Sunday, October 4, 2020

Bigger than Godzilla! Robbie the Robot

 


For this weekend, I wanted to get back to a toy blog post, and I decided to bring back a feature I thought I might be done with. The new development is that I finally picked up something I had known about for a while, and like many things I've covered it was all at the local Walmart. I introduce Robbie the Robot, in and out of the box.



By way of introduction, Robbie the Robot was possibly the first non-human "character" in science fiction to take on a life independent of the film he/ it first appeared in. The bot was first created for the 1950s classic Forbidden Planet (which I admit I have still never seen). The suit/ prop was impressive and expensive enough that it was regularly reused in later films and television, including episodes of Twilight Zone and Columbo and (allegedly) the Fred Olen Ray  direct-to-video film Phantom Empire.  The fate of the original bot became something of an existentialist riddle, as several copies emerged based on replicas of varying faithfulness and perhaps on spare or discarded parts created for Forbidden Planet. The "authentic" suit is believed to have been in the hands of a series of collectors since the early 1970s, though it is itself known to have been partially rebuilt at various time.

With the popularity of the character and design, there were inevitably a number of authorized and unauthorized toys and models. I personally have followed these with far more interest than the bot's screen appearances. I covered parts of this search previously in my posts on the Tomy Rascal/ Pocket Bots mini-line. At one time or another, I made further sightings of more direct representations of the character. I particularly recall a beautiful windup bot that popped up here ant there in the 1990s, which I am fairly sure was a now-costly model from Tamiya. The only one I actually bought was a reissue Schylling tin toy "Planet Robot" I've been meaning to get to, which was effectively a knockoff that took on a life of its own. In recent years, the pickings had gotten quite thin, with a tendency toward overpriced "deformed" figurines.

I was still surveying these new and old offerings when the Walmart bought hit the scene, as a partner to the giant Iron Giant. My immediate reaction was that it didn't really suit my interests and tastes, the main reason I didn't buy it much sooner. It also literally magnified certain flaws that were probably there all along, particularly the prominent oversized and overcomplicated circuitry. Still, it was clearly the largest available and also the cheapest, priced like the Iron Giant and the Alien Queen at $20. I finally decided to get it after a merchant selling one of the figurines quoted a price of only a little less for shipping alone. Here's some more pics of what I got for the money.




Obviously, this item is reasonably detailed as well as big, a bit more so than casual inspection in the package would show. In contrast to the Iron Giant, the arms have a good range of motion. The pleasant surprise was the walking motion, which I usually barely pay attention to. The figure is stable, even on just a book (the alternative was the bathroom floor, and I'd rather run a toy on a sidewalk), and the motion is realistic. The head and torso swing back and forth in a pretty good arc. This gets to the one drawback, which is that the toy doesn't have a "default" position. If you push the button to stop it, it usually stops with different parts pointing in in random directions, an issue which will be evident in the photos despite my best efforts, and the stationary figure definitely looks much better with the upper and lower body lined up.

This leaves the question, how big is the damn thing. He's definitely shorter than the Iron Giant, and probably still a bit taller than this feature's benchmark, the generic Godzilla. Here's some reference pics.



All in all, this is a nice addition to the Robbie legacy, and certainly worth the price if you can still get it from Walmart. Unfortunately, it's already getting scalped for much more, which might be enough to tarnish it in the eyes of more seasoned collectors. Still, cool is cool in any decade, and it's safe to say this isn't the last we'll see of Robbie the Robot.













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