's Liberation Army engineering corps, founded Huawei in 1987 in Shenzhen. The company reports that it had RMB 21,000 in registered capital at the time of its founding (about $5,000 at the time).  Ren sought to reverse engineer foreign technologies with local researchers. At a time when all of China's telecommunications technology was imported from abroad, Ren hoped to build a domestic Chinese telecommunication company that could compete with, and ultimately replace, foreign competitors.  During its first several years the company's business model consisted mainly of reselling private branch exchange (PBX) switches imported from Hong Kong. Meanwhile, it was reverse-engineering imported switches and investing heavily in research and development to manufacture its own technologies. By 1990 the company had approximately 600 R&D staff and began its own independent commercialization of PBX switches targeting hotels and small enterprises.  The company's first major breakthrough came in 1993 when it launched its C&C08 program controlled telephone switch. It was by far the most powerful switch available in China at the time. By initially deploying in small cities and rural areas and placing emphasis on service and customizability, the company gained market share and made its way into the mainstream market.  Huawei also won a key contract to build the first national telecommunications network for the People's Liberation Army, a deal one employee described as "small in terms of our overall business, but large in terms of our relationships". In 1994, founder Ren Zhengfei had a meeting with Party general secretary Jiang Zemin, telling him that "switching equipment technology was related to national security, and that a nation that did not have its own switching equipment was like one that lacked its own military." Jiang reportedly agreed with this assessment.  In the 1990s Canadian telecom giant Nortel outsourced production of their entire product line to Huawei. They subsequently outsourced much of their product engineering to Huawei as well.  Another major turning point for the company came in 1996 when the government in Beijing adopted an explicit policy of supporting domestic telecommunications manufacturers and restricting access to foreign competitors. Huawei was promoted by both the government and the military as a national champion, and established new research and development offices.

Foreign expansion.

In 1997, Huawei won a contract to provide fixed-line network products to Hong Kong company Hutchison Whampoa. Later that year, Huawei launched its wireless GSM-based products and eventually expanded to offer CDMA and UMTS. In 1999, the company opened a research and development (R&D) center in Bangalore, India to develop a wide range of telecom software.  In May 2003, Huawei partnered with 3Com on a joint venture known as H3C, which was focused on enterprise networking equipment. It marked 3Com's re-entrance into the high-end core routers and switch market, after having abandoned it in 2000 to focus on other businesses. 3Com bought out Huawei's share of the venture in 2006 for US$882 million.  In 2004, Huawei signed a $10 billion credit line with the China Development Bank (CDB) to provide low-cost financing to customers buying its telecommunications equipment to support its sales outside of China. This line of credit was tripled to $30 billion in 2009.  In 2005, Huawei's foreign contract orders exceeded its domestic sales for the first time. Huawei signed a Global Framework Agreement with Vodafone. This agreement marked the first time a telecommunications equipment supplier from China had received Approved Supplier status from Vodafone Global Supply Chain. Huawei also signed a contract with British Telecom (BT) for the deployment of its multi-service access network (MSAN) and Transmission equipment for BT's 21st Century Network (21CN).  In 2007, Huawei began a joint venture with U.S. security software vendor Symantec Corporation, known as Huawei Symantec, which aimed to provide end-to-end solutions for network data storage and security. Huawei bought out Symantec's share in the venture in 2012, with "The New York Times" noting that Symantec had fears that the partnership "would prevent it from obtaining United States government classified information about cyberthreats".  In May 2008, Australian carrier Optus announced that it would establish a technology research facility with Huawei in Sydney. In October 2008, Huawei reached an agreement to contribute to a new GSM-based HSPA+ network being deployed jointly by Canadian carriers Bell Mobility and Telus Mobility, joined by Nokia Siemens Networks. Huawei delivered one of the world's first LTE/EPC commercial networks for TeliaSonera in Oslo, Norway in 2009.  In July 2010, Huawei was included in the Global Fortune 500 2010 list published by the U.S. magazine "Fortune" for the first time, on the strength of annual sales of US$21.8 billion and net profit of US$2.67 billion.  In October 2012, it was announced that Huawei would move its UK headquarters to Green Park, Reading, Berkshire.  In September 2017, Huawei created a NarrowBand IOT city-aware network using a "one network, one platform, N applications" construction model utilizing IoT, cloud computing, big data, and other next-generation information and communications technology, it also aims to be one of the world's five largest cloud players in the near future.  In April 2019, Huawei established Huawei Malaysia Global Training Centre (MGTC) at Cyberjaya, Malaysia, which is Huawei's first training center outside of China.

Recent performance.

As of the end of 2018, Huawei sold 200 million smartphones. They reported that strong consumer demand for premium range smart phones helped the company reach consumer sales in excess of $52 billion in 2018.  Huawei announced worldwide revenues of $105.1 billion for 2018, with a net profit of $8.7 billion. Huawei's Q1 2019 revenues were up 39% year-over-year, at US$26.76 billion.  In 2019, Huawei reported revenue of US$122 billion.

Corporate affairs.

Huawei classifies itself as a "collective" entity and prior to 2019 did not refer to itself as a private company. Richard McGregor, author of "", said that this is "a definitional distinction that has been essential to the company's receipt of state support at crucial points in its development". McGregor argued that "Huawei's status as a genuine collective is doubtful." Huawei's position has shifted in 2019 when, Dr. Song Liuping, Huawei's chief legal officer, commented on the US government ban, said: "Politicians in the US are using the strength of an entire nation to come after "a private company"." (emphasis added).

Leadership.

Ren Zhengfei is the founder and CEO of Huawei and has the power to veto any decisions made by the board of directors.

Board of Directors.

Huawei disclosed its list of board of directors for the first time in 2010. Liang Hua is the current chair of the board., the members of the board are Liang Hua, Guo Ping, Xu Zhijun, Hu Houkun, Meng Wanzhou (CFO and deputy chairwoman, currently out on bail in Vancouver, after being arrested there on December 1, 2018, after an extradition request of US authorities on suspicion of Iran sanctions evasion), Ding Yun, Yu Chengdong, Wang Tao, Xu Wenwei, Shen-Han Chiu, Chen Lifang, Peng Zhongyang, He Tingbo, Li Yingtao, Ren Zhengfei, Yao Fuhai, Tao Jingwen, and Yan Lida.

Executives.

Guo Ping is the Chairman of Huawei Device, Huawei's mobile phone division. Huawei's Chief Ethics & Compliance Officer is Zhou Daiqi who is also Huawei's Communist Party Committee Secretary. Their Chief legal officer is Song Liuping.

Ownership.

Huawei claims it is an employee-owned company, but it remains a point of dispute. Ren Zhengfei retains approximately 1 percent of the shares of Huawei's holding company, Huawei Investment & Holding, with the remainder of the shares held by a trade union "committee" (not a trade union per se, and the internal governance procedures of this committee, its members, its leaders or how they are selected all remain undisclosed to the public) that is claimed to be representative of Huawei's employee shareholders. The company's trade union committee is registered with and pay dues to the Shenzhen federation of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is controlled by the Communist Party of China. This is also due to a limitation in Chinese law preventing limited liability companies from having more than 50 shareholders. About half of Huawei staff participate in this scheme (foreign employees are not eligible), and hold what the company calls "virtual restricted shares". These shares are non-tradable and are allocated to reward performance. When employees leave Huawei, their shares revert to the company, which compensates them for their holding. Although employee shareholders receive dividends, their shares do not entitle them to any direct influence in management decisions, but enables them to vote for members of the 115-person Representatives’ Commission from a pre-selected list of candidates. The Representatives’ Commission selects Huawei Holding's Board of Directors and Board of Supervisors.  Scholars have found that, after a few stages of historical morphing, employees do not own a part of Huawei through their “shares”. Instead, the “virtual stock is a contract right, not a property right; it gives the holder no voting power in either Huawei Tech or Huawei Holding, cannot be transferred, and is cancelled when the employee leaves the firm, subject to a redemption payment from Huawei Holding TUC at a low fixed price”. The same scholars added, "given the public nature of trade unions in China, if the ownership stake of the trade union committee is genuine, and if the trade union and its committee function as trade unions generally function in China, then Huawei may be deemed effectively state-owned."  In September 2019 Huawei filed a defamation lawsuit against a French researcher and a television show which had hosted her. The researcher, with the Foundation for Strategic Research, had noted that Ren Zhengfei was a former PLA member and that Huawei functions as an arm of the Chinese government. This was the first time Huawei had sued a researcher for defamation for stating common opinions and recognized facts.

Partners.

, approximately 80% of the world's top 50 telecoms companies had worked with Huawei.  Prominent partners include:  Since 2016, German camera company Leica has established a partnership with Huawei, and Leica cameras will be co-engineered into Huawei smartphones, including the P and Mate Series. The first smartphone to be co-engineered with a Leica camera was the Huawei P9.  In 2020, Huawei partners with Dutch navigation device company TomTom for Google map alternative.

Products and services.

Huawei is organized around three core business segments:  Huawei announced its Enterprise business in January 2011 to provide network infrastructure, fixed and wireless communication, data center, and cloud computing solutions for global telecommunications customers.

Telecommunication networks.

Huawei's core network solutions offer mobile and fixed softswitches, plus next-generation home location register and Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystems (IMS). Huawei sells xDSL, passive optical network (PON) and next-generation PON (NG PON) on a single platform. The company also offers mobile infrastructure, broadband access and service provider routers and switches (SPRS). Huawei's software products include service delivery platforms (SDPs), BSSs, Rich Communication Suite and digital home and mobile office solutions.

Global services.

Huawei Global Services provides telecommunications operators with equipment to build and operate networks as well as consulting and engineering services to improve operational efficiencies. These include network integration services such as those for mobile and fixed networks; assurance services such as network safety; and learning services, such as competency consulting.

Devices.

Huawei's Devices division provides white-label products to content-service providers, including USB modems, wireless modems and wireless routers for mobile Wi-Fi, embedded modules, fixed wireless terminals, wireless gateways, set-top boxes, mobile handsets and video products. Huawei also produces and sells a variety of devices under its own name, such as the IDEOS smartphones, tablet PCs and Huawei Smartwatch.

Phones.

Huawei is the second-biggest smartphone maker in the world, after Samsung, as of the first quarter of 2019. Their portfolio of phones includes both high-end smartphones, its Huawei Mate series and Huawei P series, and cheaper handsets that fall under its Honor brand.

History of Huawei phones.

In July 2003, Huawei established their handset department and by 2004, Huawei shipped their first phone, the C300. The U626 was Huawei's first 3G phone in June 2005 and in 2006, Huawei launched the first Vodafone-branded 3G handset, the V710. The U8220 was Huawei's first Android smartphone and was unveiled in MWC 2009. At CES 2012, Huawei introduced the Ascend range starting with the Ascend P1 S. At MWC 2012, Huawei launched the Ascend D1. In September 2012, Huawei launched their first 4G ready phone, the Ascend P1 LTE. At CES 2013, Huawei launched the Ascend D2 and the Ascend Mate. At MWC 2013, the Ascend P2 was launched as the world's first LTE Cat4 smartphone. In June 2013, Huawei launched the Ascend P6 and in December 2013, Huawei introduced Honor as a subsidiary independent brand in China. At CES 2014, Huawei launched the Ascend Mate2 4G in 2014 and at MWC 2014, Huawei launched the MediaPad X1 tablet and Ascend G6 4G smartphone. Other launched in 2014 included the Ascend P7 in May 2014, the Ascend Mate7, the Ascend G7 and the Ascend P7 Sapphire Edition as China's first 4G smartphone with a sapphire screen.  In January 2015, Huawei discontinued the "Ascend" brand for its flagship phones, and launched the new P series with the Huawei P8. Huawei also partnered with Google to build the Nexus 6P in 2015.  The current models in the P and Mate lines, the Mate 30, Mate 30 Pro, Mate 30 5G, Mate 30 Pro 5G P30, P30 Pro, Mate 20, Mate 20 Pro and Mate 20 X were released in 2018 and 2019.

Laptops.

In 2016, Huawei entered the laptop markets with the release of its Huawei MateBook series of laptops. They have continued to release laptop models in this series into 2020 with their most recent models being the MateBook X Pro and Matebook 13 2020.

Tablets.

The HUAWEI MatePad Pro, launched in November 2019. Huawei is number one in the Chinese tablet market and number two globally as of 4Q 2019.

Wearables.

The Huawei Watch is an Android Wear-based smartwatch developed by Huawei. It was announced at 2015 Mobile World Congress on March 1, 2015, and was released at Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin on September 2, 2015. It is the first smartwatch produced by Huawei. Their latest watch, the Huawei Watch GT 2e, was launched in India in May, 2020.

Software.

EMUI (Emotion User Interface).

Emotion UI (EMUI) is a ROM/OS developed by Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and based on Google's Android Open Source Project (AOSP). EMUI is pre-installed on most Huawei Smartphone devices and its subsidiaries the Honor series. The latest version of EMUI is EMUI 10.

Harmony OS.

On 9 August 2019, Huawei officially unveiled Harmony OS at its inaugural developers' conference in Dongguan. Huawei described Harmony as a free, microkernel-based distributed operating system for various types of hardware, with faster inter-process communication than QNX or Google's "Fuchsia" microkernel, and real-time resource allocation. The ARK compiler can be used to port Android APK packages to the OS. Huawei stated that developers would be able to "flexibly" deploy Harmony OS software across various device categories; the company focused primarily on IoT devices, including "smart displays", wearable devices, and in-car entertainment systems, and did not explicitly position Harmony OS as a mobile OS.

Huawei Mobile Services (HMS).

Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) is Huawei's app store created as a competitor to Google's Android Play Store. As of December, 2019 it was in version 4.0 and as of January 16, 2020 the company reports it has signed up 55,000 apps using its HMS Core software.

Competitive position.

Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is the world's largest telecom equipment maker and China's largest telephone-network equipment maker. With 3,442 patents, Huawei became the world's No. 1 applicant for international patents in 2014.

R&D centers.

It has 21 R&D institutes in countries including China, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Finland, France, Belgium, Germany, Colombia, Sweden, Ireland, India, Russia, Israel, and Turkey.  Huawei is considering opening a new research and development (R&D) center in Russia (2019/2020), which would be the third in the country after the Moscow and St. Petersburg R&D centers. Huawei also announced plans (November 2018) to open an R&D center in the French city of Grenoble, which would be mainly focused on smartphone sensors and parallel computing software development. The new R&D team in Grenoble was expected to grow to 30 researchers by 2020, said the company. The company said that this new addition brought to five the number of its R&D teams in the country: two were located in Sophia Antipolis and Paris, researching image processing and design, while the other two existing teams were based at Huawei's facilities in Boulogne-Billancourt, working on algorithms and mobile and 5G standards. The technology giant also intended to open two new research centers in Zürich and Lausanne, Switzerland. Huawei at the time employed around 350 people in Switzerland.  Huawei also funds research partnerships with universities such as the University of British Columbia, the University of Waterloo, the University of Western Ontario, the University of Guelph, and Université Laval.

Criticism and controversies.

Huawei has faced criticism for various aspects of its operations, with its most prominent controversies having involved U.S. allegations of its products containing backdoors for Chinese government espionage—consistent with domestic laws requiring Chinese citizens and companies to cooperate with state intelligence when warranted. Huawei executives have consistently denied these allegations, having stated that the company has never received any requests by the Chinese government to introduce backdoors in its equipment, would refuse to do so, and that Chinese law did not compel them to do so.

Espionage.

Huawei has been at the center of espionage allegations over Chinese 5G network equipment. In 2018, the United States passed a defense funding bill that contained a passage barring the federal government from doing business with Huawei, ZTE, and several Chinese vendors of surveillance products, due to security concerns. The Chinese government has threatened economic retaliation against countries that block Huawei's market access.

Allegations of fraudulent conspiracy to subvert sanctions against Iran.

In December 2012, Reuters reported the "deep links" existed as early as 2010 between Huawei through Meng Wanzhou (who was then CFO of the firm) and an Iranian telecom importer named Skycom. The US had long-standing sanctions on Iran, including against the importation of US technology goods into Iran. On August 22, 2018, a New York court issues an arrest warrant for Meng to stand trial in the United States. On 1 December 2018, Meng, was arrested in Canada at the request of U.S. authorities. She faced extradition to the United States on charges of violating the sanctions regime.  On 28 January 2019, U.S. federal prosecutors formally indicted Meng and Huawei with 13 counts of bank and wire fraud (in order to mask the sale that is illegal under sanctions of U.S. technology to Iran), obstruction of justice, and misappropriating trade secrets. The Department also filed a formal extradition request for Meng with Canadian authorities that same day. Huawei responded to the charges and said that it "denies that it or its subsidiary or affiliate have committed any of the asserted violations", as well as asserted Meng was similarly innocent. The China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology believed the charges brought on by the United States were "unfair".  The case for extradition of Meng to the US to face charges is ongoing as of May, 2020 with the B.C. Supreme Court judge on May 27, 2020 ruling that extradition proceedings against the Huawei executive should proceed, denying the claim of double criminality brought by Meng's defense team.

Exploitable backdoors.

In February 2020, US government officials claimed that Huawei has had the ability to covertly exploit backdoors intended for law enforcement officials in carrier equipment like antennas and routers since 2009.

Allegations of intellectual property theft.

Huawei has been accused of various instances of intellectual property theft against parties such as Nortel, Cisco Systems, and T-Mobile US (where a Huawei employee had photographed a robotic arm used to stress-test smartphones and taken a fingertip from the robot). The management of the company claims the US government persecutes it because Huawei's expansion can affect American business interests. In February 2020, the United States Department of Justice charged Huawei with racketeering and conspiring to steal trade secrets from six U.S. firms.

Allegations of involvement in Xinjiang re-education camps.

In 2019, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute accused Huawei of assisting in the mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang re-education camps. Huawei technology is regarded as critical to the Chinese government's pervasive system of surveillance of Uyghurs and other ethnic minority groups.

U.S. business restrictions.

In August 2018, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (NDAA 2019) was signed into law, containing a provision that banned Huawei and ZTE equipment from being used by the U.S. federal government, citing security concerns. Huawei filed a lawsuit over the act in March 2019, alleging it to be unconstitutional because it specifically targeted Huawei without granting it a chance to provide a rebuttal or due process.  Additionally, on 15 May 2019, the Department of Commerce added Huawei and 70 foreign subsidiaries and "affiliates" to its entity list under the Export Administration Regulations, citing the company having been indicted for "knowingly and willfully causing the export, re-export, sale and supply, directly and indirectly, of goods, technology and services (banking and other financial services) from the United States to Iran and the government of Iran without obtaining a license from the Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)". This restricts U.S. companies from doing business with Huawei without a government license. Various U.S.-based companies immediately froze their business with Huawei to comply with the regulation.  These actions have negatively effected Huawei production, sales and financial projections. However, on 29 June 2019 at the G20 summit, the US President made statements implicating plans to ease the restrictions on U.S. companies doing business with Huawei. Despite this statement, on 15 May 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce extended its export restrictions to bar Huawei from producing semiconductors derived from technology or software of U.S. origin, even if the manufacturing is performed overseas.

Replacement operating systems.

During the sanctions, it was noted that Huawei had been working on its own in-house operating system codenamed "HongMeng OS": in an interview with "Die Welt", executive Richard Yu stated that an in-house OS could be used as a "plan B" if it were prevented from using Android or Windows as the result of U.S. action. Huawei filed trademarks for the names "Ark", "Ark OS", and "Harmony" in Europe, which were speculated to be connected to this OS. On 9 August 2019, Huawei officially unveiled Harmony OS at its inaugural developers' conference in Dongguan with the ARK compiler which can be used to port Android APK packages to the OS.  In September 2019, Huawei began offering the Chinese Linux distribution Deepin as an optional pre-loaded operating system on selected Matebook models in China, as an alternative to Windows.

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. (; ) is a Chinese multinational technology company. It provides telecommunications equipment and sells consumer electronics, smartphones and is headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong.

Huawei ( ; en ), officiellement Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. (en ), est une entreprise fondée en 1987, dont le siège social se trouve à Shenzhen en Chine et qui fournit des solutions dans le secteur des technologies de l'information et de la communication (TIC).


Early life and family.

Born the son of, a minor samurai in the service of the Matsudaira (later Tokugawa) clan. He would later earn the nickname because of the fearless tactics he displayed in his operations; this is to distinguish him from Watanabe Hanzo (Watanabe Moritsuna), who is nicknamed.  Though Hanzō was born in Mikawa Province (now Iga-chō, Okazaki, Aichi), he often returned to Iga Province, home of the Hattori family. He fought his first battle, a nighttime attack on Udo Castle 1557, at the age of sixteen; made a successful hostage rescue of Tokugawa's daughters in Kaminogō Castle in 1562; and went on to lay siege to Kakegawa Castle in 1569. He served with distinction at the battles of Anegawa (1570) and Mikatagahara (1572).  According to the "Kansei Chōshū Shokafu", a genealogy of major samurai completed in 1812 by the Tokugawa shogunate, Hattori Hanzō rendered meritorious service during the Battle of Mikatagahara and became commander of an Iga unit consisting of one hundred fifty men. He captured a Takeda spy named Chikuan, and when Takeda's troops invaded Totomi, Hanzō counterattacked with only thirty men at the Tenryū River.

Military career.

Masanari had a great contribution to Tokugawa Ieyasu's rise to power, helping the future Shogun bring down the Imagawa after Imagawa Ujizane had held Ieyasu's wife and son as hostages in 1561. His most valuable contribution came in 1582 following Oda Nobunaga's death, when he led the future "shōgun" Tokugawa Ieyasu to safety in Mikawa Province across Iga territory with the help of remnants of the local Iga ji-zamurai clans as well as the neighboring local samurai families in the nearby Koka region. According to some sources, Hanzō also helped in rescuing the captured family of Ieyasu.  Hattori served during the siege of Odawara and was awarded 8,000 "koku". By the time Ieyasu entered Kantō, he was awarded an additional 8,000 "koku" and had 30 yoriki and 200 public officials for his services. Ieyasu was said to have also begun to employ more Iga ninja with Hanzō as their leader. Hanzō was known as an expert tactician and a master of sword fighting. Historical sources say he lived the last several years of his life as a monk under the name "Sainen" and built the temple Sainenji, which was named after him and mainly built to commemorate Tokugawa Ieyasu's elder son, Nobuyasu. Nobuyasu was accused of treason and conspiracy by Oda Nobunaga and was then ordered to commit seppuku by his father, Ieyasu. Hanzo was called in to act as the official second to end Nobuyasu's suffering, but he refused to take the sword on the blood of his own lord. Ieyasu valued his loyalty after hearing of Hanzo's ordeal and said, "Even a demon can shed tears."  He died at the age of 54.

Legacy.

Tales of Hattori's exploits often attributed various supernatural abilities, such as teleportation, psychokinesis, and precognition, and these attributions contribute to his continued prominence in popular culture.  After his death on 4 November 1596, Hattori Hanzō was succeeded by his son, whose name was also Masanari, though written with different kanji. He was given the title of Iwami no Kami and his Iga men would act as guards of Edo Castle, the headquarters of the government of united Japan. Hanzō is actually a name passed down through the leaders of the Hattori family meaning his father was also called Hanzō and so was his successor. Indeed, there are five people known as Hattori Hanzō throughout history  To this day, artifacts of Hanzō's legacy remain. Tokyo Imperial Palace (formerly the "shōgun"s palace) still has a gate called Hanzō's Gate (Hanzōmon), and the Hanzōmon subway line which runs from Hanzōmon Station in central Tokyo to the southwestern suburbs is named after the gate, where his house was once located. The neighborhood outside Hanzō's Gate is known as Wakaba, but before 1943 was named Iga-chō ("Iga Town"). Hanzō's remains now rest in the Sainen-ji temple cemetery in Yotsuya, Tokyo. The temple also holds his favorite spear and his ceremonial battle helmet. The spear, originally long and given to him by Ieyasu, was donated to the temple by Hanzō as a votive offering, but was damaged during the bombing of Tokyo in 1945.  Hattori Hanzō makes frequent appearance in popular culture, both within Japan and abroad. In modern popular culture he is most often portrayed as involved with the Iga ninja clansmen.

, also known as and nicknamed, was a famous "Samurai" of the Sengoku era, credited with saving the life of Tokugawa Ieyasu and then helping him to become the ruler of united Japan. He is often a subject of varied portrayal in modern popular culture.

, connu aussi avec le prénom, né en 1541 ou 1542 et mort le, était un célèbre ninja et samouraï japonais. Sa férocité au combat lui valut d'être surnommé.


Character biography.

Bender, a high-tech industrial metalworking robot, was built in 2996 at Fábrica Robótica De La Madre (Spanish: "Mom's Robot Factory"), a manufacturing facility of Mom's Friendly Robot Company in Tijuana, Mexico. However, the story of his construction remains a mystery. Although different creation processes have been shown, Cohen has stated that the viewer has only been shown Bender emerging from the machine that created him, while what happened inside the machine has not yet been revealed. According to one version, suggested by Hermes' flashback, and also by a reverse aging process shown in the episode "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles", a newborn Bender possessed a baby-like body. In "Bendless Love", however, Bender is portrayed with a normal, adult-sized body in a flashback sequence conveying his memory of coming into existence. As Bender's memory contains an adult form, the episode's content suggests that the character might actually be recalling a transfer to an adult body, rather than the moment of creation.  Unlike most other robots, Bender is mortal and, according to Professor Farnsworth's calculations, may have less than one billion years to live. Because of a manufacturing error that left Bender without a backup unit, Bender's memory cannot be transferred or uploaded to another robot body. After reporting that defect to his manufacturer, Bender barely escapes death from a guided missile and a robot death squad dispatched by Mom in order to eliminate him and effectively take the defective product off the market.  At the factory, Bender was programmed for cold-bending structural steel. Bender later attended Bending State University, where he majored in bending and minored in Robo-American Studies. At the university, he was a member of Epsilon Rho Rho (ERR), a robot fraternity, where he became something of a fraternity hero for his many shenanigans: one night he chugged an entire keg of beer, streaked across campus, and stuffed 58 people into a telephone booth (although he concedes they were mostly children).  Before meeting Fry and Leela and joining Planet Express (where he currently works as the assistant manager of sales), Bender had a job at the metalworking factory, bending steel girders for the construction of suicide booths.  Bender has an apartment in the "Robot Arms Apts." building, where he eventually invites his best friend and coworker, Fry, to live with him. Although the pair enjoy living together, Bender is sometimes portrayed as manipulating his guileless friend. In the series' early episodes, Bender is shown preferring to occupy smaller areas of their apartment, like the closet, referring to them as "cozy", although in later episodes he is shown to have his own individual bedroom, like Fry.  Throughout the series, he enters many romantic relationships of varying duration, and is commonly referred to as a womanizer by his friends. He does not seem to discriminate between human women and their robot or "fem-bot" counterparts, and is shown actively pursuing both. Likewise, his taste in fem-bot partners does not seem to be affected by the fem-bot's height or weight, and he is shown numerous times chasing fem-bots of all builds. In "Proposition Infinity", Bender's secret affair with coworker Amy Wong leads to a referendum that, once approved, legalizes robosexuality. In "The Bots and the Bees", he has a sexual encounter with a fem-bot soda vending machine that leads to the almost-instantaneous birth of a son, whom he names Ben, after the first part of his own name.  Professor Farnsworth describes Bender to be constructed of an alloy of iron and osmium. Bender hates magnets, as magnets interfere with his inhibition unit, causing him to uncontrollably start singing folk songs when near his head; and also causing him to reveal his secret ambition to be a folk singer. He is once able to attach a magnetic small faux-beard underneath his mouth without breaking into song. Bender also has a near-pathological fear of electric can openers.

Character.

Creation.

Bender's visual design went through multiple changes before reaching its final state. One of the decisions which Groening found to be particularly difficult was whether Bender's head should be square or round. Initially he worked under the idea that all robots would have square heads in the year 3000; however, it was later decided that Bender's head should be round, a visual play on the idea that Bender is a "round peg in a square hole".

Voice.

When casting for "Futurama", Bender's voice was the most difficult to cast, in part because the show's creators had not yet decided what robots should sound like. Because of this, every voice actor who auditioned, no matter for what role, was also asked to read for Bender. After about 300 auditions, even series co-creator Cohen attempted to audition after being told he sounded like a robot. John DiMaggio was eventually chosen for the role after his second audition.  DiMaggio originally auditioned using his Bender voice for the role of Professor Farnsworth and used a voice later used for URL the police robot for Bender. He describes the voice he got the part with as a combination of a sloppy drunk, Slim Pickens, and a character one of his college friends created named "Charlie the sausage-lover". Casting directors liked that he made the character sound like a drunk, rather than an automaton. DiMaggio has noted that he had difficulty singing as Bender in "Hell Is Other Robots" because he was forced to sing the harmony part in a low key.

Design.

Bender's factory-set height is 5 ft. 6 in. (168 cm); 6 ft. (183 cm) including his antenna. In "The Farnsworth Parabox", Bender states that he flipped a coin to decide his color, ending up with foghat gray rather than gold. In "The Cyber House Rules", Bender shows the kids a black-and-white mug shot of himself taken after his arrest for theft. In "Time Keeps on Slippin'", Bender is shown trying to join a basketball team and makes himself taller by simply extending his legs. His body has a "shiny metal ass", two legs, two "Extens-o-matic" arms with three fingers each, a head with two replaceable eyes shaped like light-emitting diodes, and a mouth used for fuel intake and voice communication. In "Bender Gets Made", Bender claims he also has a nose, but he chooses not to wear it. Bender's human-like characteristics are reinforced by his display of behaviors often regarded as exclusive to humans, such as whistling, snoring, having bloodshot eyes, crying, feeling physical attraction, being tickled, dreaming, and belching.  Other bending units of the same model as Bender, such as Flexo, share the same hardware design, but differ in terms of their personality and behavior. For example, Flexo shows personality traits similar to those of Bender but is not quite as "evil" as Bender. In the episode "Mother's Day", Leela looks through a simulation of a bending unit's sight, which targets potential rubes and then denotes a plan to rob them and leave them in a ditch, implying that all bending robots are somewhat prone to theft and amoral by design. However, another unit, Billy West (named after the series voice actor of the same name), is helpful and kind, though he lives as a farmer on the Moon and insists on not being a bending unit.  Bender's serial number, 2716057, can be expressed as the sum of two cubes, which is humorous to Bender and Flexo after Flexo reveals that his serial number has the same characteristic (also, Bender’s designation 1729 is a taxicab number).

Functions.

Bender was designed specifically for the relatively simple task of bending straight metal girders into various angles. Despite this apparent simplicity, he possesses numerous features superfluous to his original purpose, which become more apparent after an electric jolt to his antenna from an overhead light socket in the pilot episode. The scope of Bender's functionality is impressive; he often acts as if he were a multifunctional gadget rather than a special bending machine. Similar to a contemporary computer, he hosts a number of input/output devices: his head has a data socket and remotely operated volume control. His body has a socket for a microphone jack, a dual-socket power receptacle, a reset button, a kill switch, and a self-destruct button. Having the hardware-based self-destruct control on his body, rather than in his software, prevents Bender from committing suicide in "A Head in the Polls" when he pawns everything but his head, grows desperate without it and desires to kill himself.  Bender is capable of disassembling and reassembling his body at will and operating each detached body part individually and remotely, presumably by using his transmitter and antenna to send wireless signals. His head can be used for a wide range of functions, whether attached to his body or not. In one episode, Leela reassembles Bender into a functioning go-kart (albeit in an event shown in the "What-If" machine).  Bender uses his chest cavity as a locker, which seems to store much more than is physically possible; it is often used to store heads in jars, small children, alcohol, money, loot, the world's last darkroom, and, on a few occasions, Fry. In "The Route of All Evil", the cavity was also used as a boil kettle, hopback and fermentation tank to produce home-made beer. Upon inspection of his body, it appears to be empty, though devices like the F-Ray reveal that, despite appearing hollow, Bender's body contains gears and other robotic components.  Being an electronic machine, he can perform quick mathematical calculations, but admits to being a poor calculator.

Build.

As a bending unit, Bender possesses extraordinary strength, which he often demonstrates by lifting heavy objects, smashing through walls, and even bending an enormous steel girder marked "UNBENDABLE" (in "Bendless Love"). His mechanical nature also makes him far more durable than the rest of the cast, capable of surviving gunfire, explosions, extreme heat, deep water, or hard vacuum.  Even when his body is seemingly destroyed or completely detached from his head, it has no effect on Bender's ability to think and communicate, indicating that his main processing facilities are located in his head. Bender's hardware is controlled by a factory-loaded operating system, which reboots upon incidental shutdown and automatically adjusts its settings to the environment detected at the time of rebooting. For example, in "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz", when Bender reboots, his visual sensors detect a colony of penguins, prompting his boot loader to re-initialize him with penguin-like behavior and language.  He is equipped with a vast capacity of computer data storage, in excess of 100,001 terabytes- 1 TB for general storage and 100,000 TB for the storage of pornography, though in "Overclockwise" Cubert Farnsworth deletes 12 TB of outdated catchphrases from Bender. Presumably either Bender has a separate "catchphrase drive" or the majority of the catchphrases are also pornographic.

Source of energy.

Bender is powered by alcohol-based fuels, which he can convert into an electrical power source sufficient to operate not only himself, but also small household appliances plugged into his power receptacle. Low alcohol intake levels decrease his production of electricity: when he stops drinking and begins to "sober", his behavior grows increasingly ebrious and dysfunctional, and he grows a red beard of rust. He is also, apparently, able to sustain himself by consuming mineral oil, though he considers this to be only 'functional'.  Due to Professor Farnsworth's flawed design, the energy conversion process inside Bender's body produces an inordinate amount of waste gases and heat. He can expel these products from his rear end or, more often, as a flaming belch.  He also has a nuclear pile inside his body, as seen in "Godfellas". However, its location and purpose are not clear.

Personality.

Bender often exhibits sociopathic behavior; he is a pathological liar and rarely shows any empathy (his most frequent catchphrase to any bothersome person is "Bite my shiny metal ass!"). He has a mostly voluntary morality and constantly steals, ranging from the petty theft of wallets to crimes such as kidnapping Jay Leno's head and stealing Fry's blood and kidney. He also once stole Amy's earrings while giving her a hug. It was shown in "Roswell That Ends Well" that even in a disassembled state, his individual limbs carry on attempting to steal anything in proximity; the hand on his dismembered arm steals a wallet out of a scientist's pocket before becoming inactive again.  He is shown throughout the series as having a secret desire to be a folk musician that only manifests itself when a magnet is placed on or near his head. This desire is finally fulfilled in the episode "Bendin' in the Wind": an accident involving a giant can opener leaves him with a mutilated chest and paralyzed from the neck down. An encounter with Beck during his hospitalization leads to his becoming lead washboard player and the two teaming up for a musical tour that turns Bender into a folk hero for other broken robots, only for his career to end when he finally recovers. He is also fascinated with cooking, being the chef of the "Planet Express Ship", though he is shown to have no sense of actual taste. In fact, his early dinners were so horrible that even the omnivorous Zoidberg could not eat it. In his first attempt, he creates a dinner for the crew that is so over-salted they all gag (which is aggravated further when their drinks turn out to be "salt with water in them"); he then remarks that the food was fine since the salt content was 10% below a lethal dose. In "The Problem with Popplers", he creates dinner consisting of nothing but capers and baking soda, and mistakenly expresses his belief that humans eat rocks. He seems to improve his cooking skills over the series, cooking a lavish cake for Nibbler's birthday party and beating Elzar for the title of Iron Cook (though he uses a potion called "The Essence of Pure Flavor", which consists of water and a generous portion of LSD to make the judges hallucinate that his food tastes good). In "Into the Wild Green Yonder", he mistakenly bakes prison guards a cake with nutmeg thinking it was a natural human sleep drug, before being corrected by Amy that nutmeg is in fact a baking ingredient.  As a robot, he possesses an incredible amount of patience. In "Roswell That Ends Well", he is shown to wait over a thousand years in sand after his head is lost during a trip back in time to 1947, as well as many thousands of years in caverns under New New York City (although on this occasion he was also in the presence of multiple alternate versions of himself that had previously made the same 'trip'). Despite the long wait, it is implied that Bender does not power down, apparently enjoying his own company so much that he does not consider it necessary. However, in one episode, he shows next to no patience as a one-time joke.  Although the consumption of alcohol is necessitated by Bender's design and should not be generally viewed as a vice for alcohol-fueled robots, he apparently drinks far more than he needs for energy. His excessive drinking contributes to his characterization as an alcoholic ("Hell Is Other Robots" reveals that robots can function equally well on mineral oil instead of alcohol, also contributing to the perception of Bender's alcohol use as a vice). If he is deprived of alcohol, for instance during periods of depression, he ceases to function properly and shows signs similar to human drunkenness, including developing a rusty five o'clock shadow. As noted above, his disembodied head has survived for millennia with, presumably, no source of alcohol, so it may be that, when a mere head, Bender neither requires alcohol nor suffers from its absence.  When he is sufficiently frightened or sickened, bricks fall from his backside (a reference to the slang "shitting bricks"). When sufficiently fascinated by something, he may pull out a camera and snap a picture, adding the catchphrase "Neat!". He has also been shown to be able to use his eyes as cameras. In addition to drinking, he also has an affinity for cigars, which he ignites with a lighter built into his finger, although in "Decision 3012" he uses a Zippo. Unlike drinking alcohol for fuel, Bender tells Fry that he smokes cigars simply because they "make [him] look cool".  Despite being a robot, he has been seen to show emotion on many occasions, going so far as to shed a tear in "Crimes of the Hot", to Fry's astonishment. One of the series' running jokes revolves around Bender having emotions, when technically he should be an unfeeling machine. Bender is seemingly unaware of his emotions, stating in the episode "Anthology of Interest II" "I mean, being a robot's great but we don't have emotions and sometimes that makes me very sad". In his very first appearance, he tries to commit suicide via a suicide booth out of guilt for having unknowingly contributed to their creation. He has also been known to be nonchalant to the point of appearing both uncaring and incredibly brave, even in life-threatening situations.  Bender is a classic narcissist. He considers himself flawless, a "towering inferno of physical perfection", and refers to himself in both the first and third person. In "The Farnsworth Parabox" Bender seemingly falls in love with an alternate gold-plated version of himself, stating that he has finally found someone "as great as me". Even his personal email address, <nowiki>bender@ilovebender.com</nowiki>, reflects his self-absorbed nature.  Despite these human characteristics, he has no verifiable soul, as seen in "Obsoletely Fabulous" when he passes through a "soul detector" without setting off the alarm. However, in "Ghost in the Machines", Bender becomes a ghost who can't interact with people directly but can possess machinery: he uses this ability to "scare Fry to death". He eventually makes a deal with the Robot Devil to get a new body.  His relationships with the rest of the crew of Planet Express vary over time, although he treats nearly all biological organisms with disdain. The only one of his friends who he has openly shown affection for is Fry, his best friend and roommate. "Of all the friends I've had, [he is] the first." Although he is verbally and physically abusive towards Fry and considers him to be vastly inferior to him, he has been shown to care for him a great deal. In "Jurassic Bark" he states that he loves Fry "the way a human loves a dog", and in "I Second That Emotion" when Bender gets jealous of Nibbler and flushes him down the toilet, a distraught Leela asks how he would feel if she did the same to Fry, describing Fry as Bender's pet (Bender responds with an apathetic "Only one way to find out."). He routinely takes advantage of his friends, including framing them for crimes, robbing them, stealing Fry's blood on more than one occasion, stealing Fry's power of attorney, using Fry's body to smash open a window, taking Fry's kidney and trying to sell it (it eventually gets eaten by Leela), and stealing jewelry from Amy. He is prone to using Zoidberg in various get-rich-quick schemes, although it is probable he does not consider Dr. Zoidberg a friend, since in "Obsoletely Fabulous" Bender begged the 1X Robot to "save (his) friends, and Zoidberg" (Though it is seen that he helps Zoidberg from time to time, as seen in "That's Lobstertainment!"). He even betrays Leela to Zapp Brannigan in "Into the Wild Green Yonder" when she becomes a wanted criminal, out of jealousy of her steadily growing rap sheet, only to break her out of prison again to ensure his own sheet remains lengthier. Although he regularly frustrates the crew, they have demonstrated a certain affection for him in return. During "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back", the entire crew traveled to the Central Bureaucracy to recover his brain after Morgan Proctor burned it onto a floppy disk and sent it away. Hermes Conrad subsequently risks his bureaucratic license to locate the disc with Bender's brain on it by sorting the entire pile in just under four minutes. In the same episode, when Amy asked why they had to fix him, after being met with a brief period of uncertain silence, Leela responded with "Those arguments aside, we're still going." Amy and Bender date for a time in "Proposition Infinity"; the relationship becomes so serious that Bender proposes to Amy and participates in a campaign to legalize human/robot marriage, although the relationship ends after he realizes that such marriage rights would necessitate monogamy.  Despite his often immoral attitude, he does not lack a soft side; he can feel guilt and remorse over his actions if he goes too far (even by his own standards), indicating that he is not as selfish or unkind as he appears to be. In "Bendless Love", Bender intends to murder Flexo in order to gain the love of fem-bot Angelyne, but when Flexo gets stuck under a gigantic steel girder, Angelyne shows sorrow for him. Bender decides that her happiness is more important than his own, and ends up saving Flexo. Also, in "Jurassic Bark", when Bender becomes jealous of Fry's petrified dog, Seymour, he decides to throw him in magma. But when he realizes how Fry becomes deeply hurt, Bender apologizes for his behavior and rescues the dog. In "Godfellas", he becomes the god of a microscopic alien race and abuses this position by commanding them to produce beer for him. When his abuse of power causes the entire species' demise, however, he cries in mourning and remorse.

Reception and cultural influence.

In 2008, Bender took second place behind the Terminator in a poll for the "Baddest Movie Robot" on Techradar.com.  The song "Bend It Like Bender!" from the Devin Townsend Project album "Addicted", is a direct reference to Bender and contains the quote "Game's over, losers! I have all the money!"

Appearances in other media.

Being the show's breakout character, Bender has made several cameos in different episodes of "The Simpsons", another series by Matt Groening. Within "The Simpsons", Bender has appeared in episodes "Future-Drama", "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade", "" and "Replaceable You". Bender also makes a cameo appearance in Matt Groening's latest series "Disenchantment", in the episode "Dreamland Falls".  In the "Simpsons"-"Futurama" crossover episode "Simpsorama", Bender travels back in time in the 21st century to Springfield to kill Homer Simpson, whose DNA is tied to the creatures rampaging in the 31st century. Bender ends up befriending Homer before learning that the creatures are in fact Bart's genetic offspring. Once the crisis is averted, Bender goes into shutdown mode in the Simpsons' basement. Bender was still resting inert in the Simpsons' basement as of 2015 episode "Cue Detective" in which his empty body cavity was used to store the family's cash nest-egg. Bender also makes a background cameo appearance in the "Simpsons" episode "My Fare Lady", holding a shovel and bucket at the end of Homer's dream about "The Jetsons".  Bender, along with Professor Farnsworth and Fry, appear in the season finale of "Disenchantment" as a hologram from a crystal ball, within the one-way time machine from the "Futurama" episode "The Late Philip J. Fry".  He also appears as one of the enemies, along with Doctor Zoidberg, in "The Simpsons Game".  Bender makes cameo appearances in several "Family Guy" episodes. In "Blue Harvest" he can be seen at the Mos Eisley cantina, and in "The Splendid Source", he is one of the repeaters of a dirty joke whose original author Peter Griffin, Joe Swanson, and Glenn Quagmire are seeking. In the episode "Boopa-dee Bappa-dee", Peter attempts to use the guide on the television remote, turning Stewie Griffin into a host of past and present Animation Domination characters, including Bender. In "Throw it Away", Lois Griffin drags Stewies Time Machine down the stairs which takes them to, in order, the 1950s, the 18th century, the future, with Chris Griffin replaced by Bender.

Bender Bending Rodríguez (designated in-universe as Bending Unit 22, unit number 1,729, serial number 2716057) (born 2996) is one of the main characters in the animated television series "Futurama". He was conceived by the series' creators Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, and is voiced by John DiMaggio. He fulfills a comic, antihero-type role in "Futurama" and is described by fellow character Leela as an "alcoholic, whore-mongering, chain-smoking gambler".

Bender Tordeur Rodríguez ( Rodríguez dans la ), robot portant le numéro "2716057", est un personnage de fiction et l'un des personnages principaux ainsi que l'anti-héros de la série télévisée "Futurama". Il fait partie avec ses amis Fry et Leela d'un groupe qui travaille pour la société "Planet Express".