DANGER! DANGER!

Robby...!

Despite everything that I’ve been saying recently about not just wading in where you’re really not wanted when it comes to matters Internetty, on Saturday afternoon I was idly looking at my Twitterfeed when a photograph popped up from a chap (let’s call him @PeterCawdron for that is his name and it is his photo which ought to be credited) who was obviously enjoying his day at an exhibition of Film and TV Proppery somewhere.

© @PeterCawdron

It was a photograph of himself in front of a glass case containing a classic movie robot and so far, so favourited. Unfortunately, it was attached to the caption “Danger…! Danger…! Will Robinson…!” the well-known robot alert from “Lost In Space” and, well, you know, despite the fact that I know that it didn’t matter all that much, I really just could not let it lie.

So I’m a great big, steaming hypocrite, but then you already knew that anyway, didn’t you?

NOT Robby...

The prop of dear old Robby the Robot, the whisky-making, human-being protecting break-out star from the MGM classic “Forbidden Planet” has been many things over the years but he was never, ever the robot which featured as the “Bubble-headed Booby” in so many episodes of the Irwin Allen proto-classic TV series “Lost In Space” even though he did feature in a couple of episodes whenever another robot was required for “menacing” purposes.

Because it’s a basic - if ultimately unimportant - error made quite regularly and it always makes the remaining stumps of my teeth grind because I’m essentially a very, very shallow person with hidden depths so very lacking that you’d barely get the soles of your shoes wet.

To be honest, after “Forbidden Planet”, Robby became a huge star and even got to play a lead in his own movie, “The Invisible Boy” but he was difficult to cast in lead roles because he didn’t have the traditional good looks of the more usual leading man and so, after that film came out he returned to supporting roles and eventually, his star faded and he was reduced to becoming the kind of media whore who would turn out for the opening of an envelope if there was a paycheque attached to the gig.

If anything was required by the conveyor belt of TV shows which required something “futuristic’ or “space age”, for more than a decade, Robby would be pulled out of the store cupboard and wheeled out in front of the cameras to do his schtick, before disappearing back into the prop store to play poker for nuts and bolts with Captain Kirk’s old swivel chair.

Because, despite having a bit of an old trollop of a career, Robby was a bit of a design classic, created by the MGM department, initially sketched by Arnold “Buddy” Gillespie, refined by the production illustrator Mentor Huebner, and built under the direction of mechanical designer Robert Kinoshita, and, as a fifties icon he looked quite brilliant and, even twenty years later, still was pretty much everyone’s idea of what a robot ought to look like.

If you’re looking, you’ll see Robby in whole or in part featuring in dozens of classic and not-quite-so-classic TV shows from that era, from “The Thin Man” to “The Monkees”, from “The Addams Family” to “The Man from U.N.C.L.E”, from “Mork & Mindy” to “Wonder Woman”, from “Holmes & Yo-Yo” to “The Love Boat” and dozens of others.

Robby...  playing MM7 in "Columbo"

In fact, I was all set to dig out a picture from “The Brain Center at Whipples”, one of his three appearances in the original classic “Twilight Zone” series to illustrate this post when I switched on the TV set and there he was being framed for a murder he did not commit in this week’s “Columbo” re-run “Mind Over Mayhem” just to remind me that everything in the world is indeed connected after all.

Anyway, if you take nothing else away from today’s pointless little posting, hopefully you’ll have learned that the robot in “Lost In Space” was a Class M-3 Model B9, General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Control Robot, which, apart from insults like “Bubble-headed Booby” was never given a name, but was most definitely not, repeat not, called “Robby the Robot” and I can go away and sleep marginally better at night.

Until someone mentions “Robert’s Robots” at least…