Robby the Robot is a fictional character and science fiction icon who first appeared in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. He made a number of subsequent appearances in science fiction movies and television programs, usually without specific reference to the original film character.
Video Robby the Robot
Precursors of the name
The name "Robbie" (spelled with an "ie") had appeared in science fiction before Forbidden Planet. In a pulp magazine adventure The Fantastic Island (1935), the name is used for a mechanical likeness of Doc Savage used to confuse foes. The name is also used in Isaac Asimov's short story "Robbie" (1940) about a first-generation robot designed to care for children. In Tom Swift on The Phantom Satellite (1956), it is also the name given to a small four-foot robot designed by Tom Swift Jr., the boy inventor in the Tom Swift Jr. science fiction novel series by Victor Appleton II.
Maps Robby the Robot
Forbidden Planet
Story background
Robby the Robot originated as a character in the 1956 MGM science fiction film Forbidden Planet. The story centres on a crew of space explorers from Earth who land their starship, the C57-D, on the planet Altair IV, ruled by the mysterious Dr. Morbius. Robby is a mechanical servant that Morbius has designed, built, and programmed using knowledge gleaned from his study of the Krell, a long-extinct race of highly intelligent beings that once populated Altair IV. The film's plot was loosely based on William Shakespeare's play The Tempest (1610), with the planet Altair IV standing in for Shakespeare's remote island and Dr. Morbius for Prospero. In this context Robby is analogous to Ariel, a spirit enslaved by Prospero.
Robby exhibits artificial intelligence, but has a distinct personality that exhibits a (possibly unintentional) dry wit. He is instructed by Morbius to be helpful to the Earthmen and does so by synthesizing and transporting to their landing site 10 tons of "isotope 217", a light-weight though effective replacement for the requested lead shielding needed to house the C57-D's main stardrive to power an attempt to contact Earth base for further instructions. Morbius programmed Robby to obey a system of rules similar to Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics as expressed in I, Robot (1950). One of the laws is a rule against harming or killing humans; this becomes an important plot point near the conclusion of the film when Robby refuses to kill the Id monster. The robot recognizes that the invisible creature is an alter ego/extension of Dr. Morbius. Hollywood purposely, and misleadingly, depicts Robby in film's advertising posters as a terrifying adversarial creature carrying a seductively posed unconscious maiden, but no such scene is in the film and the images do not reflect in any way Robby's benevolent and intelligent character. Robby only carries one person during the movie, the Earth starship's Dr. Ostrow, when he is mortally wounded near the end of the film.
Design and construction
Robby was designed by members of the MGM art department and constructed by the studio's prop department; The design was developed from initial ideas and sketches by production designer Arnold "Buddy" Gillespie, art director Arthur Lonergan, and writer Irving Block. These concepts were refined by production illustrator Mentor Huebner and perfected by MGM staff production draughtsman and mechanical designer Robert Kinoshita..
The robot's groundbreaking design and dazzling finish represented a radical advance on the conventional "walking oil-can" depictions of robots in earlier features and film serials, and the only previous movie robot of comparable style and quality was the "Menschmaschine" created for Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). This did not come cheap, however - as with every aspect of the production of Forbidden Planet, MGM spared no expense on Robby's design and construction and at reported cost of US$125,000 (equivalent to at least $US1.1 million today) it was, proportional to total budget, one of the most expensive single film props of its kind ever created up to that time, representing nearly 7% of the film's total budget of US$1.9 million. (By way of comparison, Robby cost roughly the same, proportional to total budget, as the massive 27-tonne, 12 metre-diameter rotating centrifuge set built for Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which cost $750,000 against a total budget of around $11 million). But thanks to its imaginative design, intricate detailing and the very high visual quality of the final product, Robby immediately became the "face" of the film and soon became an enduring popular culture icon.
The Robby suit was constructed using a range of materials including metal, plastic, rubber, glass and Plexiglas. The plastic parts were a pioneering example of the use of the then novel technology of vacuum-forming heated plastic over wooden moulds. These parts were made from an early form of ABS plastic with the brand name "Royalite", a material mainly used at the time for making suitcases. The finished suit stands just over 7-foot (2.1 m) tall and was fabricated in three detachable sections - the legs and lower torso, the barrel-like chest section (which included the arms), and the highly detailed 'head'.
The tall conical plexiglass dome that covered the head housed the detailed mechanisms representing Robby's electronic "brain". These included a 'pilot light' at the very top, an intricate apparatus terminating in three chromed wire-frame spheres that rotate in planetary fashion (representing his gyroscopic stabilisers), a pair of reciprocating arms in the shape of an inverted "V", multiple flashing lights, and an elaborate horizontal array of moving levers resembling saxophone keys. Conical protuberances attached to each side of the head carry two small forward-facing blinking lights (representing his electronic 'eyes') and two rotating chromed rings, one mounted vertically and the other horizontally, which represent Robby's audio detectors (his 'ears'). The bottom front section of the head is a curved grille consisting of parallel rows of thin blue neon tubes, which light up in synchronization with Robby's 'synthetic' speech. This neon grille also enabled the operator to see out (and breathe). The joint between the head and chest section was fitted with a custom-made bearing that allowed the head to rotate 45 degrees in either direction.
Robby's bulky barrel-shaped torso (a sly reference to Bob Kinoshita's earlier job as a washing machine designer) featured a front panel fitted with a rectangular flap at the top (into which samples of any substance could be inserted for Robby to analyse and replicate); underneath the slot were two rotating discs fitted with small flashing lights and below that a row of five buttons that moved in and out. Robby's thick, stubby arms were connected to his body with plastic ball-joints that fitted into matching sockets in the torso, allowing the joints a small amount of rotational movement. The arms could also be slightly extended and this section was covered with a concertina-type tubular rubber sheath. Robby's three-fingered hands were also made of rubber, finished with metallic paint. The chest section attached to the leg section with special locking clips. The bottom section of the suit hinged at the top of the legs, allowing Robby to both bend forward and swing each leg backward and forward slightly enabling him to walk with relative ease (albeit with rather small and stiff steps). Robby's legs were made from interlocking globes of vacuum-formed plastic which were connected by internal jointing that permitted the entire leg to bend slightly but cleverly concealed the movement of the hips and knees of the human operator inside.
Robby's ingenious design was a major advance on all previous screen robots in many practical and aesthetic respects. By comparison, Gort, the menacing "interstellar policeman" robot from the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was still very obviously a man in a suit and its design posed several practical problems for shooting. Because it was essentially a tight-fitting neoprene overall, similar to a wetsuit, and the opening of the suit fastened with laces, the props team had to fabricate two suits in order to keep the fastenings out of sight while filming Gort in action - one suit opened at the back (for frontal shots), and the second, which opened at the front, was used for the shots in which Gort was seen from behind, but despite these precautions there were a few shots in which the laces were accidentally visible. Another challenge to Gort's believability was that, because it was made of flexible neoprene, the suit inevitably creased at the hips, knees and elbows when the actor moved. The filmmakers disguised this where possible by keeping Gort's movements to a minimum or only shooting his upper body when he walked, but in some scenes this was impossible to conceal.
By contrast, Robby's considerable size and its construction from rigid sections that had articulated joints combined to create a far more convincing viewer experience. To access the suit, the three sections were dismantled and the operator climbed into the legs. The torso was then placed around him, the two sections were secured with internal clips, and the operator was strapped into an internal harness; finally the head was fitted, the internal electronics were connected to external power with hidden cables, and the suit was switched on and ready for filming. This design thus made it possible to film Robby from any angle and for him to move about and carry out the actions required without either betraying the obvious presence of the operator inside or revealing how they got in and out. One of the suit's few drawbacks was that its many intricate moving parts made a considerable amount of noise, so for all the scenes featuring Robby, the actors had to re-voice their dialogue in post-production to eliminate this unwanted sound.
For the filming of Forbidden Planet Robby was operated (uncredited) by stuntmen Frankie Darro and Frankie Carpenter; both actors were shorter-statured (Darro was 5'3"). During shooting Robby's voice was performed by an uncredited actor who spoke the robot's lines offscreen into a microphone that was fed into to a voice-actuated circuit which was connected by cable to the neon tubes in Robby's head; this device generated a control voltage that synchronised the flashing of the neon tubes to the dialogue. The Robby voice heard in the finished film was re-recorded in post-production by actor Marvin Miller (who also read the film's prologue).
Later appearances
The robot quickly became a science fiction icon in the decades that followed and was reused or recreated in multiple TV shows. Robby was reused by MGM in The Invisible Boy (1957) and then made several further appearances in other films and TV shows during the next few decades; these include episodes of My Little Margie, The Thin Man, Columbo, The Addams Family, and Lost in Space where he battles The Robot. While Robby's appearance was generally consistent, there were exceptions.
The original Rod Serling incarnation of The Twilight Zone - which was substantially filmed at MGM Studios - made extensive use of props and costumes originally created for Forbidden Planet, including Robby. The Season 5 episode "Uncle Simon" (1963) featured Robby, although his appearance was considerably different, combining the familiar body with an alternate head. According to Robby's current owner, director William Malone, the head used in this episode was a prototype created during Robby's original construction. It featured a highly simplified and rather old-fashioned cylindrical "oil can" robot head with stylised 'eyes' (that were illuminated and movable) and a circular 'mouth'; this was enclosed under the distinctively-shaped conical plexiglass dome, but this head's front grille also did not have the blue neon tubes and lacked the rotating external 'ear' pieces seen in Forbidden Planet. It is not known whether this internal "oil-can'" head was original, but its rather rudimentary design and appearance is clearly not of same exacting MGM standards that are evident in all other Forbidden Planet props, and suggests it may have been custom-made for the filming of this Twilight Zone episode. However this version of the prop survives and is currently also owned by William Malone.
In other appearances, Robby usually retained the moving parts inside his transparent dome, although the details of his "brain" and chest panel were sometimes altered; in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. episode, "The Bridge of Lions Affair", only Robby's head dome was used as part of a regeneration machine. Robby also appeared in the Mork & Mindy second-season episode "Dr. Morkenstein", this time representing a character called Chuck (voiced by actor Roddy McDowall) whom Mork befriends while working as a security guard in the science museum where Chuck is on display. Robby was given a major 'makeover' for his appearance in the TV series Project U.F.O. (1978). The original head was removed and replaced with a newly constructed "Cyclops" head that had new internal 'brain' fittings, a much squatter (roughly hemispherical) perspex dome, and a large circular glowing green 'eye' on the front, mounted in a protruding triangular panel. The front panel on Robby's torso was also modified with the addition of a new protruding panel, and additional appliances and cables were added to the front of both legs. This 'Cyclops' version of Robby was also used in the 1976 TV series Ark II and the 1988 video B-movie Phantom Empire. It should be noted that all appearances of Robby after 1971 are a replica, as the original was retired and on display in a museum (see below).
Robby has made few appearances after the 1970s, but he does make a cameo appearance in Gremlins (1984); he can be seen standing in the background and speaking some of his trademark lines. He was also featured in a 2006 commercial for AT&T.
Robby the Robot was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2004.
Fate of the original "Robby" suit
In 1971 the original 1956 Robby the Robot was sold to Jim Brucker and put on display at his Movie World / Cars of the Stars Museum, near Disneyland in Buena Park, California, where he was often vandalized by visitors. Robot historian Fred Barton was commissioned to restore Robby to his original 1956 state while the robot was still on display at the museum. Barton used original duplicate replacement parts made for the Forbidden Planet suit by MGM's prop department. It was, however, in a desperate condition once again several years later. The museum closed its doors in 1980, and Robby, along with his vehicle, original MGM spare parts, and shipping containers were sold to William Malone. Malone noted that Robby had once again fallen into a state of disrepair. Having built the first ever replica of Robby in 1973, Malone was able to carefully restore the robot prop to its original condition using additional spare parts which the original builders had stocked in Robby's stage cases some 25 years earlier. The original Robby the Robot remains in Malone's collection as of 2015. It was sold at auction by Bonhams Auctioneers in New York on November 21, 2017 for $5,375,000.
Replicas
Fred Barton built a second Robby replica which appeared at the 1974 Star Trek Convention in Los Angeles. Barton continues to produce Robby props and other 1:1 robot replicas. His recreations are currently on display at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington, and at the Metreon entertainment complex in San Francisco; other Robby replicas are on display in various venues. Full-sized, remote-controlled Barton robot props are available from Hammacher Schlemmer or ordered directly on-line from Fred Barton Productions; the company manufacturers various 1:1 film and TV robot reproductions under license, aimed at the growing science fiction film collectors' market. Robby has also become a popular subject of collector tin toy and plastic robot reproductions and model kits.
Cultural references
In games
- Thursday of the Disgaea game series (first appearing in 2003's Disgaea: Hour of Darkness) resembles Robby.
- The Robby-inspired Protectron model of robot is ubiquitously featured throughout the retro-futuristic video game series Fallout, as one of many homages to classic pulp magazines and B movies.
- "Robby the Automaton" is unlockable in The Simpsons: Tapped Out mobile game, after buying The Knowledgeum.
In television
Multiple episodes of The Simpsons parody Robby the Robot:
- "Homer's Phobia" (airdate February 16, 1997) features both a parody of the Forbidden Planet movie poster (titled Clank, Clank, You're Dead!) and a parody of Robby The Robot that was controlled by a midget.
- The Halloween episode "Treehouse of Horror VIII" (airdate October 26, 1997), in the segment "Fly vs. Fly", parodies Robby the Robot as "Floyd the Scrubbing Robot", which unsuccessfully tries to label itself "sold" at Prof. Frink's yard sale.
- "This Little Wiggy" (airdate March 22, 1998) parodies Robby the Robot as "Robby the Automaton".
List of appearances
- Forbidden Planet (1956)
- The Invisible Boy (1957)
- The Thin Man (1958) - season 1 episode "Robot Client", first aired 28 February 1958
- The Gale Storm Show (1958) - season 3 episode "Robot from Inner Space", first aired 13 December 1958
- The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1963) - season 4 episode "Beethoven, Presley, and Me", first aired 13 March 1963
- The Twilight Zone
- Episode "One for the Angels" (1959; as a tinplate battery operated toy)
- Episode The Little People (1962); prototype head only
- Episode "The Brain Center at Whipple's" (1963)
- Episode "Uncle Simon" (1964); fitted with simplified prototype head for this appearance
- Hazel (1962) - season 2 episode "Rosie's Contract", first aired 27 September 1962
- The Addams Family in the episode "Lurch's Little Helper" aired 18 March 1966
- The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
- Episode "The Bridge of Lions Affair" (1966)
- Feature film One of Our Spies Is Missing (1966)
- Lost in Space (1966 and 1967) - in two episodes as two different characters (in "War of the Robots" as a robotoid)
- Ultraseven (1967) - A race of Robots called the 'U-Toms' bear Robby's likeness in one episode.
- The Monkees (1966-1968) - one episode
- The Banana Splits Adventure Hour (1968 and 1970 "The Coronation of Bakaar") - recurring appearance as a maid named "Mildred the Robot"; does not have plexiglass dome
- Columbo: Mind Over Mayhem - as "MM7" (1974)
- Hollywood Boulevard (1976)
- Ark II (1976)
- Holmes & Yo-Yo (1976)
- Music Machine (1977) - a K-tel compilation LP, photographs featured on both the front and back of the cover. In the commercial for the LP, Robby dances to some of the album's songs.
- Project U.F.O. (1978) - season 1 episode "Sighting 4010: The Waterford Incident". Here, the costume has a different, flatter head and 'brain' elements with a large "Cyclops" eye, a modified torso panel and assorted add-ons to the legs.
- Television commercial for Starlog Magazine (1978)
- The New Adventures of Wonder Woman (1979) - season 3 episode "Spaced Out", as the master of ceremonies at a science fiction convention
- Mork & Mindy (1979) - season 2 episode "Dr. Morkenstein", as a robot named Chuck, in a museum, who becomes friends with Mork.
- Space Academy (1979) - episode "My Favorite Marcia". This program used the 'Cyclops' head variation previously seen on Project U.F.O..
- Pink Lady (1980) - Episode 5, a brief cameo.
- Heavy Metal (1981) - cameo as a hot dog vendor during the "Harry Canyon" segment.
- Charmin Television commercial (1981) - as an assistant to Mr. Whipple, named Squeezak, repeating the phrase "Don't squeeze Charmin".
- Night Stalker video game (1982) - featured in the print advertising for the Mattel video game for the IBM and Mac
- The Love Boat - episode "Programmed for Love"
- Gremlins (1984) - in the background during the inventors' convention scenes
- Phantom Empire (1988); third screen appearance with the Project U.F.O. 'Cyclops' head and other modifications
- Cherry 2000 (1987)
- Earth Girls Are Easy (1988) - during a dream sequence
- Star Kid (1998) - footage from Lost in Space featuring Robby is shown on a TV
- Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
- Stacked (2005) - as the Nightmare NASA Robot
- Television commercial for AT&T (2006) - with WOPR, KITT, and Rosie the Robot Maid
- Television commercial for General Electric (2012) - with KITT and other robots
- Season 8 Episode 7 of The Big Bang Theory (2014) - with other movie props
References
Notes
Bibliography
External links
- Robby the Robot on IMDb
- The AT&T commercial at YouTube
Source of article : Wikipedia
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