Top Ten Robots, Part 2

5. Bender Bending Rodriguez, Futurama

Who doesn't love a drinking, smoking, thieving bending unit from Mexico? Bender's baby booties weren't bronzed, they were bronze. As the only member of the regular cast who was 40% iron, Bender was the obvious avenue of choice for any joke that the writers could make about the sum totality of computers and computer science. Bender was Futurama's method of showing us the lighter side of automation: everything from the fact that magnets interfere with his inhibitions and reveal his true desire to be a folk singer to the 6502 microprocessor in his head. He's escaped from robot hell, pushed the Earth further away from the sun, and shown us that "kill all humans" has at least one exception.

4. Gort, The Day the Earth Stood Still

We all know the words. All except Ash from Army of Darkness, maybe. Klaatu... barada... nickel? Necktie? Definitely an N-word. As Klaatu runs around warning people to stop futzing with nuclear power like it's a goddamn toy, Gort silently stands vigil waiting for the go-ahead to nuke us primitive screwheads back to the stone age. It is only by the saying of the words "Klaatu barada nikto" that a lone human prevents him from annihilating the planet. Gort is famous, like Hollywood famous, and he didn't even frickin' do anything. Kind of like Tori Spelling or Penelope Cruz. At almost 8 feet tall, Gort is a massive pile of circuits that is so memorable because he has so much potential. We never seem him do anything, and Klaatu outright says that he can do darn near anything. In reality this is just a bait-and-switch so the producers wouldn't have to spend a lot of cash on special effects, but in the subconscious, the mind races with possibilities. How, exactly, could Gort destroy the world? He's ensconced by tanks and fighter planes ready to bomb him into particles, and the only real glimmer we see of his forcefulness is that he's wearing some sort of visor on his face. Lasers, perhaps? Some sort of devious X-ray emitter? If you think back to all of the robots in all the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s, Gort is probably your first or second pic. The robot monster from Robot Monster should get honorable mention here simply because when you think "robot monster", you picture a gorilla wearing a diving helmet. Am I right or am I right?

3. Tie: Crow T. Robot & Tom Servo, Mystery Science Theater 3000

The story in short: in the not too distant future... oh hell. You all know how this one plays out. Joel gets marooned in space and uses spare parts from the ship like a bubble gum dispenser, a bowling pin, and a lacrosse mask in order to make two wise-cracking robots that help him mock B-movies of yesteryear. They may just be puppets from Minnesota, but Crow and Servo had a classic vaudevillian rapport that involved everything from a vicious game called "Dog and Bear" to their eventual marriage (and subsequent forgetting that it ever happened). These two bots made the show kitschy and fun, and more than just some stoner making Wizard of Oz references for two hours on a Saturday afternoon.

2. R2-D2, Star Wars

I have a theory that everybody understood Artoo in the movies, but the reason why he only ever spoke in clicks, whistles, and beeps is that he is the filthiest-talking motherfucker in the galaxy. Click, click, bzzzt, for example, means, "Get your scrawny feathered-hair-having ass over here, you sand farming fuckwit. I have a shitty holographic message from some bitch with sticky buns on her head for some washed-up kook who lives up in the hills." He's probably the most famous robot ever created, so much so that the U. S. Postal Service can deck out their little blue drop boxes with his likeness and his famous white-and-blue dome has been painted on buildings in MIT at least once as a practical joke. He's more than just an exceptional R2 unit. He's entered into our American culture as an icon. Artoo ranks so highly on my list because he's just so damned lovable, and competent, too. C-3PO would have made the list, but he's as grating and annoying as the worst British children you could imagine. R2-D2 will beep at you, buzz at you, and then go fix the fuckin' problem. Amen!

1. Trent, Demon with a Glass Hand

Through all the legends of ancient peoples, Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Semitic, runs the saga of the eternal man, the one has has never tasted death, the hero who strides through the centuries. Trent, by contrast, has no memories before ten days ago. All he knows is that there are men trying to kill him, and his hand is an ultra-intelligent supercomputer made of glass. The only real problem there is that he's missing fingers — thus the computer is incomplete. As he pieces things together, literally and figuratively, he learns that he is the last survivor of an alien invasion that will take place on Earth a millennium from now. Trapped in a dilapidated office building (where they also shot scenes for Blade Runner), Trent meets a pretty immigrant named Consuela Biros. He and Consuela find out that during the invasion, the world was poisoned with a plague to kill the invaders, and all the humans escaped by being converted into electrical impulses stored in a metal wire whose location here in the past is known only by a fully assembled glass hand. When he defeats the aliens and finally assembles the last of his missing digits, he finds out that the wire is coiled inside the gears and circuits of his chest. He is simply a robot who thought he was a man. Suddenly more alien than the aliens, Trent looks to Consuela for help, but she just retreats from him in horror. Alone, Trent ascends to the top of the building to wait there for centuries until the Earth is safe again, until the invasion ends and the plague has cleared. Trent runs the entire spectrum: he is a machine who dreams he is a man, and winds up as exploited as the device he really is. In order to execute his primary function, his creators knowingly endowed him with all the characteristics of a person, knowing also that in order to complete his task those characteristics would have to be stripped from him. They have given him mobility and movement — but not life.