DiMaggio has clearly given Bender a lot of thought, and laid out his influences plainly, saying:
“Bender was three things. Bender was every drunk at the end of every bar on the East Coast, northeast coast specifically. You know, from Cape May to the top of Maine, you know?”
Cape May is a peninsula in the south of New Jersey. The geographical stretch DiMaggio describes includes about 650 miles of coastline, and covers areas of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, a short strip of New Hampshire, and Maine itself. DiMaggio himself was born in North Plainfield, New Jersey, and attended Rutgers University nearby. He knows what he’s talking about when it comes to New Jersey drunks. He continued:
“And then my man Slim Pickens from ‘Blazing Saddles.’ ‘What in the hell in the wide, wide world of sports is a-goin’ on!?’
Slim Pickens, of course, played the sniveling cowboy and slave driver Taggart in Mel Brooks’ 1974 comedy “Blazing Saddles.” Pickens was a long-working cowboy actor who appeared in dozens of Westerns in his career on TV and on the big screen. In the early 1950s, Pickens played a cowboy version of himself for multiple cowpoke flicks directed by William Witney and put out by Republic Pictures. He also appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He was the one who rode the atomic bomb like a rodeo horse.
Naturally, DiMaggio can do a crackerjack Slim Pickens impersonation. Professional voice actors, you will learn, are typically very good mimics.