In a delightful starburst of serendipity a few weeks ago, my Morlock brother from another mother R. Emmett Sweeney wrote about lesser-known robots of the silver screen; this is by definition serendipitous because I find myself playing robot a lot lately, with my kids.  I don’t know where Vayda and Victor picked up on the classic robot schtick – the stiff, jointless legs; arms bent at 90 degree angles; the metallic, soulless voice droning “I am a ro-bot… I am a ro-bot…” – but they’ve got it down cold.  They’re not that into science fiction, my children, and I suspect their inspiration may have come from the TV show YO GABBA GABBA, which boasts a regular automaton character named Plex and a recurring featurette titled SUPER MARTIAN ROBOT GIRL.  Truth be told, it’s really Vayda who has the robot jones.  She recently made my wife walk home from the park with her in full-on robot character; it’s not a long walk, maybe a hundred yards or so, but it sure would seem a hundred miles if you couldn’t bend your knees for the duration and instead had to waddle Tobor-style all the way.  But that’s one of the great things about having kids – time and time again, in the sheer barking lunacy of their innocence and exhausting enthusiasm, they bring back the essential stuff from your youth, passions you’ve forgotten and left behind in your mad rush to be sophisticated, up-to-date and cool.  And one of the things my brood has brought me back to late in life is a love, a deep and abiding love, of badly designed, crudely constructed and barely viable robots.  You know the kind of which I speak:  they clatter and clank, looking as if they’ve been put together from spare Edsel parts, Swanson TV dinner trays and AC conduit, as they trudge along in the service of a mad scientist or evil alien emperor.  Why, they’re nearly as old as cinema itself.

Let’s take a moment to define our terms.  We owe our usage of the word “robot” to Czech dramatist Karel Capek, who coined the phrase from a Slavic term meaning “labor” or “worker” for his 1921 stage play R.U.R. (ROSOM’S UNIVERSAL ROBOTS).  In the play, the robots aren’t like the walking tin cans of 30s, 40s and 50s cinema but rather flesh and blood simulacrums that are closer kin to the “skin jobs” of Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER (1982).  Nonetheless, “robot” became a sexy buzz word as sci-fi elements began to insinuate themselves into popular cinema during the sound era and soon the term was the go-to reference for man-made men.  A promotional illustration for James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), back when Bela Lugosi was still being touted as the star of the show, willfully overstated the monster’s size, giving him a leviathan’s stature and strange, destructive beams of light coming from his eyes, such as the robot Gort would rock twenty years later in the science fiction classic THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951).  Beyond that, though, the major Hollywood studios dropped the ball, robot-wise, leaving it to the minors to carry the day.  Rob Sweeney wrote about the dodgy-looking robot in the Mascot serial THE PHANTOM EMPIRE (1935), starring Gene Autry, so I’ll skip ahead a year to the Republic chapter play THE UNDERSEA KINGDOM (1936), which introduced the Volkites.  This army of somewhat more tenable-looking automatons (with energy bolts painted on their riveted chests) seem to be kissin’ cousins to Plex from YO GABBA GABBA and both Robby the Robot from FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) and the eponymous Robot from the TV series LOST IN SPACE.  In 1939, Westinghouse introduced “Electro,” a robot who walked, talked, obeyed direct commands (“Sometimes”) and smoked cigarettes!  A year later, the Jam Handy Organization produced this industrial short illustrating what a help robots would be around the house.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it appropriate that it took Bela Lugosi himself to school the Poverty Row studios in how to dress up a man-made man.  In THE PHANTOM CREEPS (1939, pictured above), Lugosi’s twisted genius Dr. Zorka commands a robot who looks like Billy Corgan.  Produced at Universal, this serial made use of pre-existing music cues culled from FRANKENSTEIN, affirming the shared bloodline of the walking dead (before he mastered transistor technology, Lugosi had relied on Haitian zombies to do his sweat work) and your patchwork quasi-monsters, from Dr. F’s Undying Creature all the way up the assembly line to ROBOCOP (1987).

Maybe because scrap metal was so hard to come by during World War II, robots were few and far between during the Forties.  It was really with the eclipsing of Gothic Horror by the great Sci-Fi boom of the Fifties that tinned automatons came back in fashion.  The postwar economic boom and America’s rush toward modernity and labor-saving devices whetted the popular appetite for sleek, multi-purpose robotics, even if they sometimes got it into their heads that the human race needed to be destroyed in order to save it.  I’ve already mentioned the mighty, mighty Gort and Robby the Robot (who turned up subsequently in THE INVISIBLE BOY) but there are plenty of lesser-known models from this period, such as the aforementioned Tobor and the pesky Shiva-armed units of United Artists’ GOG (1954), who wreck havoc in the command of a super-computer gone rogue (“a Frankenstein of steel,” as the ads proclaimed).  And let us not forget KRONOS (1957), a skyscraper-sized “accumulator” sent from another world to steal our stuff.  The Ro-Man of ROBOT MONSTER (1953) had a great robot voice but because director Phil Tucker cheated and stuck a space helmet on a guy in a gorilla suit, the viewer was cheated out of vintage robotics.  Chani, the mechanical helpmeet of Patricia Laffan’s DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS (1954) was more like it, resembling as it did a parking meter that dispenses Dixie cups and accepts outgoing mail.  It’s too bad that Ed Wood could never afford a robot but I guess Tor Johnson lumbered like one in the films he made for Wood, and never more robotically than in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959), in which the ex-wrestler lurched menacingly, strangled people and carried a pretty girl around, as robots have done since Rabbai Lowe sculpted his Golem out of clay and animated his man-thing with the unutterable name of God, which was I suppose you might say the first microchip.

Big box robots became declasse during the Space Race, as NASA made Americans increasingly more familiar with what technology actually looked like and sci-fi filmmakers decided that robots should look more like humans.  Robots, androids and cyborgs got a little too familiar for my taste from this point on, in movies from THE CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS (1962), an odd jumble of social commentary, existential deep-think and Sirkian melodrama that predates BLADE RUNNER by two decades, to WESTWORLD (1972), where nickel-eyed robot gunslinger Yul Brynner goes all GOG on modern day thrillseekers in a time-slipping fantasy theme park.  By the time of STAR WARS (1977), the word robot was supplanted entirely by android (or just ‘droid), and old school robotics were largely shelved, even while the anal retentive C3PO (pictured above) seemed like the red-wired love child of Maria from Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927) and The Tin Man from THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939).  The androids of STAR WARS brought upon robotics the curse of cuteness.  You can trace Pixar’s WALL-E (2008) back to Johnny-Five from John Badham’s SHORT CIRCUIT (1986) and its sequel, SHORT CIRCUIT 2 (1988), and from there back to R2D2 in the various STAR WARS films, although it might be argued that R2 was ripped from the squat service drones of Douglas Trumbull’s SILENT RUNNING (1972).  Kids love R2D2 and the slew of automated plush toys who followed and I can’t blame them.  Nonetheless, this saccharine surfeit makes me long for the old days when robots had not so much personality as… presence.

Now that computes!