There has been a lot of interest in the recent animated robot adventure Wall-e, which inspired us to do a quick internet search on film history to find out some more about other famous robots. Here’s what we learned...

It turns out that the first robot in a film was actually in one of the first films ever - a silent film called Metropolis made in 1926 in Germany. This should tell you how important both robots and science fiction are to people’s imaginations.  Even though the film Metropolis is almost 100 years old, it still has some of the coolest special effects in cinema today.

Now you don’t tend to think of the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz as even being a robot, but he actually was. In fact the Tin man from this 1939 hit musical was probably the first lovable robot ever to appear on the big screen.

In 1956, the film Forbidden Planet brought us Robbie the Robot. While the story of the film was just a futuristic version of William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Robbie the Robot was brand new and became a huge hit. Robbie set the new standard of what a robot should like, and versions of robots all based on Robbie were used in television shows such as Lost in Space and the Twilight Zone for years to come.

In 1965 the television series Dr Who introduced us to a new idea of robots with strange looking robots called Daleks. These were completely unlike anything seen before and were such awesome designs that they are still using pretty much the same design in the current Dr Who TV series - almost 45 years later!

Star Wars brought us lots of new ideas about science fiction and about robots. In the Star Wars films, robots are used for labor and are designed according to what they need to do. The robot R2-D2 is small with 3 legs because he is basically a living toolbox where as C-3P0 is human-like as he serves humans and specializes in etiquette, customs, and translation. Funnily, C-3PO actually gets his name from the map reference of director George Lucas' local Post Office.

In the 1980’s, robots in films were played by humans to show how advanced they had become. In the films such as Blade Runner and The Terminator as well as other 80’s classics these robots were portrayed as almost superhu man beings that were easily confused with other humans. This made for interesting story-lines in the films! Perhaps the exception to this 80’s rule of advanced superhuman-like robots comes from the 1986 film Short Circuit. In this film the robot Number 5 is a military robot that gets struck by lightning and then goes on to become a cute and lovable creature with a hunger for information.

In the last 10 years however, it seems that robots in films are all trying to find their humanity. From Bicentennial Man to the kid in AI and the droids in I,robot, robots in films today seem to be most concerned with friends family and their own soul, not unlike the Tinman from the Wizard of Oz.