Difference between revisions of "Hermes Conrad"

	Primary character
Hermes Conrad
	; A promotional picture of Hermes.
Age	65
Date of birth	2959
Gender	Male
Species	Human
Planet of origin	Earth
Profession	Bureaucrat and Accountant
Bureaucrat grade	36
Relatives	See below
First appearance	"The Series Has Landed" (1ACV02)
Voiced by	Phil LaMarr

Latest revision as of 21:18, 4 December 2017

Hermes Conrad is a Jamaican Rastafarian and grade 36 Bureaucrat, and proud of it. He works at Planet Express, handling stamping, filing, collating, and accounting - all the fiddly little paperwork that only a true bureaucrat can handle properly. He claims, however, that he is only anal 78.36% of the time. He is also an honorary Globetrotter, and has worked for Mom's Friendly Robot Company as Inspector #5. He lives with his family in an apartment.

Personality

Hermes is a bureaucrat working for the Planet Express delivery company, under Hubert J. Farnsworth. He is friendly and hard working but can also be nasty at times, particularly to Dr. Zoidberg. Despite his wide frame, Hermes was an accomplished limboer. He has a rivalry with Barbados Slim. Hermes also has a habit of saying "Sweet (something) of (some place)". The show also hints that Hermes does not like his co-workers in "The Farnsworth Parabox". He first tells Leela to shoot Bender, Fry and Zoidberg, and second has to be begged not to eject the crew from the airlock.

Biography

Hurricane in Kingston town

Hermes Conrad was born to a fat ugly Jamaican woman in 2959 and soon after began to develop into a fine young bureaucrat, crying when his alphabet blocks are blown out of order as a two year old, and making friends and family file long applications to get into his tenth birthday party.

Limbo champion

During his adult life, Hermes became an Olympic grade limboer. It was around this time that he married LaBarbara, the ex-wife of his rival Barbados Slim. On his honeymoon, he limboed for 12 straight hours. When competing for the Earth team in 2980 a young fan trying to emulate him ran onto the field and snapped his spine, killing him, Hermes dropped out of professional limbo immediately after the tragic accident. Turning to his other passion, Hermes and his wife moved to New New York, home to the Central Bureaucracy and the couple had a son, Dwight.

Mom's Friendly Robot Company

Sometime after moving to New New York, Hermes got a job as Inspector #5 at Mom's Friendly Robot Company's Tijuana division (6ACV06). He lived in a rather quaint mission-styled house there, while it appears LaBarbara remained in New New York. There he was responsible for letting Bender live, despite him being a defective unit. After this he immediately quit the company and moved back to New New York.

Heroic Bureaucrat

Hermes, as a grade 36 bureaucrat, joined the staff of Planet Express. When his limboing skills alone could save the entire crew from certain death in the destruction of the space cruise ship Titanic, he overcame his aversion and rediscovered the sport he loved. After a few bad experiences with brain slugs, Hermes received a pair of letters from the Central Bureaucracy, the second of which informed him there would soon be an inspection - and a chance at a promotion. Unfortunately, his office was messed up by the angry staff of Applied Cryogenics (due to Bender cheating at a game of poker) and he was sent on the ultimate penalty of paid vacation. Zoidberg suggested that he and LaBarbara go to Spa 5 to relieve the stress, but it turned out to be nothing more than a labour camp. On returning to the Central Bureaucracy building, he was able to sort the master "in" pile and retrieve a disk containing Bender's brain. He finished the job with time to spare and was demoted to grade 38 as a result, but soon found an error in another bureaucrat's paperwork and earned a promotion to grade 37.

It's called parenting

When Dwight and Cubert Farnsworth started their own delivery company, Hermes and the Professor felt threatened, and rightly so; the pair soon took over the company, until they were revealed to not have been delivering their papers. Later, The pair of parents formed a Bender protest group, Fathers Against Rude Television, which successfully protested All My Circuits to get him off the show and remove his influence on their children.

Old Habits

In 3004, when the entire Jamaican limbo team was detained at the airport because of their "other interests," Hermes was called back out of retirement to defend his country's pride, but he came in dead last due to a freak accident with his flabbo-dynamic spandex bodysuit. Three years and three bureaucrat grade increases later Hermes, now grade 34, was decapitated when a decorative sword fell and sliced off his head after a limbo contest at Planet Express. Although he survived as a head in a jar, LaBarbara immediately left him and went back to her first husband. At Lars and Leela's wedding, he won LaBarbara back when he received a new body (his own, stolen from the past by Bender). Soon after, he was jabbed in the eye with a pen and his head is chopped off once again when a crystal chandelier falls, destroying the time paradox duplicate body. His head then provides useful guidance in the war to reclaim the earth where, using his mighty bureaucratic mind to coordinate the human fleet, he defeats the remote-controlled solid gold Death Stars and wins LaBarbara back. He then regains his original body back and witnesses space ripping open.

Mysterious Destination

In the same year, he attends Kif and Amy's Fonfon Rubok and participates in "Deathball" to win the right to explore the Anomaly (TBwaBB). He is one of the many people who live with one of Yivo's tentacles in his neck and joins everyone else in the universe in leaving to live on Yivo. After returning, Hermes comes to LaBarbara and the other Feministas' rescue, as they flee Zapp Brannigan and the Earthican legal system through a wormhole.

Reborn

Exiting the wormhole, only to crash land outside their workplace, Hermes and his colleagues are given new bodies by the Professor, as the old ones were reduced to skeletons (6ACV01). A few months later, Bender learned that he had been approved by "Inspector #5" despite lacking a backup unit. Hermes accompanies Bender on a quest to find the responsible party, allowing him to continue hiding the fact that he had been that inspector, and to protect Bender from any dangerous Killbots. By this time, Hermes had been demoted back to grade 36 (6ACV06). In the following year, Hermes became a cyborg after feeling he was inferior to machines, though Zoidberg managed to put him back into his organic body (after using it as a ventriloquist dummy). (7ACV07).

Character Description

Hermes as a cyborg (7ACV07). ^[1]

Family

LaBarbara Conrad, wife.
Dwight Conrad, son.
Granny (deceased), a zombie.
Mamma (deceased), fat, ugly, and possibly promiscuous, she promised Hermes that he would never be attacked by tentacles when he gave up diapers.
Unnamed father (possibly deceased), he promised his son that he would never be attacked by tentacles when he gave up diapers.

Relationships

Hermes has been married to LaBarbara since the beginning of the series, so no other relationships are shown, except when the entire universe, him included, falls in love with Yivo.

Semblance

It is pointed out at several times that Hermes is overweight, perhaps this is why Fry mistook Hermes as an outer-space potato man instead of a rotund Jamaican (2ACV11). For example, when a sword cuts off part of his belly while limboing (BBS) and a High-Powered X-Ray is fired at him (6ACV05), he realizes that he is not, as he presumed, big-boned - he's just fat. When he asks Amy to switches minds (6ACV10), she says she'll destroy his body too (already having made Leela's obese), he solemnly replies, "three decades of the munchies already beat you to it". Amy, however, helped him lose a lot of weight, by losing her appetite after seeing Leela and Fry make out in the bodies of the Professor and Zoidberg, respectively.

Additional Info

Hermes is just fat (6ACV05).

Trivia

During early production of the series, Hermes was named "Dexter".
Age is revealed in ""Bender Breaks Out" (US#020)", when he dies in an alternate timeline.
In Cornwood, a universe created from Bender's imagination, Hermes' counterpart is a hermaphroditic centaur.
In "Proposition Infinity", Hermes was coming down with circusitis.
Has tasted toxic waste, that he claimed tasted like delicious fig pudding, but had a distinct aftertaste of toxic waste.
Many jokes throughout the series have suggested that Hermes smokes marijuana, although originally this stereotype about Jamaicans was subverted when he described the traditional Jamaican sleep aid as a glass of warm milk.
Apparently likes pizza, as seen in "Attack of the Killer App" and "A Clockwork Origin".
He may be named after the messenger of the gods from Greek mythology. This is fitting since he works for a delivery company.
Canonically, he is the only main character to be put in a Head Jar.
He is one of three members of Planet Express to have worked for Mom's Friendly Robot Company (the other two being Professor Farnsworth and Dr. Zoidberg).
It has been shown that due to his diet of overly spicy foods his skin has itself become extremely spicy to the point which if a robot consumes it they will melt.

Catchphrases and running gags

Hermes Conrad

Hermes' basic catchphrase is 'Sweet [something] of [some place]!'. The 'something' and the 'some place' usually rhyme.

Variations include the following:

Sweet lion of Zion! ^[2ACV04]
Sweet manatee of Galilee! ^[2ACV04]
Sweet llamas of the Bahamas! ^[2ACV06]
Sweet gorilla of Manila! ^[2ACV11]
Great cow of Moscow! ^[2ACV11]
S-s-s-s-s-sweet something of... of some place. ^[2ACV11]
Sweet giant anteater of Santa Anita! ^[2ACV16]
Sweet sacred boa of Western and Eastern Samoa! ^[3ACV03]
Sweet lamprey of Santa Fe! ^[3ACV06]
Cursed bacteria of Liberia! ^[3ACV12]
Sweet guinea pig of Winnipeg! ^[3ACV12]
Sweet three-toed sloth of ice planet Hoth! ^[4ACV12]
Sweet honeybee of infinity! ^[4ACV15]
Sweet bongo of the Congo! ^[BBS]
Sweet Yeti of the Serengeti! She's gone crazy-eddy in the heady! ^[BBS]
Sweet squid of Madrid! ^[TBwaBB]
Sweet topography of cosmology! ^[ItWGY]
Sweet coincidence of Port-au-Prince! ^[6ACV01]
Sweet Georgia Brown of Kingston Town! ^[6ACV03]
Sweet tornadoes of Barbados! ^[6ACV04]
Sweet dodo of Lesotho! ^[6ACV05]
Sweet File-not-found of Puget Sound! ^[6ACV06]
Sweet Robot Swan of Botswana. ^[6ACV09]
Sweet candelabra of La Habra, LaBarbara! ^[6ACV13]
Sweet ego of Montego! ^[6ACV21]
Sweet freak of Mozambique! ^[6ACV22]
Sweet reawakenin', of me, a Jamaicanin'! ^[7ACV07]
Sweet toak of Ocracoke! ^[7ACV16]
Sweet pyro of Cairo! ^[7ACV18]
Sweet dehydration of every nation! (deleted scene)
Sweet sparrow of George Romero! ^[US#073]
Sweet Dover sole of the Bikini Atoll! (Radiorama)

A recurring joke involves Hermes about to eat a manwich, until it is stolen by Bender or Zoidberg, at which point Hermes cries "My Manwich!" (His son Dwight also has the same habit.)

Hermes usually refers to LaBarbara Conrad as "wife" or "woman"; his wife usually calls him "husband".

Hermes sometimes mentions green snakes and sugar canes including:

Our electricity bill is climbing faster than a green snake up a sugar cane!
I'm hungrier than a green snake in a sugar cane field.
Fry, no! The pressure will crush you like a green snake under a sugar cane truck!
That's flatter than a green snake under a sugar cane truck.

Another running gag is his relationship with Zoidberg; he is often quite friendly to Zoidberg but occasionally lashes out at him, at times rather savagely.

Hermes has been shown nude more times than any other character in the series.

It is also a recurring theme that Hermes wants to kill some or all of the members of the Planet Express crew; in "The Farnsworth Parabox", he suggested that Leela shoot the rest of the crew and pondered ejecting the entire crew of both universes except him in Universe 1 into the sun.

Hermes also has a susceptibility to being infected by brain slugs- once in "A Head in the Polls", again in "Raging Bender" (where he also managed to infect Fry), and yet again in the video game.

Quotes

Hermes: I'm hungrier than a green snake in a sugar cane field.

Hermes: When push comes to shove, you've got to do what you love, even if it's not a good idea.

Hermes: Like my granny used to say back in her tar paper shack on Montego Bay, "If you want a box thrown into the sun, you got to do it yourself." [mournfully] God rest her zombie bones.

Fry: Jamaican? I thought you were some kind of outer-space potato man.

Hermes: My Speedos!

Hermes: My manwich!

Hermes: OK captain, dis is just a standard legal release, protecting Planet Express in de event of de unforeseen.
Leela: [reading] Death by airlock failure.
Hermes: Uh-huh.
Leela: Death by brain parasite.
Hermes: Yah.
Leela: Death by sonic diarrhea.
Hermes: Oh, you don't want dat...
Leela: Look, I don't know about your previous captains, but I intend to do as little dying as possible.
Hermes: [laughing] Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho! [dead serious] Sign de paper.

Hermes: Welcome to stampy-town, population five.

Hermes: I'm goin' to jump! [Fry, Leela, Amy, Zoidberg, and Prof. Farnsworth panic.]
Bender: Do a flip!

Hermes: That's a calculator. I ate it to gain its power.

Hermes: Exciting news, people! The pet license I requisitioned for Nibbler has arrived.
Leela: Hermes, that's sweet. I didn't know you cared about Nibbler.
Hermes: Dream on, woman! I'd like to put the little bastard in a sack and toss the sack in a river and hurl the river into space!

Bender: We're going to fight to legalize it right here.
Hermes: Ya mon! Ya got to legalize it!
Amy: We're talking about robosexual marriage.
Hermes: We're talkin' about lots of stuff.

Appearances

Hermes Conrad appears in all episodes (not counting film episodes), due to being visible in the opening sequence. Outside of the sequence, he appears in almost every episode/film/comic, only missing the following:

This list may be incomplete!

The following list may be incomplete and requires revision. You can help the project by determining whether or not this list is incomplete.
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The following categories may be of interest:

References

^ Matt Tobey (06 June 2012). Countdown to Futurama: Mecha Hermes. (Comedy Centrl [sic].) Retrieved on 06 June 2012.

[Countdown_to_Futurama-1] Matt Tobey (06 June 2012). Countdown to Futurama: Mecha Hermes. (Comedy Centrl [sic].) Retrieved on 06 June 2012.

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