Forgotten Heroes: Robby the Robot

By Owen Quinn author

Photos copyright MGM

I was recently made aware of just how many movies and television shows the younger generation have never heard of, never mind seen. So to that end, we look back at some characters you really need to see before you kick the bucket.

When you think robots from the fifties and sixties you think of the Robot from Lost In Space and his warning cry of “Danger Will Robinson!” but before Robot became a hit as a comedy duo with Doctor Smith, there was another that captured audiences’ attention and quickly became labeled as the hardest working robot in Hollywood.

In 1956 the movie Forbidden Planet starring Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen was released. The movie poster showed a woman limp in the arms of a big human-sized black robot. It appeared threatening on the poster but the portrayal was far from menacing. Robby was a good guy with a great wit and willingness to help anyone out as the ship’s cook discovered when Robby delivered 60 gallons of whiskey to him. As one character remarks, Robby looks after them like a mother. He was remarkably strong and bows gracefully to Adams when they first meet. He can speak 187 other languages with their dialects and sub tongues while cooking at the same time. He is very careful to protect humans even down to telling them to fasten their seatbelts before driving off. If Robby was the template for the Lost In Space robot then it worked in spades.

Forbidden Planet was a huge movie for its time with no expense spared including the creation of Robby. MGM did not want the standard metal man robot. They wanted this to be special. Robby cost between $100,000 and $125,000 to make and if ever a studio got their money’s worth out of a robot this was it.

His conception came from a collaboration between Arnold Buddy Gillespie, Arthur Lonergan, Mentor Huebner Irving Block and Robert Kinoshita. Robby came in three parts and this proved to be easier for shooting him. He was voiced by Marvin Miller for the movie and was an instant hit. For me as a kid, I loved the domed head and you could see the internal mechanics which could be found lying around the house if you looked meaning you could be Robby. His front panel flashed when he spoke and he could put anything in his chest slot to analyse and replicate as he did with the alcohol. There had been nothing like Robby before especially when you discovered his kind and helpful nature. He could not harm humans and had internal weapons to protect Doctor Morbius (Pidgeon) and Altaira (Anne Francis).

It had been Morbius that had created Robby when the expedition first arrived at Altair 4. Robby and Altaira join the crew as Altair explodes at the movie’s ending and he is loving it being behind the controls of the ship. It is this comedic humanity that made Robby popular. Everybody wanted one.

If Robby had negotiated a wage for all his appearances, he would have been worth a fortune. He would appear in three episodes of The Twilight Zone as like the BBC years later with Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who, props were recycled to other shows much like Irwin Allen did for Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. He would pop up in the Addams Family, Mork and Mindy, The Man From Uncle, Gremlins and the Thin Columbo to name a few but for me the battle of the giants was when Robot went head to head with Robby in the Lost In Space episode War of the Robots and later in Condemned in Space where Robby was a prison guard. This was an iconic moment and didn’t disappoint.

But in the Twilight Zone episode Uncle Simon, he appeared a little differently than we were used to. He was given a different headpiece due to the recycling policy maybe as an attempt to make it something new but most of the time he was as we remembered him from Forbidden Planet.

In 2004 Robby was entered into the Robot Hall of Fame where his legacy lasts right to this day. With every generation that watches Forbidden Planet or any of his shows then Robby’s fan base will forever grow.