"Hey, what's this dust coming?" "When Robby the Robot stepped out of that jeep and walked up to those guys I said, "This is it."" "For your convenience, I am monitored to respond to the name "Robby."" "We really believed that this was a robot that was like a character, a real person." "Can I be of service, sir?" "And what is it you require this time, Miss Alta?" "Nobody had ever seen anything like Robby, period and he just clicked with a generation." "You can't think of Forbidden Planet without thinking of Robby the Robot." "The monster carrying the girl has always been a classic from the days of gorilla pictures." "It was a little duplicitous and Robby looked menacing." "We saw that poster of Robby carrying Anne Francis around and the inference is that the robot is gonna do something bad." "Not only does it not take place in the film it completely changes the character of Robby who was a servant of humankind and wouldn't harm a fly." "Welcome to Altair-4, gentlemen." "Robby was your guardian and your protester." "And so he was an endearing character." "Robby was very complicated-looking and very smart-looking." "He was the only one in the universe that looked like Robby." "I am monitored to admit no one at this hour." "It had this very authoritative voice that reassured you that, uh, you know, Robby was in control." "He was able to take commands." "He was able to process food." "He was able to make whiskey for the cook after tasting it." "It's smooth too." "What's great about Robby is he's very 1950s." "And Robby was what we thought the future should look like so they built him that way." "Robby the Robot was designed, really, not by any one artist." "Irving Block did drawings and so did Buddy Gillespie and the various departments were all, uh, contributing." "And then Bob Kinoshita sort of took all of those ideas and melded it into one basic idea." "I was a design draftsman at the time in MGM." "We had five guys designing and we just knocked out must have been about a couple thousand drawings by the time five weeks goes by." "So I said, "The hell with this." "I'm gonna make me a model."" "So I start making a model." "It was about that big:" "After I almost got through the art director, An Lonergan, came by." "He said, "Hey, give me that thing."" "So he grabs it and runs." "And he really ran right through the drafting room went into the, uh, producer's office 10 minutes later, he comes running back and he said, "You draw it up."" "And that's how Robby the Robot was born." "Ladies and gentlemen the robot of the forbidden planet." "Now these are his eyes." "These, his ears, tuned in all directions to receive the slightest sound." "And this is his brain." "Robby was a great design." "I mean, he was anthropomorphic." "He had a head, shoulders, feet, arms." "And you knew where to look to see him express himself." "Robby's head looks like one big vacuum tube." "And the rest of his body actually looks like a washing-machine tub because that's what Mr. Kinoshita used to design." "He was into designing washing machines out of clear plastic so they can see the agitators go." "And these bizarre mechanisms and a lot of his design experience came over into the design of Robby." "The thing was, how to use plastics in a new way." "And that's how..." "What we tried to do, see?" "Nobody actually had shaped plastics in those kind of ways and new technology was created for Robby." "So Robby the Robot actually did push science forward." "Nice climate you have here." "High oxygen content." "I rarely use it myself, sir." "It promotes rust." "Robby, he was actually built in the leather shop at MGM because leather workers, the guys who formed holsters and stuff had more of an idea of how to form things than the Construction Department." "Finally, they settled on a material called Royalite which was actually what they used to make suitcases out of in the 1950s." "The inside of Robby looks like the suitcases." "It's got, like, the alligator texture or something on the inside." "They wanted a man inside which makes it awful hard to design robots." "But I tried to eliminate the appearance of a man being in there." "I tried to make you guess, "Where is this guy?" You know inside that suit." "Ha, ha." "Well, MGM, at the time, sold Robby as..." "That he was absolutely a real robot." "And I grew up, till I was a teenager thinking that, somehow, they'd managed to pull it off." "Later, we found out that Robby had, uh, a guy inside." "You know, it was akin to finding out there was no Santa Claus." "Not that I'm saying there is no Santa Claus." "You have to be a certain build to get inside Robby." "Short in stature, long legs, short upper torso because you don't want your head getting into all the gadgets." "You can't see, you're..." "Really, the man is looking from behind the neon tubes." "He had to blacken his face and he always looked kind of funny." "It looked like a big mask on him." "Ha, ha." "He went to lunch that way." "It was hard work." "That was a heavy thing." "You wouldn't walk too far." "One day, the young man who was going to be working that afternoon he got inside the suit and he started going down this little plank and everyone realized at once he didn't have a good grip on it." "And about 15 grips ran in and caught him just before he hit the floor with a splat." "They didn't have another Robby." "There was only one." "And had he fallen over, it would have set production back quite a lot." "He was very expensive at the time." "The price that was quoted was $100,000 in 1955, when he was built." "We actors were second to Robby." "He was really the star of the picture." "Is it a male or a female?" "In my case, sir, the question is totally without meaning." "The voice was portrayed by actor and announcer Marvin Miller who was a radio man for years and men was in The Millionaire series." "But he had this voice." " Morbius." " What'?" "Something is approaching from the southwest." "It is now quite close." "That gave Robby the Robot the sophistication of a human being which was what made him a viable companion." "Well, this is the original Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet." "Down here is his analyzing box that, uh, you remember Earl Holliman pours the, uh, booze into which is in this little flap up here which I'll open up for you." "These buttons that move when they are on have an interesting effect because it almost looks like LCDs moving and you really can't, in the film, tell what they are but on close inspection, you can see it just catches the light." "I think it's really kind of a brilliant idea." "The head turns on, uh, a set of bearings which were, uh, custom made." "A lot of the stuff in Robby was actually aircraft stuff." "Lockheed aircraft used to be very angry with MGM because they'd go in and MGM would buy up all their best machinists." "They'd come in and raid their machinists and get the best guys there." "And Robby's an example of all that." "I mean, he's just very well-made and everything moves very smoothly." "But it was all built, actually, custom so there isn't anything on here that's store-bought." "Up here are the neon tubes which operated when he talked." "The way this was accomplished was, uh, they had a large box which was an amplifier that drove these and they actually ran a cable up the heel which ran about 7,000 volts uh, which made the neons work." "Normally, the mouth was operated by a, uh, voice-actuated circuit off camera." "When the actor would speak the mouth would light up like so:" "I'm doing it, act, I'm cheating." "I have a little button." "I'm talking rather loud, as you can tell because I have to talk over Robby's mechanisms." "And this is pretty much the sound he made when they were shooting Forbidden Planet." "Every time Robby is in the scene there's just a tremendous racket going on and any scene that Robby was in they had to ADR it which means to replace the dialogue, uh because he was so noisy." "Because Robby was so expensive and sort of high technology at the time they only ever built one." "And as you probably are aware of there's people building replicas." "I remember, back in high school, I was building my first Robby." "I was 16 years old." "Everybody else was working on cars or going on dates." "I would walk down the hallway and a guy would say:" ""Hey, there's Fred Barton, The Robot Man."" "And that name has stuck, you know." "Thirty years now and I'm still The Robot Man." "This particular Robby is a very popular model." "It's the collector's edition." "You notice he's much quieter than the fully mechanized robot." "You don't have to scream over him and a lot of people want this for their office." "And he'll go into automatic mode in a couple of minutes here." "And he'll start turning his head and lighting and his scanners will come on but it's all microprocessor-controlled it's whatever the robot wants to do." "See, there he goes." "Don't look at me." "And of course, everything is molded right off the original robot so it's not a re-sculpt." "This is the real deal." "Robby the Robot became a favorite of every young kid." "He was one of my favorites." "When the film was over, the talk at school for the next months was, "Can't we have Robby the Robot around?"" "Because he was strong and if you had a bully push you around, Robby could save you." "Every kid in America would love to have been Cookie." "You know, who wouldn't want to have their own robot?" "Kids watching Robby get very inspired." "I see a lot of wonderful students say, "I want to work on these robots."" "And they want to create that R2-D2, Robby, C-3PO." "And then they learn why it isn't possible quite today and how can they get us closer." "At USC, in particular we're focusing on what we call human-centered robotics." "It's robotics for helping people." "Whether it be the elderly or special education search and rescue, emergency response you can do specific things." "But if you want a general robot that's going to, say run around your house, keep it clean, monitor for intruders that's really hard." "And so, that's what we're working towards." "And in many ways, you know, that's what Robby was." "If you gentlemen will go in, you're expected." "Robby was the first very sophisticated automaton." "I mean, the way he talked and walked and acted Robby was a real person." "I will run the dress up for you in time for breakfast." "And he went on, for the next 50 years like any other character actor doing guest shots in TV and film." "It's probably the first case of a completely non-human actor gaining that kind of popularity to the point to where it could spawn a sequel on its own." "He was so popular, he went on to do another movie:" "The Invisible Boy." " Come on, Robby." " Yes, master." "In fact, they reissued Forbidden Planet some years later MGM did, for kiddie matinees." "And they cut out all of the love stuff and just concentrated on the spectacle and Robby the Robot." "Watch out." "Nora." "Nora, did you see that?" "Robby was in The Thin Man episodes with Phyllis Kirk and Peter Lawford and then, you know, showed up on Lost in Space on two or three episodes." "In fact, he's often confused with the Lost in Space robot because Bob Kinoshita later designed the robot for Lost in Space." "Robby was in my first picture, Hollywood Boulevard." "Then I used him in Gremlins and I used him again in Back in Action." "There was a big scene where a lot of '50s monsters..." "And I just couldn't do it without Robby." "When I went over to, uh, Pittsburgh to get Robby into the Robot Hall of Fame I was surprised how, uh, famous he was." "Robby was designed in '56 and here it's, uh, what?" "Fifty years ago." "The unbelievable popularity over the past 50 years of Robby the Robot is really just his look." "His whole stance, there's something indescribable." "It's timeless, yet it's still locked in time." "There's nothing like it today." "It's just really cool." "You think so?" "That is correct, sir."