Danger, Will Robinson! Robots still rule the roost

The robot designed by Jim Henson's Creature Shop for the new movie "Lost in Space" owes a mechanical nod to its movie robot ancestors, some of which date back to the 1920s.

"My all-time favorite was the robot from 'Forbidden Planet,' " says Verner Gresty, one of the supervisors who created the new automaton for "Lost in Space."

Robby, the friendly bubble-domed robot from the 1956 science fiction classic "Forbidden Planet," inspired a legion of admirers. One Hollywood designer, Fred Barton, makes replicas of Robby at $25,000 a copy for the movie buff who has to have everything.

Like Robby and many other movie robots, cinema's latest mechanical man embodies a mix of qualities ranging from the menacing to the protective -- and from the human to the cold and metallic.

Gresty worked with a dozen special effects wizards in England to make the 3,000-pound, 8-foot-tall robot for "Lost in Space." Operated by a crew of four, the device can travel at 15 miles an hour.

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"He's a pretty fearsome industrial kind of robot," Gresty said in a telephone interview from London. "We worked to get the menacing look of an American football player, with huge shoulders."

The "Lost in Space" robot is transformed midway through the movie to a mechanical man with the familiar spinning glass dome and light-up chest that fans of the 1960s "Lost in Space" television series will recognize.

And the robot waffles between good and evil, depending on who's programming it the villainous Dr. Smith or the good little hero, Will Robinson.

Filmmakers have long been intrigued with mechanical beings, which were an obsession of 19th-century fantasy writers like E.T.A. Hoffmann. "The Clown and the Automaton," a one-minute reel made by Georges Melies in 1897, is perhaps the earliest film to feature what would become known as a robot.

The word itself was used by Karel Capek in his 1923 play, "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots). Three years later, Fritz Lang released his futuristic fantasy, "Metropolis." The silent movie set in the year 2000 features an evil robot named Maria who incites workers to revolt.

Since then, robots in various guises have graced all sorts of sci-fi movies.

The 1930s saw a slew of robots roaming among fantasy technology in serials like "The Phantom Empire," "Undersea Kingdom" and "The Phantom Creeps." Robots pretty much had a respite during World War II, but the atomic age, with its paranoia and high anxiety, found a robotics renaissance.

Beginning in the late 1940s with "The Perfect Woman" and continuing throughout the next few decades, robots became central characters in sometimes visionary film plots. Robby, Gort ("The Day the Earth Stood Still"), R2D2 and C-3P0 ("Star Wars"), and the "Terminator" were as intriguing as their human counterparts. "The Stepford Wives" (1974) featured suburban women who were docile, empty-eyed -- and coldly, hauntingly mechanical. And "Star Trek The Next Generation" spent seven years chronicling the android Data's quest to be more human.

"Robots in film and television are an index to the way humans have felt about the ever-changing technology around them," Barton said.

Whether it's friendly or ferocious, people retain their fascination for automatons because of their resemblance to humans, Gresty said.

"Robots are humanoid, like a replica," he said. "You can step away and still get a machine that you've got an affinity with. You want the audience to have a link with him."

One of the big differences in the new "Lost in Space" robot is that there's no human inside. But the film robot shares the same voice as the original TV series Dick Tufeld does both.

"This is very close to being a real robot," Gresty said of the movie device. "All the performances done by the robot, like crashing through doorways and getting shot at, they're all done for real."

The blend of real and illusory is part of robots' the appeal, said Barton, whose home is a real-life robot museum. In his living room, 6-foot replicas of Robby and the original "Lost in Space" robot whirr and buzz beside an 8-foot model of Gort, the majestic robot sentinel from "The Day the Earth Stood Still."

Barton's dream of making his own movie robots began when he was 4.

"My parents let me stay up late to watch 'Forbidden Planet' and I was totally enthralled," he said. "I thought he was a friendly thing that would protect me."

The fascination bordered on obsession. After his parents bought him all the Robby replicas that filled toy store shelves in the early 1960s, Barton went on to build his first life-size Robby as a teen-ager. The thing came to life after Barton cooked plastic in his mother's kitchen and sculpted metal in his high school shop class.

The replica was so good that a Hollywood prop museum invited him to restore the original Robby, which had fallen into disrepair.

When movie nostalgia surged in the 1990s, Barton dusted off his Robby blueprints and began making new models under license for Time Warner.

"It was a hobby," he said, "that turned into a living."

Photo by The Associated Press

Hollywood designer Fred Barton displays three of his robot replicas, Robbie the Robot, left, from the 1956 sci-fi flick, "Forbidden Planet," Gort from 1951's "The Day the Earth Stood Still," and the unnamed robot from the 1960s TV series "Lost in Space." Barton's pricey replicas, which he sells to movie fans, reflect a continuing Hollywood fascination with mechanical humans.