Pop culture’s top robots

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/07/2015 (3821 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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These are exciting times for people who love watching innocent robots fight to the death in armed combat.

For instance, a sixth season of BattleBots, wherein nerdy techies wage war with remote-controlled machines in a booby-trapped arena in an elimination-style tournament, has just premièred on ABC to favourable reviews.

Even more exciting is news this week that giant robot warriors from the United States and Japan will be duking it out on an unnamed date in the next year.

The drama began June 30 when the co-founders of Boston- based MegaBots Inc., Matt Oehrlien and Gui Cavalcanti, challenged Japanese giant-robot maker Suidobashi Heavy Industry in a video posted to YouTube.

“We have a giant robot. You have a giant robot. You know what needs to happen,” Oehrlien, wearing an American flag as a cape, chirped in the video.

In his video reply, Suidobashi founder and CEO Kogoro Kurata quickly picked up the gauntlet. “We can’t let another country win this,” Kurata declared. “Giant robots are Japanese culture.”

MegaBots’ Mark II and Suidobashi’s Kuratas robots are piloted by humans inside a cockpit. The Mark II reportedly weights 6,800 kilograms, sports pneumatic arm cannons that fire 1.4-kilogram paintballs and requires two pilots.

The single-pilot Kuratas is much lighter and features a BB Gatling cannon capable of firing 6,000 rounds per minute.

These mechanical marvels may pack a lot of firepower, but they lack the heart-tugging iconic intensity of our Top Five Robots of All Time:

5) ROCK ’EM SOCK ’EM ROBOTS

For our money, you can keep your giant battling robots, because nothing can beat this pop culture phenomenon first manufactured by Marx Toys in 1964. If you had this (bad word) toy, you were the coolest kid on the block. It features two plastic robot boxers — the Red Rocker and the Blue Bomber — standing in a bright-yellow plastic boxing ring. By pressing plunger buttons on a pair of joysticks, the players could make their robots hammer away at each other until, with one resounding “THWACK!” delivered with the right force at the right angle on its tender plastic chin, the losing robot would get its block knocked off, by which we mean its head would fly up on its spindly neck with a delightful clicking whir. “Fighting was always cool, and the fact that robots were now the ones doing the fighting…man, if that was the future, then let us live to see the day,” gushed the website Skooldays.com. “Rock ’Em Sock ’Ems kept aggressive young hooligans entertained for hours on end, and the toys continued to sell well into the 1970s.” The iconic toy was designed by Chicago’s Marvin Glass and Associates. Burt Meyer, a longtime toymaker with the firm, told Deadspin.com the game, first designed with human replicas, almost didn’t get made, because the late Marvin Glass thought it would be in “bad taste” after a famed boxer was killed in the ring. Thankfully, Meyer changed the concept to robot boxers. “Obviously they don’t fall over dead,” he told his boss. “Maybe their heads can pop up.” And the rest, as we say in the robot fight game, is history.

 

4) ROSIE THE ROBOT MAID

For many forward-thinking baby boomers, our first encounter with a robot came watching The Jetsons, the early 1960s animated TV comedy produced by Hanna-Barbera that was the studio’s Space Age answer to The Flintstones. Whereas the Flintstones lived in a Stone Age world of dinosaurs, the Jetsons were residents of a futuristic utopia, Orbit City, where everyone had flying cars and, as you have already guessed, robot maids. The Jetson family consisted of dad George, his wife Jane, their two kids, Judy and Elroy, their dog Astro, and Rosie, the robot housekeeper who not only kept their house in order, but dispensed pills and pearls of wisdom to her human family with a Jersey accent. In the show, Rosie — typically seen wearing a frilly apron, her torso mounted on a single leg, rolling around on a set of caster wheels — was an old demonstrator model hired from U-Rent A Maid. She’s outdated, but, hey, the Jetsons would never consider trading her in for a newer model. In the series’ first episode, Rosie gives her model number as XB-500.

Voiced by actress Jean Vander Pyl, Rosie rolled in at the No. 14 spot on Pastemagazine.com’s list of the “40 Best Robots of All Time (Fictional and Real).” Rosie was famously parodied in the animated series Futurama by a look-alike robot that croaked: “Everything must be clean. Very clean. That’s why the dog had to die. He was a dirty dog. Also that boy Elroy. Dirty. Dirty.” But fans loved her. “Rosie, the maid robot was (and is) a sweet, caring robot,” asserts the blog Jeffbots.com. “I’m sure the Jetsons will be with us for decades to come, and into the days when household cleaning robots are a reality… Thank you, Rosie!” She could never be replaced by a Roomba.

 

3) ROBBY THE ROBOT

You would be hard-pressed to find a more iconic robot than Robby, who made his screen debut in the 1956 classic Forbidden Planet, a kind of sci-fi version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The seven-foot robot suit was operated from the inside by actor Frankie Darro and was built by the MGM prop department for a reported $125,000 — more than a million bucks in today’s dollars. In the film, Robby is a mechanical servant and bodyguard designed and built by the mysterious Dr. Morbius, current ruler of the planet Altair IV, on which a crew from Earth, led by Comm. Adams (Leslie Nielsen), lands its starship. With a surprisingly dry wit, Robby is a lot more than just your typical sci-fi robot. “The robot’s interior includes a fully contained chemical laboratory, so he’s able to whip up a delicious meal, 60 pints of bourbon, or a festive new frock at a moment’s notice,” notes the website AVclub.com. Morbius also programmed Robby to obey Isaac Asimov’s famed Three Laws of Robotics, one of which states robots cannot harm or kill humans. Which brings us to the dramatic conclusion of the film, wherein the friendly Robby is unable to shoot at the scary invisible monster attacking his boss’s estate because he realizes the monster is actually a physical manifestation of the id of his creator, whom the robot is programmed to protect. So we are talking about a deep movie here. The important thing is Robby, created by industrial designer Robert Kinoshita, became the template for all movie robots and went on to appear in a ton of movies and TV shows, including The Twilight Zone, The Addams Family, Lost in Space, Wonder Woman, The Love Boat and Gremlins.

 

2) THE ROBOT FROM LOST IN SPACE

This classic sci-fi TV series, which originally aired from September 1965 to March 1968, has a special place in this columnist’s heart. It followed the adventures of the Robinson family — dad John, mom Maureen and their kids Judy, Penny and Will — who were (surprise) lost in space aboard the saucer-shaped Jupiter 2 spaceship. Also on board were Dr. Zachary Smith, a troublesome, self-centred snot, and the Robot. We call him the Robot because apparently the Robinson family were too busy to be bothered naming their Class M-3 Model B9 General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot. Even without a name, he was one cool metal dude, endowed with super strength, futuristic weapons, including claws that fired laser beams, and possessed of many human characteristic, such as laughter, sadness and an ability to play the guitar. Inside the suit was actor Bob May, whose legs were cut by the metal edges inside the original articulated legs in the prop costume, so the legs were bolted together and the robot was pulled along by a wire to make it look as if he were rolling along on tracks. Even if you never saw the show, you know the Robot because of his iconic catchphrases, such as: “Danger, Will Robinson!” Or: “Warning! Warning!” We loved his relationship with Dr. Smith, a snivelling coward who provided comic relief, dubbing his robot pal a “Bubble-headed Booby,” “Cackling Cacophony” and “Traitorous Transistorized Toad.” We just called it awesome.

 

1) R2-D2 AND C-3PO

You had to know this famously odd robotic couple (yes, we know, they’re droids) from the Star Wars franchise had to take the top spot. They’re at or near the top of every online list of the most famous robots of all time. Yes, they were a lot like an old married couple, constantly bickering, even though you couldn’t understand a thing bucket-shaped R2D2 said, but their friendship is one of the most enduring in film history. As Screenrant.com put it: “They are the yin and the yang. R2-D2 can do it all and save the day, while C-3PO can… well, he can probably do your taxes. The two bring an essential comedic relief to the otherwise serious Star Wars saga.” As everyone knows, the pint-sized R2-D2 is an “astromech droid,” packed with more gadgets than a Swiss Army knife and capable of projecting holographic images of Princess Leia or co-piloting an X-wing fighter. In contrast, the humanoid C-3PO is a protocol droid, an overly talkative, fussy etiquette expert fluent in “over six million forms of communication.” Fans had a lot of love for the brave but stubby R2-D2, whose whistles and beeps made him oddly endearing. “There is something about R2-D2 that people just want to cuddle,” said the robot’s original designer, Tony Dyson, in a Smithsonian.com article. In the films, R2 is portrayed either by a remote-controlled unit or English actor Kenny Baker. His best friend, the gold-coloured “Threepio,” is famously played by Anthony Daniels. As the blogger Jeffbots.com aptly puts it: “Show me a person that doesn’t know who C-3PO and R2-D2 are, and I’ll show you my brother Steve… um, well, maybe not Steve, but someone who has been living in a cave.”

Like most sci-fi fans, we can only dream of the day when robots like the ones on our list become an everyday reality. Sure, they may end up as the mechanical overlords of the human race, but why worry about that. After all, nothing can go wrong… go wrong… go wrong …

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca