Kick-Ass Robot: Before the of the Borg and Terminator, there was Warlock

There’s an alien race, half-machine, half-alive, traveling from planet to planet assimilating living beings into their collective. The Borg perhaps? Not hardly.

A living metal machine that can become anyone or anything, can never be fully destroyed and can remain completely undetectable hiding among the human race. The T-1000 you might say? Nah, this robot predates even the original T-800 by two months.

Kick-Ass Robot: Wall•e’s Buy n Large Trades Robots for Souls

Wall•e might be a lot more contemporary than most robots in this column, there is one aspect of the feature-film easily overlooked – the Buy n Large Corporation.

The friendly mega-company that is destined to one day rule the world and launch the last vestiges of humanity into space already has already established a bastion on the World Wide Web – even if visiting means forfeiting your immortal soul.

Kick-Ass Robot: R.O.B., the S.O.B. who brought video games back

Sure, now it’s easy to see video games as the 18-billion-dollar behemoth that the industry has become, but back in the mid-1980s home console video games were as dead as disco in the United States thanks to Atari’s E.T. game and the Crash of 1983.

At the same time, Nintendo wanted to bring Famicom to the other side of the Pacific. In one of the biggest ironies in video game history, Atari was offered sole distribution rights in the U.S. and turned it down. Atari met a slow and painful death while Nintendo, left to their own devices, decided to try it without help, but they did need a gimmick.

They found R.O.B.

Kick-Ass Robot: Marvin hates us all

Gazing hopelessly into the inky void of space through red inverted triangles easily mistaken for eyes, Marvin watches humanity. He was there before the first protein chain formed in a mud pool on earth, and he was there long after the last ape-descended inhabitant watched the universe die. He is Marvin, and he hates us all.

At best guess, the paranoid android existed for at most a few zillion years and at least 21.8 trillion years – as he was created when the universe was about 13.7 billion years old, waited 576,000,003,579 years for the end of the universe, and thanks to time travel, is 37 times older than the universe – and he loathed every minute of it.

Kick-ass Robot: Elektro, the first foul-mouthed smoking robotic icon

“Robot” is a household word in America, and it’s all thanks to a foul-mouthed, smoking robot near Futurama.

Over 1,000 years before Bender will ever have the chance to bend his first I-beam, another robot was cracking-wise and talking it up with the ladies: Elektro. The Westinghouse motoman was the darling of the 1938 New York World’s Fair (the same fair that included the General Motors “Futurama” exhibit), and for a generation of Americans, he was what a robot should be.

Kick-Ass Robot: H.E.R.B.I.E., the chrome-headed step-child that won’t go away

This series was originally published for a now-defunct site called SciFiObserver run by the very astute Mike Moody. Read Mike’s pop-culture commentary at TVSquad and hear his podcasts (including many with myself) at ScreenPunk.net. This entry includes Marvel Comics writer/artist Chris Eliopoulos and originally ran in April of 2008.

With florescent eyes that seem to emote, “feel ambiguous about me,” and a warm nixie tube mouth that would look at home in Charlie Brown’s wardrobe, H.E.R.B.I.E. is hardly what comes to mind when people think of the World’s Greatest Comic Magazine.

But, for a brief, sad time in the late 1970’s, he was the fourth member of the Fantastic Four. Now he’s a super-nanny.