Return of the Robot
They captured the public imagination 50 years ago. Now a retro-revival has them set to conquer the world again

From the National Post, December 26, 2000

The giant robot, that clinking, clattering cacophony of connected cogs and camshafts, has always fascinated a certain segment of the population. But for some reason, this enduring, somewhat endearing mechanical creature has become even more widely popular.

In the last few years, a retro-revival of the giant robot has occurred with the appearance of the film The Iron Giant, the Saturday-morning cartoon Big Guy and Rusty The Boy Robot and the children's book Ricky Ricotta's Giant Robot to name but a few. And at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, curators have glommed on to the trend with Robots and Space Toys (until Feb. 1; www.brooklynart. org/exhibits.html), an exhibition of more than 250 robots and related gadgets, mostly manufactured during Japan's post-war boom, ranging from the pre-war era through the golden age of robots in the 1950s and '60s.

For some, the giant robot represents the zenith of scientific hubris, the technological analog of creating a robot so big that even He couldn't lift it. Part Frankenstein myth, part Godzilla, the giant robot casts a shadow, symbolic and otherwise that we cower beneath.

Robot-mania was at its peak in the 1950s, perhaps inspired by the steel and tail-fin monsters of the Detroit variety. Be it Cold War paranoia or technological encroachment or social conformity, the reflective surface of these robots mirrored societal concerns. But even during the '50s, when both film stock and morality was rendered in black and white, not all giant robots were evil.

Their good intentions were sometimes misunderstood. Gort, the robotic protagonist of the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, was sent by an alien planetary federation to convince humankind to curb its aggressive atomic tendencies or face self-destruction.

The sci-fi community has long been battling public relations problems when it came to robots, be they extra-large or otherwise. In an attempt to address this, the writer Isaac Asimov created the three laws of robotics in 1942:

1) A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.

2) A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Robby the Robot, the star of Forbidden Planet and later Lost in Space, was the most famous set of circuits to obey these laws. The robot as servant represented a commercialization of technology, turning menace into dishwasher, dystopia into utopia. But for every docile electric house servant such as Rosie the Robot (the Jetsons' futuristic maid) there was an angry Robot Monster lurking.

Rather than continue ascending skyward, the giant robot shrank in both stature and popularity during the 1960s. While Dr. Who battled squat, non-human looking robots called Daleks, "them," began to resemble "us" in films such as Westworld, Stepford Wives, and later in The Terminator, Robocop and most famously in Blade Runner.

And even worse than the insidious android or killer cyborg, was the avalanche of "cute" robots such as C3P0, R2D2 and Number Five, the "star" of the 1986 film Short Circuit.

Many '50s predictions about the future failed terribly and we are still awaiting flying cars, jetpacks and moving sidewalks. Similarly, the giant robot is now valued mainly for its kitsch value -- fanciful, reminiscent of simpler times, impractical yet all the more alluring because of it.