Robots in our past and present, in film and real life.
What IS a robot? Everything from a real-life car assembly machine to a fictional artificial human being gets called a “robot.”
The Merriam-Webster Online site gives its main definition of the term this way: “A machine that looks like a human being and performs various complex acts (as walking or talking) of a human being, also: a similar but fictional machine whose lack of capacity for human emotions is often emphasized.”
That lack of humanity in a humanoid shell is what makes a great movie robot a great monster.
There were robots in films before the term “robot” was created. In fact, robots have been in films for as long as films have been a widely available entertainment.
Robots in film
Robots in film go back nearly as far as motion pictures themselves. In 1907, Vitagraph released a short film titled The Mechanical Statue and the Ingenious Servant featuring a mechanical man, although this “mechanical statue” is no more than a life-size dancing wind-up toy. The term “robot,” (from the Czech robota, or drudgery) first appears in the 1921 play R.U.R. (for Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Czech playwright Karel Capek. This play’s “robots” were artificially created slave laborers, although they were biological beings. Initially useful for filling manual labor needs, improvements resulted in “robots” too much like human beings, and they revolted. A film adaptation of R.U.R. is now in development, with a planned release date in 2011.
Early in film history, there were robots who were memorably menacing, like all good monsters. In 1920, superstar magician and escape artist Harry Houdini appeared in The Master Mystery, a film serial featuring The Automaton, a robot made to protect a criminal cartel. The following year, Italian audiences watched The Mechanical Man, which showcased a rampaging robot over nine feet tall that could shoot flames from its arms.
This audience fascination with robots continues to this day and remains strong. Wall-E, and The Terminator and Transformers franchises testify to this.
What drives our fascination and fear? It isn’t just the possibility of things going haywire and robots and androids (robots that appear to be human) posing a violent danger, such as has seen in films like Westworld. The possibility of robots or cyborgs (part human being, but significantly part mechanical or electronic beings) superseding ordinary homo sapiens as the most powerful sentient beings on the planet feeds our darkest suspicion of them.
Nexuses of real and fictional robots
For me, the fear and fascination all started when I was a child at a carnival, and was frightened by a fat lady robot.
Maybe “robot” is too strong a word. When I was four years old, I would sometimes be taken to an amusement park where a spook-house ride beckoned to my imaginative self. But the thought of going in wasn’t something I would even consider, as outside the entrance a shaking and rocking mechanical figure of an obese woman seated in a chair emitted an emotionless and loud recorded laugh, over and over. This was my first exposure to an artificial “person,” and the frightening impression it made on me has stayed with me ever since.
This power to scare I tried to assimilate one early Halloween, going out as a cardboard-box robot, a staple of the set of DYI costumes that most trick-or-treaters or their parents create at one time or another. Roaming the streets, I set aside my humanity and imagined being the master of puny humans, above human ethics, and able to crush at will any I encountered. Of course, I didn’t share this mindset when appearing at a neighbor’s door begging for candy!
I did encounter numerous and impressive ‘bots in childhood. They included the curvy “false Maria” robotrix from the film Metropolis, seen in a photo in the original Famous Monsters magazine, the droll robot of TV’s Lost in Space, the Kong robot from the film King Kong Escapes, the heroic robot of the cartoon Frankenstein Jr., and the similarly heroic gang of androids in the comic book Metal Men. A lot of kids of my generation were similarly big robot fans, and so are many younger people now.
Last year, I spoke with young mechanical design engineer Laura Wong of Pittsburgh, who works in the creation of robotic prototypes, and is a self-described “Star Wars fan.” I asked her how she came to be interested in the field she works in. In part of her response, she told me that in her house when she was a child was small version of a famous movie robot– “a mini R2D2 that you were able to control through the computer manually. I would drive it around to find my family cat and have it stop in front of her and state ‘here kitty kitty kitty’. It amused me to say the least.”
When she was eight, Ms. Wong says her younger sister had a toy robot that she was interested in understanding how it functioned. She related, “I can’t remember what kind it was, but it was a dome-shaped robot with ‘whisker’ touch sensors on it. So I decided to take it apart, but I got caught red-handed by my dad and he said if I did not put it back together in working condition before my sister finds out I would have to pay for a new one with my allowance. So I sat there and figured out how to get all the parts back together and it worked for the most part! So that is how I got into robotics.”
Her sister lucky was fortunate that Ms. Wong wasn’t influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In that film, HAL 9000 (which comes from “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) was the evil computer system for the spaceship Discovery One. Operating all mechanical and electrical functions of the craft, HAL murders several human beings who threaten his control.
In 2003, HAL was one of the first fictional robots inducted into Carnegie Mellon University’s “Robot Hall of Fame” in Pittsburgh, along with George Lucas’ lovable R2-D2.
Five Infamous Robotic Monsters of Filmland
My nominees for five most memorable robots of film are a quirky mix, ranging from the the best bad bots to the crappiest clanking creations. But all are destructive and memorable for a variety of reasons. Here, from worst to best, are my selections:
Ro-Man from 1953′s Robot Monster. His image, a shoddy combination of gorilla suit and diving helmet with a TV antenna added, is still used today in garage kits, and is often featured wherever you find celebrations of schlock cinema. This robotic alien, somehow able in the film to destroy humanity with the use of “Q rays,” has the most unforgettably horrible costume design in film history.
Nameless Scowling Robot from the ’39 Lugosi serial The Phantom Creeps. Though seen only briefly in the film, this robot’s villainous visage is well-known as the film is in the public domain and many dvd copies are out there– and also because a recreation appeared onstage in a tour by musician Rob Zombie. It has, perhaps, the most Golem-like ‘bot appearance in film, with its immobile human-like face and sculpted scowl.
“Ygorstein” from The Ghost of Frankenstein. This is the 1942 version of the famous film Monster, complete with a new brain transplanted into its head– the brain of the malevolent Ygor, who used the Monster to kill his enemies in the previous sequel, Son of Frankenstein. With his neck electrodes and skull clamps the Monster is an early form of a cyborg rather than a robot, the guileless Frankenstein Monster becomes in this entry of the Universal series a truly evil figure, acquiring a malign intelligence to match his strength. But only briefly– and just at the film’s end! Sadly, all references to the transplant are dropped in subsequent films and the character becomes no more than a mute, hulking plot device.
Maria from the 1927 Metropolis. Even before being given a false skin to make it a doppelganger of the classic film’s heroine, this Art Deco-styled robotrix is sexy, intelligent and evil. Another Robot Hall of Fame inductee at CMU, the influence of her visual design can be seen in the much later masculine but ineffectual character of C3PO in the Star Wars franchise.
HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). If computers ever develop a form of self-awareness and the freedom to program itself, we would do well to remember HAL’s actions in the film. We might face surprising consequences for sharing space with a new sentient being too young to have moral standards derived from experience, and too different from human beings to have an abundance of empathy for them.
But that doesn’t keep us from being fascinated by robots and cyborgs, and even wanting to emulate them. Martin Magnussen of Sweden, who says he wants to “advance the state of artificial intelligence,” has created a wearable computer with net access and features a pair of “Myvu Crystal video glasses hacked into a monocular head-mounted display.” He looks Borg-like with his gear on; take a look for yourself at Magnussen’s blog, Becoming Cyborg.
Currently, film robots that look like robots are deemed quaint, and are depicted in family films like 2005′s Robots and 2008′s Wall-E. Only androids like the Terminator get to be a menace. Here’s to a future where real androids are charming, attractive and benign and (as with the Japanese-made robots seen here and here) and movie robots are bad metallic mofos.
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