Indeed I thought that a robotic ambassador from another world had truly arrived when one day I ran into Robbie the Robot in Myers Department Store. There he was, slightly larger than human size, in the toy department amazing the children and terrorising their mothers. Massive and shiny and utterly wonderful, he moved independently on his rollers, waving his concertinaed arms, snapping his pincher fingers, and speaking in electronic tones: “Greetings from Planet Altare 4!”
I wanted one right away but he wasn’t a toy to be bought—he was actually there to promote the movie Forbidden Planet.
We were hardly out of the store before I had verbally bludgeoned my mother into permission to see the film. I suppose that when she considered what it might have cost to buy me the full-size robot, she thought she was getting off lightly.
“That’s really him!” I gabbled. “He’s in the movie. He’s the star.”
“That thing is a movie star?” she gasped. “Oh dear, I don’t know what the world’s coming to. Why don’t they make nice movies anymore, with nice actors, like Walter Pigeon?”
He was always her favourite. To the day she died I never had the heart to tell her the truth.
MGM decided to give Forbidden Planet the works, using wide-screen and colour, A-class special effects and an interesting cast (although some of them let things down a bit). They lifted the story straight out of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, (with Robby the Robot as a fascinating Ariel) and spun the plot around some basic Freudian psychology. It was a pity, as one critic put it, that they didn’t lift some of the Bard’s dialogue along with his story, and these days it is definitely a museum piece, with too many dull patches and a climax ruined by censorship, but it was amazing at the time and remained a unique work until Stanley Kubrick finally realised it’s ambitions thirteen years later with 2001: A Space Odyssey.
For all that, it remains an amiable and enjoyable film that everyone should see once. It certainly boasts a long list of firsts—apart from inventing a whole raft of special effects techniques, it provided the first talking robot character, the first use of electronic music, and almost all of the basic elements of the Star Trek TV series, right down to the relaxed relationship between the tough captain and his crew. And gladly, against the odds, it made a profit.
There are many myths, mostly disguised as psychological studies, about television—that it was the passive, mind-numbing, conversation-killer in the corner of every lounge room—but the great reality of it is this: that while it has striven mightily to mediocrise and distort and propagandise the populations, what’s really been happening is that truth and knowledge have been seeping out around the edges. The messages being received have never been the ones they thought they were sending.
