Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by the week’s new releases or premieres. This week: That adorable walking weapon Chappie inspires five days of robots, androids, and sentient machines.
Forbidden Planet (1956)
You’d be hard-pressed to find a cinematic robot friendlier than Robby, who even has his own IMDB entry. Created by industrial designer Robert Kinoshita and manufactured by the MGM prop department to the tune of $125,000 (more than a million in today’s dollars), Robby made his screen debut in that landmark early sci-fi effort, the 1956 version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Forbidden Planet. Robby gets a raw deal in the movie poster, as he’s shown as menacing. But in fact he appears to personify Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws Of Robotics”:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
In Forbidden Planet, Robby is introduced as a servant and a bodyguard to Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis), who live on a settlement on the planet Altair IV. A Star Trek-like exploratory ship from Earth, led by Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen), lands on the planet and crashes the settlement. Adams and his crew soon learn that there is much more to Robby: 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. He even offers a few wisecracks, as when the ship’s cook asks him if he’s a boy robot or a girl robot: “In my case, sir, the question is totally without meaning.” His creator Morbius calls him a robot “beyond the combined resources of all Earth’s physical science.”