One of the most startling discoveries I made as a kid was that robots weren’t a 20th century invention. I’d assumed that the concept of a mechanical person would depend so heavily on electronics and other modern marvels that previous ages wouldn’t even have dreamed of such a thing.
But when I started reading Greek mythology, I found this wasn’t so. Thousands of years before such a thing would have been practically possible, spinners of myth were pondering the idea of building people out of metal.
Of course this discussion could rapidly devolve into hair-splitting about what can and can’t be considered a robot. Indeed, the term itself comes from a play about artificially created but non-mechanical workers, creatures that wouldn’t fit the image that the word now brings most readily to mind. Though the “replicants” of Blade Runner almost made the list, the robots here are all of the more standard mechanical ilk.
Robby – If you could have only one robot, Robby would be the guy. Living on a planet – even a forbidden one – with a deadly supernatural force is a small price to pay for owning a mechanical servant who can do most anything from cooking dinner to manufacturing diamonds in his spare time. Sure, his tone is a little smart-alecky at times. But that just gives him personality. He also deserves to top the list because he was the first big robot success story, a character that paved the way for cinema automatons everywhere.
C3PO – Sure, R2D2 is more popular. I can see why. Even a three-legged trashcan that can’t speak in anything but squeaks and beeps is still more likely to win the hearts and minds of moviegoers than a prissy android perpetually locked in fret mode. But hey, when Star Wars first hit theaters I was 11 and tended to fret too much myself. So it seemed to me like “goldenrod” was making good points about not getting into trouble. Besides, he looked more interesting than any of the other robots in the movie.
Huey, Dewey and Louie – This trio of walking boxes helped Bruce Dern tend to the last remaining fragments of wildlife in Silent Running. The movie overall is depressing and dumb (hence no review), but the robots in it are an odd combination of utilitarian and cute. It takes a little doing to give individual personalities to cubes with legs, but they manage to make it work.
The Terminator – I think we all knew Arnold Schwarzenegger would look like this if he ever peeled off his rubbery hide. And that’s when the Terminator gets really impressive. He’s okay when he can still pass for human, but when he gets stripped down to that shiny chrome skeleton, now that’s a scary robot. The scene in number one when the monster is chasing our heroes down a long, dark hallway is the stuff nightmares are made of.
Gort – On the surface, Klaatu’s sidekick from The Day the Earth Stood Still doesn’t seem to have much to him. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t water flowers or fix dinner. But for silent menace he can’t be beat. His design is particularly brilliant, his smooth, deco surfaces emphasizing just how attack-proof he is. I’d still rather have Robby in the kitchen, but Gort would be my choice for sentry to stand next to my cars while I’m asleep.
The Runaway spiders – I’m a big fan of the BEAM approach to robotics. The idea here is that it makes more sense to create lots of little, cheap robots for specific tasks than it does to make big, expensive, multi-purpose androids. Needless to say, such personality-free gizmos aren’t common in movies, where the need is greater for robots that can be characters that are voiced by actors. But in Runaway, the bad guy uses some BEAM-ish spiders to do his evil bidding. The plot even points out the big advantage to the BEAM scheme: a ton of tiny terrors is harder to evade than a single, human-sized opponent.
The Minoton – I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) that Ray Harryhausen never did more with robots. His Dynamation effects techniques were particularly well suited to mechanical creatures. But though he did some robot-like creatures from time to time – Talos in Jason and the Argonauts and the Kali statue in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad – the only real robot he ever did was the Minoton from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. It’s sadly under-utilized; a mechanical minotaur could have been a kick-ass bad guy rather than an elaborate outboard motor. But the design is still hard to beat. And true geek confession: I have models of all three of these aforementioned creatures sitting on a shelf above my desk.
Evil Maria – The robot in Metropolis is the ultimate in cinema injustice. She’s one of the first mechanical people ever to grace the silver screen, and her design set the bar impossibly high for every movie robot that followed. Further, the scene in which she’s transformed into a doppelganger of the heroine still impresses even in an age of computer effects a million times more sophisticated than what Fritz Lang had at his disposal in the 1920s. The rest of the movie is great as well, but I could sit through nothing but the robot sequences and still come away happy in the end.
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