Robby The Robot - Overview

Overview

Robby the Robot is a 7-foot (2.1 m) tall fictional robot originally created in the mid-1950s by MGM's prop department. The initial design was sketched by Arnold "Buddy" Gillespie, refined by production illustrator Mentor Huebner, and then turned into reality under the direction of mechanical designer Robert Kinoshita. The robot quickly became a science fiction icon in the decades that followed.

Forbidden Planet contains story analogs to William Shakespeare's The Tempest, and Robby has in turn been compared to the spirit Ariel in that play. The first known use of the name "Robbie the Robot" was for a mechanical likeness of Doc Savage used to confuse foes in the 1935 adventure The Fantastic Island. That was followed in 1940 by the Isaac Asimov short story "Robbie", about a first-generation robot designed to care for children.

As Dr. Morbius demonstrates in Forbidden Planet, Robby was programmed to obey Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. This plot point becomes important near the end of the film when Robby refuses to kill the "Id monster" because the robot recognizes that the creature is an alter ego/extension of Dr. Morbius. The Laws of Robotics were adapted from I, Robot, published in 1950 by Isaac Asimov.