Robby the Robot

The film’s plot is loosely based on William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (1610), with the planet Altair IV standing in for Shakespeare’s remote island and Dr. Morbius for Prospero.

In this context Robby is analogous to Ariel, a spirit enslaved by Prospero.

Robby exhibits artificial intelligence, but has a distinct personality that at times exhibits a dry wit.

He is instructed by Morbius to be helpful to the Earthmen and does so by synthesizing and transporting to their landing site 10 tons of "isotope 217", a lightweight though still effective replacement for the requested lead shielding needed to house the C57-D’s main stardrive to power an attempt to contact Earth base for further instructions.

The only previous film robot of comparable style and quality was the "Menschmaschine" created for Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).

However, this did not come cheap: As with every aspect of the production of Forbidden Planet, MGM spared no expense on Robby's design and construction.

With reported costs ranging from $100,000 and $125,000 (equivalent to at least $US1.1 million today) it was, proportional to total budget, one of the most expensive single film props ever created up to that time, which represented nearly 7% of the film's total budget of US$1.9 million.

In a pulp magazine adventure The Fantastic Island (1935), the name is used for a mechanical likeness of Doc Savage used to confuse foes.

The name is also used in Isaac Asimov's short story "Robbie" (1940) about a first-generation robot designed to care for children.

Morbius programmed Robby to obey a system of rules similar to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics as expressed in I, Robot (1950).

One of the laws is a rule against harming or killing humans.

This becomes an important plot point near the conclusion of the film when Robby refuses to kill the Id monster; he recognizes the invisible creature to be an alter ego/avatar of Dr. Morbius.

Hollywood purposely, and misleadingly, depicts Robby in the film’s advertising posters as a terrifying adversarial creature carrying a seductively posed unconscious maiden (Altaira), but no such scene is in the film and the images do not reflect in any way Robby's benevolent and intelligent character.

Robby only carries one person during the film, the Earth starship's Dr. Ostrow, when he is mortally wounded near the end of the film.

Robby was designed by members of the MGM art department and constructed by the studio's prop department; The design was developed from initial ideas and sketches by production designer Arnold "Buddy" Gillespie, art director Arthur Lonergan, and writer Irving Block.

These concepts were refined by production illustrator Mentor Huebner and perfected by MGM staff production draughtsman and mechanical designer Robert Kinoshita.

The robot's groundbreaking design and execution represented a radical advance on the conventional "walking oil-can" depictions of robots in earlier feature films and movie serials.

Robby the Robot is a fictional character and science fiction icon who first appeared in the 1956 film Forbidden Planet.

He made a number of subsequent appearances in science fiction films and television programs, which has given him the distinction as "the hardest working robot in Hollywood".

The name "Robbie" (spelled with an "ie") had appeared in science fiction before Forbidden Planet.

In Tom Swift on The Phantom Satellite (1956), it is also the name given to a small four-footed robot designed by Tom Swift Jr., the boy inventor in the Tom Swift Jr. science fiction novel series by Victor Appleton II.

Robby the Robot originated as a supporting character in the 1956 MGM science fiction film Forbidden Planet.

The film's storyline centers on a crew of Earth explorers who land their starship, the C57-D, on the planet Altair IV, inhabited by the mysterious human Dr. Morbius and his daughter Altaira who was born there.

Robby is a mechanical servant that Morbius has designed, built, and programmed using knowledge gleaned from his study of the ancient Krell, a long-extinct race of highly intelligent beings that once populated Altair IV.

(By way of comparison, Robby cost roughly the same, proportional to total budget, as the massive 27-ton, 12 meter-diameter, rotating centrifuge set built for Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which cost US$750,000 against a total budget of around US$11 million).

But thanks to its imaginative design, intricate detailing, and the very high visual quality of the final product, Robby immediately became the "face" of the film and soon became an enduring popular culture icon.

Robby was constructed using a range of materials including metal, plastic, rubber, glass, and Plexiglas.

The plastic parts were a pioneering example of the use of the then novel technology of vacuum-forming heated plastic over wooden molds.

These parts were made from an early form of ABS plastic with the brand name "Royalite", a material mainly used at the time for making suitcases.

The finished Robby stands just over 7 ft tall and was fabricated in three detachable sections: the legs and lower torso, the barrel-like chest section (which included the arms), and the highly detailed head piece.

The tall paraboloidal plexiglass dome that covered the head housed the detailed mechanisms representing Robby's electronic brain.

These included a "pilot light" at the very top, an intricate apparatus terminating in three white wire-frame spheres that rotate in planetary fashion (representing his gyroscopic stabilizers), a pair of reciprocating arms in the shape of an inverted "V", multiple flashing lights, and an elaborate horizontal array of moving levers resembling saxophone keys.

Conical protuberances attached to each side of the head carry two small forward-facing blinking lights (his eyes) and two rotating chromed rings, one mounted vertically and the other horizontally, which represent Robby's audio detectors (his ears).

The bottom front section of the head is a curved grille consisting of parallel rows of thin blue neon tubes, which light up in voice synchronization when Robby speaks.

This neon grille also enabled the operator to both see out and to breathe.

The joint between the head and chest section was fitted with a custom-made bearing that allowed the head to rotate in either direction.

Robby's bulky barrel-shaped torso (a sly reference to Bob Kinoshita's earlier job as a washing machine designer) featured a front panel fitted with a rectangular door at the top (into which samples of any substance could be inserted for Robby to analyze and replicate); underneath the slot were two rotating discs fitted with small flashing lights and below that a row of five buttons that moved in and out.

Robby's thick, stubby arms were connected to his body with plastic ball-joints that fitted into matching sockets in the torso, allowing the joints a small amount of rotational movement.

The arms could also be extended and this section was covered with an expanding concertina-type tubular rubber sheath.

Robby's three-fingered hands were also made of rubber, finished with the suit's overall gunmetal metallic gray paint.