ABSTRACT
This chapter considers robotic persistence in three essential guises: the mechanical figure that appeared in film after film, almost unchanged, from the 1930s to the mid-1950s. Then, the complex humanoid robot with an electronic brain, based on Robby the Robot of Forbidden Planet, that would reappear in films and television throughout the following two decades, Finally, the morphing, human-seeming cyborg, not first introduced but perhaps best exemplified in the Terminator films from 1984 to the present. As computers themselves became familiar components of the culture, even trusted and essential elements of everyday life. The Invisible Boy thus sounds a warning against that marriage of an advanced electronic brain with the physical power of a robot unconstrained by those Asimovian directives. While there was no robot in the original short story on which the film was based, Robby was inserted into the script in part to capitalize on this for the film.
