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Demon Seed: No, it's not about Vanessa--though you'll really wonder about that at the very close, after megalomaniacal supercomputer Proteus (à la Robert Vaughn's voice) inseminates computer scientist Fritz Weaver's wife, Julie Christie. An eerie but high-class production. It's amazing that the ending hasn't spawned a sequel by now.
Colossus: The Forbin Project: A major motion picture taken from D.F. Jones' Colossus trilogy, this Glasnost-by-shotgun film of merging defense supercomputers is intelligent, thoughtful and suspenseful, despite the now-dated hardware. Colossus cuts through all the peace-war morality-philosophy rubbish in one fell logical swoop that's a frightening pleasure to watch. Read the books, too.
Condor: This was the pilot for an ABC series about a future spy with a beautiful female bio-android sidekick named Lisa (Wendy Kilbourne), whose "organic technology" powers come in handy. There are heavy pre-TekWar overtones in this one. The rapport between Lisa and Condor was promising but the script had too mediocre crime-busting.
Making Mr. Right: About a quickie scientist who creates his robot double and hires his romantic object public relations agent to market it. Like a few other post-1985 robot films, an obvious skim of Small Wonder's success. This film illustrates one of the roads that Small Wonder intentionally didn't travel, that of having an anachronistic "nearly human" 20th-century android. This was an odd film that, with a little tweaking and laying off the slapstick, could've been cute albeit somewhat lame.
Runaway: Of about all contemporary films with robots, this one comes the closest to having them being regarded as just another appliance in the background like they'd eventually be in reality. Vicki would've been at home in this "near-future" movie, and chances are writer Michael Crichton would've anticipated android robots like her would've been possible and inevitable to go along with the clunky "Hero-1" types in his movie, but I suspect he felt it would've rendered the movie too "sci-fi'ish." Still, if Small Wonder ever came back as a dramatic series, the tone and production values of this film is a good example of how to do it. Magnum P.I. star Tom Selleck and ex-Playmate Cynthia Rhodes play it straight and the non-sentient robots look practical and believable, but the film gets bogged down by a silly plot of sabotaged black-market computer chips.
WestWorld: A Crichton landmark, WestWorld is the logical extension to what we can expect Disneyland and Williamsburg, Virginia to become; totally interactive robotic environments. The film makes you wonder, "Well, why not?" and it clicks because it doesn't go overboard with standard world-conquest plots and sticks to having fun in peril.
FutureWorld: I'll say only that this is a poor pale rip-off of WestWorld that smacks of the bad Stepford Wives sequels. Great effects and acting, but the "taking over your family and the world" premise is tried and worn. I hate it when good resources go down the drain from unimaginative writing like this. Instead of renegade robots, it could've clicked by just having the protagonists pursued by bad guys who they can't tell from the robots.
The Stepford Wives: As an original strict horror film of Disney-type Barbie-like robots in tea dresses stepping into the high-heels of bored suburban housewives it works, but on second thought you have to ask yourself: Instead of sneaking around murdering and replacing their wives, why didn't these weary 9-to-5 pinstripe baddies just divorce and come out and sell such charming cybernetic cuties out in the open and make Bill Gates their chauffeur?
The Questor Tapes: This TV-pilot about an intelligent and introspective "messiah" android far too advanced for earth to have built was Gene Roddenberry's brainchild (a gleaned spin-off of his "Assignment: Earth" Trek episode.) There was no real reason it couldn't have become a series, except that brilliantly discriminating NBC assumed that it was just a clone of The Six Million Dollar Man, then turned around and produced Supertrain. Questor had a good interplay between the android and its co-assembler (MASH's Mike Farrell), good production values and a great premise of historical nursemaids helping mankind. It's a concept aching to be resurrected, and one I think Tiffany Brissette would be most interested in playing an artificial being again. The Questor Tapes musical score was adapted for Kolchak: The Night Stalker after the Questor pilot failed.
C.H.O.M.P.S.: What's crazy about this second-rate Disney-type flick is that while juvenile, it's kind of cute, being a tale about a robotic security pup and its young creator.
The Black Hole: This Disney bomb had so many flaws, inaccuracies and lapses in common sense that it barely deserves mention, about a spaceship encountering a madman's "lost" billion-dollar ship orbiting the bathtub drain of a black hole, doing a disservice to the scientific enlightenment of the country. The robots are either too R2D2-clone cute or too devilishly sinister to capture anyone's care. Mostly a special-effects fest, nothing more.
Creation of the Humanoids: This cheapie sleeper is a nice surprise that launches the "robots replace humans on the sly" premise. Its slow community-playhouse grade acting and stinted lines will turn some off, but it toys with some interesting concepts, not the least the idea of an android-human liaison. You'll like the pacifistic "we're doing this for your own good" message.
D.A.R.Y.L.: A blatant Small Wonder pilot rip-off, this story of a biological boy with a cybernetic brain running from the Defense Department's ever-evil plans tries to use the heartstring approach to grab interest, but it's hard to feel for a kid who flies off in an Air Force jet. Logic fails me in this movie: The standard myopic scientists contend that they can't manufacture an artificial body good enough for D.A.R.Y.L.'s cybernetic brain, yet are able to create a human-grade brain that's far more complex than a natural body. I doubt this was the real reason giving Daryl a human body; I really wonder whether Daryl's "foster family" or the prospective audience would've so tearfully taken to him as if he were 100% synthetic like Vicki.
Blade Runner: A landmark film on several planes which is too commented on elsewhere to discuss here, except the theme here is that "Replicants," or biological robots created in the stead of humans who perform mining and other industry on other moons, escape to Earth to seek their creator to undo a self-destructive mechanism built into all of them (a lot like Questor). Sean Young plays a cool and silky replicant who is unaware that she is one. Personally, I don't field biological robots in the same category as purely synthetic ones because you don't need science to create them and we've had them for a very long time; the familiar label is slaves. Granted, you can eugenically enhance them, but basically they're still enslaved humans just the same. I cannot prove it, but I highly suspect Leeds gleaned the term Replicants to create "Voice Input Child Identicant."
Robot Monster: I first saw this ultra-cheapie 1953 film as a very young child and it kind of scared the dejebbies out of me in a late-1950s way, not so much by what the "robot" did (killed off the human race all by itself, then spent the rest of the movie hunting down the last family) as, I think, because putting a diver's helmet on someone in a gorilla suit was so eerie weird! (Too weirdo strange to even laugh at?)
Astroboy: Not a movie, but honorable mention as the first Japanese anime series to cross American television. The storyline goes that Astroboy, a jet-propelled flying robot boy, was created in the 21st century by a genius to immortalize only son Astar, who was killed in an auto accident. Astroboy becomes the ward of the Institute of Science which sends him on all kinds of missions against super villains. One of the neat things about this series was how it attempted to go techie in displaying Astroboy's functions and powers, which were kept consistent show after show. The first true "hero" robot on its own, I suspect Astroboy seeded a lot of kids with an interest in robots and computers. Astroboy later on acquired the "gift" of a sister, Astrogirl naturally, who is as strong and quick as he is but a dozen times cuter, or about a "3" on the Vicki scale.
Not Quite Human: When the Small Wonder production heard Disney was cranking up for this quickie project, it drew a lot of smug smiles. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! NQH was a series pilot that only spluttered into two sequels. Unlike Vicki, "Chip" is a 21st-century android with rudimentary emotions in contemporary America trying to pass for an average kid in high school, showing that Disney hasn't exactly picked up on the original story route since The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. On top of this, a competitor of Chip's dad builds a girl robot (Chip's "romantic" interest) in NQH II, which has the name of Vicki too! Apart from the gimmick of Chip being an android, the writers don't really seem to know what to do with the premise but pad it with adolescent gags and idiotic villains. In a way, Chip was a warning of what not to do with Vanessa.
Prototype: Another android snatched away from its evil military creators by a guilt-ridden "moral" inventor. Most critics liked it only because of this factor. They say science fiction is at its best when it mimics reality in logic and development. Prototype again presents a 21st- or 22nd-century-grade android (Steve Morse) in contemporary America who ponders the human condition and mortality of existence and war with its creator (Christopher Plummer). Wow! Not bad for 20th-century technology! Personally, I'm tired of plots that make the Pentagon the heavy; it's an intellectual cop-out and lazy in logic, assuming we can reach such stunning advancements in a single bound than in steps, that we had ever "smarter" robot tanks and planes long before any android to overwhelm Plato. At least we never pretended Vicki ever had a mind, much less a soul, nor needed any to make her role click, and still she could've just as easily posed such philosophical questions as these human-level androids regularly do.