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This one goes out to the janky robots. I don't mean the movie and TV robots that were a product of design limitations of their time and now seem hilariously dated, or robots that were cobbled together within the context of the series, like Homer's robot. And perfectly human androids don't count either, even though B4 was one of the lowest points in Star Trek Nemesis, a movie with plenty of low points to spare.

I mean the robots that were built out of cardboard. The true heroes of awful design. The bargain basement robots that flashed "low budget" in busted neon letters. This is an attempt to chronicle a few of the worst offenders, whether they were bad because of budget, because of poor grasp of design, or because the filmmakers couldn't be bothered to care. They are terrible, and we love (?) them.

The originator of bad movie robots

This is Q, the robot from The Master Mystery, a 1920 movie serial starring Harry Houdini. Yes, that Harry Houdini. There were robots on screen before this one, but no early on-screen robot was as incongruously designed as Q, who had a barrel in his pelvic area for no apparent reason. You might be saying to yourself, "come on, this was nearly a century ago!" Just remember: Metropolis came out in 1926 featuring the robotic Maria whose design is still iconic today.

Other robots had the front-junk-trunk problem, including Marvin the Paranoid Android in the original BBC Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy miniseries. The BBC, in general, has an uneven track record in robot production. The Cybermen and Daleks from Doctor Who do a lot with a little. The Robot ... not as much.

The nadir

Often regarded as one of the worst movies of all time, Robot Monster also features one of the laziest robots of all time, essentially a cheap gorilla costume crossed with a cheap astronaut costume. The 1953 movie was made in four days for $10,000. The titular robot, Ro-Man Extension XJ-2, is on a quest to destroy the last eight humans in the film. He does not succeed.

In the same realm of quality filmmaking is Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy, which certainly wins in the "descriptive title" department. We want to give the film's titular robot credit for sheer effort on costuming, aside from the incongruously placed human-head-within-its-head.

Big head bots

The 1954 movie Tobor the Great features a robot named Tobor who intends to become a spaceship pilot, but instead winds up befriending a young child and a kindly grandfather. This being the Cold War, the Russians are out to get the robot, but the bonds of friendship between machine and small human prevail.

Design-wise, Tobor is a classic case of the hilariously oversized shapes common to early cinematic robots. Moviemakers wanted to emulate the machines seen in Superman and the Mechanical Men. But the result was many clunky, too-tall designs meant to invoke size and scale but instead creating a head-to-body ratio unsustainable in a real android. It was just one of many bots to take on this motif in the 50s.

Bad robots in good movies

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Welcome to the "one of these things is not like the other" section, were I'm talking about bad robots that appear alongside good robots. The worst offender, easily, is the Power Droid from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (also seen in Return of the Jedi, above). Standing alongside astromechs, protocol, and other cool types of droid, Power Droid was hopelessly clunky—and obviously a child or short person sitting under a plastic box with HVAC tubing for legs. C-3PO, R2-D2, and the Death Star droid worked because they seemed like robots. The Star Wars world worked because the aliens looked alien and the puppets were mostly realistic. But Power Droid a mistake. And they still made at least two action figures out of it.

There's also Lucifer, Count Baltar's assistant in the 1970s Battlestar Galactica. Compared to the excellent original Cylon design of original TV series, Lucifer is below Robby the Robot in design, a loose collection of parts that vaguely moves to resemble some sort of speech. This is a curious design choice in movie robots: Their designers give mouths to machines that don't need them just to make them look more human. Just think of C-3PO. In his case, it works: There's an empty cavity, rather than unmoving lips, and you see the sort of design they're aiming for. But Lucifer just has lights that blink creepily, which is ... something.

Lucifer wasn't the first lazily design robot where blinking lights stand in for speech. The trend continued with other low-budget TV robots, like Alpha 5 from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, who was not the most janky thing about that television series. Plus, Alpha 5 is sort of charming.

The Black Hole of bad robots

Not a lot of people find charm in The Black Hole. It was a naked attempt to cash in after Star Wars and nab some of that sweet, sweet robots-and-space-battles cash. But even though it was made by Disney, The Black Hole was... really messed up. (Spoilers for a 36-year-old movie): For instance, everyone ends up in Hell at the end, meaning you could, conceivably, say that Event Horizon copied this surprisingly dark film.

But The Black Hole had two adorable robots named B.O.B. and V.I.N.CENT. They are nakedly Star Wars-inspired, with just a bit of Disney thrown in (by that I mean cute robot eyes).

Even the S.T.A.R. style robots in the film work, in their own way. But then there's Maximilian. Maximilian is supposed to be the ultimate robotic villain, but its design begins and ends with, "make a robot tall, then do nothing else with him." Maximilian's parts don't move well and he seems to move forward mostly on wheel casters. It's sort of like watching a statue try to fight, only able to raise ineffective, rod-like hands.

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I'll give Maximilian a little credit though. His concept art made him look a whole lot cooler, so you can write off some of the problems to budgetary limitations and '70s effects.

Even more 'Star Wars' rip-offs

Star Wars cash-ins or not, BSG and The Black Hole have defenders ready to go to bat for either. Star Odyssey does not.

Star Odyssey was one of a handful of ripoffs of Star Wars to come out of Italy. It was directed by Alfonso Brescia, who made more than 51 cheapies across his 30-plus year film career. One of those, War of the Planets, had one of the best cheap evil computers ever—a bunch of lights on a spray painted cardboard box, which "inspired" Aqua Teen Hunger Force years later. But Star Odyssey is a worse movie because it's annoying on a variety of fronts. Specifically, there are two duck-like robots in love that will leave you questioning years of life decisions:

Their voices are simultaneously obnoxious and bored. Their personalities are despondently amorous. Star Odyssey was almost too bad for Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Then there's Message from Space, a bizarre Japanese take on Star Wars that went on to spawn a TV series despite some truly hideous robots, like one of the Beba models seen here in the movie, previewing years of live-action robots in Japanese children's shows.

Thsi wasn't just happening overseas. In the wake of Star Wars, two old franchises that inspired it came back to rip it off all over again, because time is a flat circle. There was Flash Gordon, a campy movie with a Queen soundtrack that achieved alright reviews and a cult following. There was also Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a one-two movie-then-tv-show punch. It had TWIKI. Human face, no moving mouth, janky movements, and the voice of a grizzled Brooklyn plumber that didn't quite fit the design.

There are reasons I prefer Duck Dodgers. But perhaps one of the most naked Star Wars ripoffs is one of the least known. Ladies and gentleman, via io9, here's the robot from a Texas wine infomercial called Holiday Race for Space.

Taylor Wines

The janky TV bots

That's Urkelbot. That's all you need to know about Urkelbot. Go home, Urkelbot.

But let's not talk about Urkelbot, part of Family Matters' race to the bottom from promising middle class sitcom to a show about Urkel and the family he harasses. What I'm here to talk about is Gilligan's Island.

The robots visited the island. Ginger fell in love with one. Oh, and the castaways later returned to the island after their rescue. And robots returned. And the robots were evil. The only way to stop them was the world's greatest basketball team this side of Space Jam: The Harlem Globetrotters.

Now we need to talk about Star Trek. I'm not going to criticize the "androids look just like us" motif, because then I'd have to criticize the greatest on-screen androids, including the replicants from Blade Runner and Data and Lore from Star Trek: The Next Generation, even if that gives a pass to a lot of bad ones. But Star Trek wasn't innocent when it came to crappy robots, and I'm not talking about Lal, because "Data's Daughter" was a great episode with a lot to say about gender and personality as a construct. What I'm talking about is the episode where Kirk talked to a robotic probe named NOMAD and got it to commit suicide.

NOMAD lights up when talking. It moves when it talks, too. It looks like a bunch of spare parts lying around. NOMAD is the jankiest robot in the franchise.

You might think animation would fare better, since cartoon robots are not limited by real physics or the need to build a big robot suit. You might think wrong. Just look at H.E.R.B.I.E.

When Fantastic Four returned to the small screen in the late 1970s, the Human Torch was busy being developed into his own (never to come to fruition) TV show. So, needing a fourth member of the team, NBC opted not for another superhero, but for H.E.R.B.I.E., an ineffective android whose acronym stood for some iteration of "cynically kid friendly." The New Fantastic Four lasted one season. H.E.R.B.I.E. is still in the comics to this day, though.

H.E.R.B.I.E. was also an introduction to the annoying robotic sidekick. Many, many films and TV shows used this. JINX from Space Camp comes to mind.

Just throw some metal on the actors

The Robin Williams vehicle Bicentennial Man always gave off a creepy vibe though its Pinocchio-like tale of a robot who wants to become human. It falls into the Uncanny Valley of janky robots. It's too life-like, but also not enough. There's too much resemblance to a big actor, making it too hard to suspend disbelief. (It doesn't help that the movie is rather lazy in plot.)

The Andy Kaufmann movie Heartbeeps featured Kaufmann and Bernadette Peters as a robotic couple trying to realize the American dream. The movie was trashed on release, but the makeup effects got an Oscar nod. Today, those makeup effects are deeply unnerving.

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That's not to say it's impossible to make a good pretend robot this way. Kryten from Red Dwarf comes to mind as a robotic character that took the budgetary limits, added some angles, and created what, at the least, was an interesting variation of the trope. The least interesting variation came in Superman III, where a machine turned people into robots.

The very worst

It's not easy to pick a loser from this bunch. Sure, Tobor is terrible, but had you heard of it prior to this article. The jankiest robot of all time must be from something that's still at least somewhat in the mind of genre fans. It should be from a production that had a few resources to work with but still came up with something awful. It should have been created by people who knew better and still came up short.

So, we have Box from Logan's Run.

The 1976 film actually looks a lot like Star Wars, at least on paper. It cost $9 million; Star Wars cost $13 million. Both relied on classically trained actors going through hard times who needed the work (Alec Guinnes for Star Wars, Peter Ustinov in the case of Logan's Run.) Both had to come up with futuristic settings on limited budgets. Say what you want to about the madness of latter-day George Lucas—back then he came up with R2-D2 and C-3PO, robots arguably as popular and familiar to multiple generations of children as Big Bird.

Logan's Run came up with this.

Box speaks for itself. Box is the alpha and the omega. Box is the jankiest robot.

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