The 2008 Pixar film WALL-E posits two main things about the future: an Earth that is completely overwhelmed by the refuse of a technology-dependent obese humanity and an adorable little robot with soulful eyes who rolls around and says his name in such a way that breaks your heart. Well, it would now appear as though the future is finally here.
Bakersfield, California-based Michael McMaster and some of his equally-innovative friends—who previously built replicas of Star Wars's R2-D2 just for the fun of it—got it into their heads that they would create a life size remote-controlled version of the lovelorn trash compactor from Andrew Stanton's instant classic. So, they spent the next several years painstakingly building the robot, using screen grabs from the animated film, as well as a Rubik's Cube and a videotape as reference points to exact scale from scratch. What they ended up with is about as real-to-life as can be reasonably expected when the original is a computer-generated cartoon character.