Pre-Op Transformer

Pre-Op Transformer lives among the tenants of Fry's apartment building, a battered robot who greets neighbors with a startlingly husky, sultry voice utterly at odds with its clunky metal frame. It just wants to be taken as it presents itself, mid-transformation, and carries on with unbothered confidence regardless of anyone's double-take.

The whole joke lives in the gap between what you see and what you hear, and John DiMaggio plays that gap dead straight, never winking at the audience. It's a one-note gag, but the note is so perfectly pitched — that voice pouring out of a scrap-heap chassis — that Futurama can bring it back for years without it going stale.