Tobor" is robot spelled backwards. Clever, no? No, I didn't think so.
Tobor is probably one of the most forgettable robots ever to have graced the silver screen. Supposedly built to replace astronauts in hazardous space missions, Tobor really existed for A Boy and his Robot plotlines in between shenanigans involving communist spies trying to steal him.
None of this would have made Tobor worthy of inclusion here, except for the publicity shots for the film Tobor the Great (1954), which show Tobor being followed around by a little toy windup robot. Was this supposed to be some sort of cybernetic Sydney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre relationship? Thankfully, the world will never know.
Robby the Robot; a true classic of robot design. Like the Zippo lighter, the Swiss Army knife, the Marmite jar, or the Routemaster omnibus, he never goes out of style. In fact, now that I think about it, he does rather resemble a Morris Minor. And, as we can see above, the women are drawn to him like flies to a honey pot. And, no, he didn't like Elektro either.
Robby first appeared on the public scene in the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. Designed by MGM art director Robert Kino****a, Robby reportedly cost MGM $125,000 to make. Since Robby was a contract player at the time, this was regarded by the studio as a cheap investment.
Forbidden Planet was a milestone in science fiction cinema. In a genre that had up then been dominated by juvenile serials like Buck Rogers and Radar Men from the Moon, Forbidden Planet managed to present a fairly mature story line (the first draught was by William Shakespeare) while capturing the look and spirit of pulp sci-fi of the time. Robby was a key element of this. His lumbering entrance set to the electronic tonalities of Bebe & Louis Barron told us that we were entering the future and this was our usher.
Robby was the quintessence of what a robot should be; not an impersonal piece of industrial hardware, but an wise, polite, obedient, powerful, yet diffident servant. The Anti-Bender, if you will.
But Robby turned out to be more than a prop. He became a hard working actor with a string of credits that extend to this day. He even has his own IMDB entry. His first gig after Forbidden Planet was a guest appearance on the Perry Como Show. After that, he was the star of the The Invisible Boy, where he became the best friend of a neglected little boy while battling a computer bent on world domination. Then the offers just poured in and Robby was guest starring on The Thin Man, Columbo, The Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, and his latest cameo in Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
Robby soon became the toast of Society and in the '60s he was a fixture at Hollywood parties and a frequent guest at the Playboy mansion. He even dabbled in politics and launched a gubernatorial bid in 1964 that failed notwithstanding a strong showing in the polls
Despite his success, Robby never let fame go to his head. Having achieved financial independence due to a lucrative toy deal in Japan, Robby was able to turn his attention to charity, such as his foundation for the rehabilitation of delinquent calculators and the March of Diodes.
Gog? What the heck is Gog? For those with very long memories for the very obscure, Gog is the eponymous character of the 1954 film of the same name about a load of scientists at a space research lab being killed off one by one by their automated equipment. Not to mention that the robots that help run the place have gone berserk as well. No, it isn't a Window's problem. It turns out that spies in a high-altitude jet are to blame.
Gog is actually a pretty sound bit of design for the '50s. For one thing, the filmmaker's realised that with the average computer of the day filling a large room, there was no way that Gog was going to carry its brains in its body, so it was allegedly designed to be controlled by a distant, imobile computer. Also, it's not anthropomorphic, but looks more like a metallic octopus on tank treads and has various specialised claws and a handy flame thrower.
FLAME THROWER?!?
Flunky robot and second banana to the Devil Girl From Mars, a Martian woman who decided to visit the Earth during what was most definitely the wrong time of the month.
Chani's specifications:
Main function: Disintegrating random agricultural fixtures.
Secondary function: That's about it, really.
Main gripe: Being a cheap Gort knockoff.
Gort is the runner-up in the '50s robot competition. Though he predated Robby the Robot by five years with his debut in The Day the Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox 1951), he lacked the charisma that Robby brought to the screen. But where Robby embodied the ideal relationship between man and robot, Gort represented the robot as the instrument of judgment wielding vast, unfeeling power. He is the "servant," sort of, of Klaatu, an alien from space who has come to our planet to bring us greetings and scare the living crap out of us. Gort is key to this. He not only possesses superhuman strength, an unstoppable death ray, and the power to restore life, but he also comes equipped with an Allegorical Message Generator that would have made Gene Roddenberry swoon.
Not bad for a robot who wears mittens.
The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of a clutch of '50s sci-fi films that strove mightily for seriousness, and this one is about as serious as you can get without resorting to actual finger wagging. It ends with Klaatu standing next to Gort, who's the strong, silent type, and lecturing the Earth that it must give up its warlike ways or the peaceful people of space will send GIANT KILLER ROBOTS to blow our planet to gravel. Oh, he says that it's all automatic and they can't do anything about it, sorry old chap, but it still comes off as rather like letting loose the brake on a steamroller and saying that it isn't your fault if it hits somebody's house.
And the filmmakers thought that this was an enlightened message?
Question: Did anyone bother to check Klaatu's ID? Lot of cranks bouncing around the Cosmos, you know.
Silent Running (1971). It's the year 2000 and spaceman Bruce Dern murders his entire crew and hijacks a cargo ship with a payload of greenhouses carrying Earth's last vegetation and hightails it out for Saturn. You'd think they'd have seen that coming when they assigned a professional nut-job like Dern to space duty. Anyway, Dern starts to suffer from terminal loneliness, what with having murdered his crew and all, so he programmes the ship's robot drones to play poker and do a bit of light gardening. He also renames them Huey, Dewey, and Louie, which just goes to show that he should have kept up with his medication.
These robots are quite the pieces of engineering. According to the film, their programming is entirely hardwired and in order to get them to draw to an inside straight Dern has to stick circuit boards under a microscope and go at them with a mini-arc welder. Fortunately, we are spared scenes depicting the hundreds of man hours he spends cussing and fuming as he tries to debug the blasted things.
Doctor Who's famous robot dog. I'd make a joke about leaving little batteries around the house, but Woody Allen already beat me to it.
Best robot prediction ever! When Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he said what we all truly believed about artificial intelligence, but never had the nerve to articulate; that as the intelligence of our machines doubled, their ability to aggravate would cube. Marvin is exactly what a truly intelligent robot would be like in the real world; moody, depressed, and with a distinct air of being put upon and underappreciated. No wonder conversations with him usually went like this:
"Marvin, we left you trapped aboard a spaceship crashing into a sun on the other side of the Galaxy two million years in the past. How did you get here?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Suit yourself."
Irwin Allen knew that if you were going to steal, steal big. After all, the entire premise of The Time Tunnel was travelling through time to periods where Allen could use dirty great swatches of stock footage.
For the television series Lost in Space, Allen needed a robot, so he figured why not go for the best and ripped off Robby the Robot. Not directly, mind you. Robby had far too good an agent for that. Instead, he brought in Robby's designer Robert Kino****a to come up with something suitably Robbyesque: Environmental Control Robot B-9, or "Robot," as he was called with striking imagination. Though the design of the B-9 is an impressive mixture of elements from actual industrial robots of the day and the original concept was a powerful, though dangerously literal-minded machine, it quickly sank into some of the most painfully campy performances ever to blight the living rooms of America and the world.
The problem with having a common name like "Robby" is that you're likely to keep bumping into other people with your moniker. Such is case in Hollywood. Here we see the "other" Robby the Robot; this one from the Gerry Anderson series Fireball XL-5. This Robby is not as suavely articulate as the original, and his acting talents are a bit transparent (sorry), but he was refreshingly bad tempered for a robot and would spout steam from his head whenever he lost an argument with Zoonie the Lazoon.
You had to be there.
The robots who couldn't shoot straight. That says it all.
What is your favourite Retro Robot?
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