Tears for Robby the Robot

Steampunk'd - Robby the Robot seen here in the pilot for 'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes the Robot', argued to be one of the ten worst pilots in the history of American television.

In the late 1950's noted motion picture studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), was a dying giant in the industry. One whose golden years had long faded into a lackluster mockery of itself. Desperate for new ideas to revitalize their flagging revenues at the box office, they turned to the guiding light of Science in the desperate hopes of finding a new relevance in Hollywood. Pouring their dwindling assets into a top-secret R&D department ('Project Lion'), the studio heads at the time were expecting their 'egg-heads' to come up with a revolutionary new innovation in motion picture technology. Something rivaling recent breakthroughs in 3-D, stereophonics or cinemascope perhaps.

What they got instead was a robot.

Robby the Robot to be specific. Apparently the finest minds of the Atomic Age (well the finest minds they could afford leastways) came to the conclusion that robots were the future. And not just for obvious fields such as space exploration, construction, manufacturing, world domination or prostitution... but serving in a wide variety of careers whose ranks would inevitably one day include the film industry. So it was the boys of Project Lion created the world's first artifical intelligence in the form of the iconic robot.

The MGM executives however were not pleased to say the least with the result of their exorbitantly funded project. In fact the costs for Robby the Robot had gone way over budget and effectively put the studio deeper in the red. Some cite the creation of Robby as the reason L.B. Mayer suffered a fatal heart attack in 1957. Deciding to make the best of a bad scenario they quickly cast Robby in the science fiction classic, Forbidden Planet.

Robby the Robot's appearance was met with not just rave revues and the open hearts of audiences everywhere... but with an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor that some to this day felt he was robbed of. But the tragedy of Robby the Robot was that he was never designed to be an 'actor' at all. In fact he was originally programmed to be a director. Not just any director either but one that could easily humble the visions of a Howard Hawks or John Ford. But the executives had no interest in a robot director. Not with toy and collectible sales of Robby going through the roof. Besides the executives had grown accustomed to the robot's vital role in breaking Union strikes or dealing with pesky mob shake downs. Robby soon found himself cast next in 1957's The Invisible Boy, followed by a series of appearances on TV.

However Robby still dreamed (yes robots dream... didn't you ever see that episode of Star Trek the Next Generation?) of becoming a director. Forbidden Planet had awakened in him a love of Shakespeare and he yearned deep within his vacuum tube heart to create a science fiction version of Romeo & Juliet. He soon got to work constructing his first script. The result was a simple story about a man who fell in love with an artifical intelligence. The studio scoffed at his pitch and it would be decades later before a young Ridley Scott would stumble upon the original script at a flea market.

Meanwhile it wasn't long before the fickle interests of the movie goers grew tired with Robby-Mania. His roles began to dwindle across the turbulent 60's with a few notable appearnaces on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Columbo. By the 70's he was reduced to a few walk on roles and commercials. After a disastrous one man (err... robot) performance as The Elephant Man in the early 80's along with a critically panned portrayl as Daddy Warbucks in Broadway's Annie, Robby the Robot's career had all but vanished.

The 21st century has come. The Atomic Age casts a bittersweet shadow of predictions of what could have been. The sleek age of jet packs, interplanetary colonies and robot actors now relegated to the pop culture dollar bin of our hyperinformation saturated culture. Yet Robby the Robot doesn't mind being a sentient anarchonism of the future that did not come. He has settled down in a small town in Nowhere, America. He lives with Brad, his 'life-partner' of the last twelve years, and teaches a film class at a local community workshop. Though he is not above appearing in the occasional cameo or commercial to supplement his income, he has long given up on his dreams of directing. Late at night however, while Brad is sleeping, Robby's electronic squawk box sobs gently as the robot looks over his perpetually unfinished script for 'Forbidden Planet 2: A Space Tempest'.