Any Resemblance To Actual Future Is Purely Coincidental
Bender meets his hero, Silicon Red, a famous folksinger who has been in jail 30 times, during a convict transport, and uses a wireless 3-D printer to duplicate his success, but the wireless connection between Bender's brain and the 3-D printer turns his folk song about an angry space railbot hunting down Bender into a reality.
Tropes:
- Affectionate Parody: The episode title alludes to folk singer Lead Belly.
- Call-Back:
- Once again, we see Bender's desire to be a folk singer.
- Bender's fake funeral is attended by the Cookieville orphans he once adopted, Lucy Liu's head, and some Plutonian penguins.
- We get a brief look at Bender's files in this episode, and he actually has a whole folder for his Penguin personality.
- The Dog Bites Back: Duplicate Fry refuses to help Bender when Big Caboose is after him. As he put it, "You deserted me once, and now it's your turn to feel the chill".
- Fantastic Plastic: Bender's hard-drive becomes permanently connected to the Bluetooth of a giant 3-D printer to create whatever he imagines out of nanoplastic. While he originally only wanted to replicate Silicone Red's guitar (the nanoplastic-guitar sounding indistinguishable to a real one), the printer begins to automatically print whatever he is thinking as perfect replicas, including 3 robots (one of which being a perfect replica of Bender), Fry, a fully-functioning train and several giant octopuses/octopi.
- Glad I Thought of It:Bender: I've never picked cotton, or been on top of Old Smoky, or worked on anything all the livelong day, let alone a railroad.Zoidberg: Then go live among the railroad men, why not? You'll come to understand them, just as I now understand the ape men of Earth.Bender: As stupid as Zoidberg's idea is, it's brilliant when I have it.
- Honor Before Reason: Duplicate Bender refused to use a simple ending to save himself from being killed by Big Caboose, determined to have his song end with a blaze, resulting in him being killed. As revealed, this was designed by Bender to prevent him from avoiding his fate by giving him artistic integrity.
- Hypocritical Humor: Bender believes that Fry (who turns out to be duplicate) refusing to help him hide from Big Caboose merits being strangled to death when he deserted Fry to a much worse fate.
- Jerkass Ball: Fry acts like a total Jerkass throughout the whole episode by holding a grudge towards Bender for leaving him behind. Justified as he was at the mercy of a criminal who trapped him in carbonite.
- Rewriting Reality: Due to being connected to a 3-D printer, everything that Bender puts in his song actually happens.
- Shout-Out: The Planet Express crew visits a carbonite prison.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Fry really takes it hard when Bender abandons him with a carbonite frozen criminal, who ends up escaping and trapping Fry in his place.
- Yawn and Reach: Leela attempts to do this when she and Fry are watching TV. Fry misunderstands that she's tired because it's late so gets up to get her coat so she can go home.
