From: jack.bohn64@gmail.com   
      
   This week has already been covered in a previous post, and looking at next   
   week is not very inspiring, so I'm going to go through some movies not in the   
   program this month.  I'll be specifically looking to fill out my scale:   
   0=obviously a human to 1=   
   pretty convincingly a robot, currently filled through 0.5 -- Robby and the   
   "Lost in Space" Robot.   
      
   I'd like first to reveal my most robotic cinematic robot, if you don't mind my   
   dipping into television.  SID, the Space Intrusion Detector for SHADO, the   
   Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization on the Gerry Anderson series   
   "UFO" (institutional    
   culture of SHADO has us pronouncing that title as YouFoe).  Its "body" is a   
   satellite, controlling various sensors, and directing the armed response to   
   intrusion.  The voice of Mel Oxley is calm, measured, and unvarying as SID.    
   In addition, SID gets    
   into no philosophical arguments about logic vs. emotion or such stuff.    
   Strictly business, it as if the Speaking Clock were to call you up with the   
   time, temperature, and distance attacking alien craft.   
      
   So, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.  Douglas Trumble admits to being inspired by Todd   
   Browning's movie "Freaks" showing a legless man walking on his hands.  He used   
   this idea to put people in robot suits that weren't shaped like a human body.    
   He used amputees,    
   and small ones, too; three of the actors: Steven Brown, Cheryl Sparks, and   
   Larry Whisenhunt are adolescents, needing school on set (which means onboard   
   the USS Kitty Hawk!) and all, and the fourth the then-only 20 year old Mark   
   Persons.  The robot body    
   he built has no head, and defies being read as a face, with asymmetry of the   
   features on it.   
      
      
   There are some who say the movement of the drones is too organic, so we have a   
   robot we can place a few milliislands above them: the Maintenance Operator, or   
   MO on the Saturday morning cartoon "The Space Sentinels."  The design is (they   
   admit) inspired    
   by the drones.  In Saturday animation, even the organic beings don't move too   
   organically, so MO does not walk, its legs and feet are mainly just fixed at   
   its side as support, and possibly part of its hovering mechanism; its body is   
   mostly kept parallel    
   to the floor, that may be a bit of it as well.  You might think cartoons would   
   be a great source of robots that don't have to look like people in suits, but   
   they span the spectrum.  Androids indistinguishable from humans (or   
   anthropomorphic animals) can    
   be one-off copies of the main character (as in the saying that in animation   
   the special effects cost the same as a shot of folks walking down the street;   
   a doppelganger in live-action requires split screen or traveling mattes, or   
   body doubles or whatever,   
    on a cartoon it requires xeroxing the character drawing onto another cell),   
   other human-looking robotic characters often reveal their robotness by opening   
   panels and extending an improbably amount of equipment from inside.  (I have   
   almost no knowledge    
   of Astroboy, are his rocketboots part of his body, or just clothing he wears   
   over his rocketfeet?) I can't think of a good example of a person in a robot   
   outfit; Bender's arms and legs are just a bit too thin for me to justify   
   saying it could be one of "   
   Futurama"-style human drawings in a robot outfit drawing.  Rosie, maid to "The   
   Jetsons," balances precariously on a wheeled base.  "Rubber hose limbs"   
   describes a loose type of animation where a character's hands or feet are   
   positioned where they need to    
   be for an action, and the arms or legs are just sort of sketched in to connect   
   them to the body, without real consideration of the way they'd move, or the   
   position of the elbow or knee.  Applied to robots, I think of these as   
   "gooseneck lamps."  As seen    
   on Bender, the lines of rubber hose limbs have lines drawn across them to make   
   it look like they are segments.  This also leads to the idea of a coil spring   
   or telescoping rod, for stretching the limbs out.  Another simple cartoon   
   robot limb is just two    
   thin metal rods bolted to each other loosely enough to hinge; no real   
   indication of what moves them, and no need to fit a person's arm in to do it.   
   Robots from cartoon shorts include the Mechanical Monsters from the Superman   
   cartoon of the same name, a    
   pest eliminator that chases Bugs Bunny around in a circle... the circle of a   
   rotating sprinkler, and, in a house of the future Daffy is trying to sell   
   Elmer Fudd, a series of robots specialized for specific tasks, each summoned   
   by its own button (but "   
   Not the wed one!  Don't ever press the wed one!").   Adventure cartoons of the   
   '60s through '70s would feature robot one-offs, like the daddy longlegs robot   
   eye of "Jonny Quest."  Japanese anime also has many, such Haro, a robot about   
   the size and shape    
   of a basketball; it is of limited utility and basically acts as a mascot to   
   the pilots of the giant fighting robots in the Gundam series, and also as the   
   corporate mascot for the animation studio Sunrise.   The anime series "The   
   Ghost in the Shell: Stand    
   Alone Complex" features automobile-sized robots called tachikomas (slightly   
   different from the fuchikomas of slightly different world of "Ghost in the   
   Shell" manga series or movies: Japanese "rebooting" and "reimagining"   
   technology was well in advance of    
   ours) the series explores the human mind in cyborg bodies, having bionic   
   senses, even in electronic communication with other minds or machines, the   
   tachikomas reflect those themes with robots achieving sentience.  A   
   live-action "Ghost in the Shell" movie    
   was made in the US, you may remember the furor over the disinclusion of any   
   tachikoma.   
      
   (This seems the appropriate place to mention Robert the Robot from the Gerry   
   Anderson puppet series "Fireball XL5."  It appears it could be a puppet human   
   in a buckethead and barrel, except it is made from a clear material, and you   
   can see the gears    
   inside!)   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)