Best Robot?

Marvin and Kryten, definitely. With an honourable mention to Speedy (from Asimovs I, Robot)
 
Awe, heck. I had to look up Kryten to see what y'all were talking about. Okay, got it.

Don't know their names but:

The big old bot in Judge Dread (very cool and junkyard looking)

The bi-pedal gun platform bot in Robocop

The silver wonder in Logan's Run

And the bot in (I think it was called Saturn 5, staring Kirk Douglas)


Tri
 
Triceratops said:
The silver wonder in Logan's Run

And the bot in (I think it was called Saturn 5, staring Kirk Douglas)
Click to expand...

I assume you mean "Box" (played by Roscoe Lee Browne), from the ice sculpture sequence, in Logan's Run? If so, I'd have to add that one to the list, as I've always been particularly fond of him/it (it's a cyborg, really, as I recall)... and Jerry Goldsmith's musical rendition for him is especially memorable, I think.

As for the one in Saturn 5... beautiful looking... but thoroughly impractical, considering the story -- too easily damaged, and with all the exposed hydraulic tubing, it could have been put out of commission too quickly to have become the menace it is supposed to be. It did look neat, though....
 
I think we may have missed some really neat robots in this thread.

Way back in the time of legend there is Galatea a woman made from ivory. Then in the middle ages we get Roger Bacon’s Brazen Head although he is far from the only man of learning said to possess one. The in the sixteenth century the Golem is defending the Prague Ghetto.

The term robot is of course supposed to have originated with the Kapek play R.U.R. Rossum’s Universal Robots. Some of my favourite robots from literature include; del Rey’s Helen O’Loy, Disch’s Brave little toaster, Dee Model from the Stone Canal, the Robass & Saint Aquin and lastly the Moravecs, Mahnmut & Orphu of Io. My all time favourite literary robots are however Iron Trilobite and his cyber deity, the great plankton harvester Roqual Maru. When we get on to comics what British boy of a certain age can forget Hammerstein and Rojaws?

In Cinema no one seems to have mentioned the Maria the Maschinenmensch from Metropolis which given that she seems to be the ancestor of all sexy gynoids I find surprising. Robbie from Forbidden Planet is high kitch but great fun. I remember as if it were yeaterday, Duey and Louie running silent through the darkness tending the last forest to the strains of a Joan Baez song. As for less humaniform robots in cinema what about the phenomenal (fnark!, fnark!) bomb from Dark Star? Fiat Lux! Better yet the Sentinel/Monolith from 2001: A Space Odessy.

From TV; Will, Dr. Smith and Robot a comedy threesome from a sixties childhood and the Skutters to clear up a Saturday night curry extravaganza.
In the real world robots still have a long way to go. From the Bristol Elsie to today’s Kismets and the latest member of the Asimo series. All great technical achievements but still far from the goal of ending humanity’s lonely existence.
 
Here's 3 that no one else has mentioned:

Tobor (Azumasan), the 8th Man

Questor

R. Dorothy Wainwright (from Big O)

And I'm glad some remembered the Metropolis' Parody, and Huey, Dewey and Louie!
 
I just discovered this one, which instantly became a favourite simply for the scale of it

IMG_2012.jpeg
 
No one has mention the girl in Ex Machina yet, who has to be the prettiest and most conniving robot in films.

But my favourite robot ever is and will always be Marvin; in the TV series and on the radio. So as voiced by Stephen Moore.

PS I think Alan Rickman's voice in the film was also very good, but the earlier shape was miles better.
 
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