24
I, Robot
And Other Mechanical Marvels
Robots are one of mankind’s most ancient “modern” inventions. The first recorded tales of “automata”—automatic men—date back to ancient times (and animals too; the fourth-century Greek philosopher and scientist Archytras developed automatic doves). The Chinese built them, a Buddhist shrine was protected by them, and Leonardo Da Vinci designed one that could apparently wave its arms in the air and move its head.
The French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson (1709–1782) constructed sufficient automata to form a small orchestra, and in 1928, English inventor W. H. Richards displayed a metal man, powered by electromagnets, at the Model Engineers Society annual exhibition in London.
Literature had already grasped the concept by then. In 1886, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam popularized the term “android” in his novel The Future Eve; there is an automaton in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann; and L. Frank Baum’s visions of Oz include the clockwork Tik-Tok.
The actual term “robot,” however, was still to be coined. It first entered the language in 1928, via Czech writer Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rosumovi Univerzální Roboti, or Rossum’s Universal Robots), a science fiction play set in a factory, where the production line churns out synthetic slave workers (the term “robot” is itself derived from the Czech “roboti,” meaning “drudgery”). It is a system that works perfectly until the slaves revolt and, shrugging off their overlords, eventually exterminate the entire human race.
As portents of doom go, few could be so unequivocal, and by the end of the decade, British writer S. Fowler Wright had fashioned his own army of fictional robots, in the novel “Automata,” bent on the same dire purpose.
Over the next three decades, robots marched into science fiction (and other) writing like a mechanized plague; some, like Japanese writer Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, John Wyndham’s Zat, Ray Bradbury’s Mechanical Hound and a whole host of the things coined by Isaac Asimov, destined for legend; many more forgotten as soon as the pulp novel or magazine was shelved after reading.
It was inevitable, however, that the twilight zone would be lousy with the things.
“The Mighty Casey” (First broadcast: June 17, 1960)
Tragedy haunts behind the scenes of this episode. Tragedy and a mystery, too. Filmed at Los Angeles’s own Wrigley Field stadium, which stood at 435 E. 42nd Place, this generally lighthearted episode was originally intended for broadcast on Christmas Day 1959, only to be withdrawn when actor Paul Douglas passed away. Shortly after that, viewing again the completed episode, Serling made the decision to effectively remake the entire thing.
A press release explained,
all of us at Cayuga Productions felt that this performance by such a competent actor as Paul Douglas was not one which we could show to the public. We who were associated with him on the set know how hard he tried not to let his loss of health show up in the picture, but the prying, probing eye of the motion picture camera was too cruel. Heaven knows he turned in a performance that was outstanding for a man in his physical condition. Only a fine actor could have done so well in such a state of health.
In the final analysis, it was decided to do the thing that was right for Paul and remake the film.
With Serling canning an earlier decision to air the episode on March 25, actor Jack Warden was recruited to reshoot all the scenes featuring Douglas as Mouth McGarry, the manager of the Hoboken Zephyrs baseball team, with the original footage presumably being destroyed, for it has never resurfaced. Or perhaps it is safely archived in the twilight zone?
Another of Serling’s sporting opuses, “The Mighty Casey” looks back at what, had it ever actually transpired, would rank among professional sport’s most fascinating controversies—the day when the Hoboken Zephyrs smashed a seemingly eternal losing streak by surreptitiously fielding a robot pitcher. A robot designed by a scientist who believes he is capable of creating an entire race of superhumans.
He may have been correct, too. Certainly nobody ever suspected Casey of being anything but the greatest player the world has ever seen, until the terrible day when he was injured. A standard medical examination revealed a shocking fact—Casey has no heart.
The deception was blown wide open; without a heart, Casey cannot be a human, and if he isn’t a human, he cannot play ball. The Zephyrs’ problem is compounded when the scientist offers to insert a heart into Casey’s body, only to discover that the ruthlessness that was so key to his game has now been hopelessly diminished. The robot quit the sport and became a social worker (and what sort of commentary is bound up in that?); and the Zephyrs’ manager, too, seemed set for a new career.
Or did he? Serling’s closing monologue plants just a little doubt about that. McGarry moved to the West Coast, where he set about building a new team. But whereas the Zephyrs had just the one superhuman performer, this new side comprised nothing but.
It is a familiar-sounding story, of course, although that is only because we conflate it in our memories with “Casey at the Bat”—poet Ernest Thayer’s “Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888.” Mudville, the home team, was losing by two runs—and then the “mighty Casey” takes the field, and the entire stadium seems to believe their hero will win the game for them.
He doesn’t.
Hubris and overconfidence are the victors, instead.
Of course, Serling’s Casey is on the mound, not at the bat, and there is no suggestion that Thayer’s man was anything but mortal. Still there is a gentle sense of tribute being played here, albeit from behind a brilliantly futuristic sheen, while the years since “The Mighty Casey” aired have only seen science’s drive increase to create a genuine, functioning sports-playing robot. Robo Cups are now fought for wherever scientists come to bang robotic heads together, while there is a Robot Soccer World Cup whose stated mission is that, “by the middle of the 21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win a soccer game, complying with the official rules of FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.”
“A Thing About Machines” (First broadcast: October 28, 1960)
Preempted the previous week by a presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon, The Twilight Zone returned with an introduction to Mr. Bartlett Finchley, a sensitive sophisticate who “writes very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like,” and who loathes the latter half of the twentieth century with a tart and zealous passion.
Indeed, he is an absolute pig of a man, one of those boorish louts whose sense of self-entitlement is so overdeveloped that nothing is good enough for him. Least of all the creeping mechanization that he sees taking over society, replacing the conscientiousness that once was a crucial part of any workman’s arsenal with clanking technology that screws up far more regularly than it does the job for which it was created.
Yet that is not the sole cloud on his horizon. He lives in perpetual fear that, one day, the machines will take over; and that he will be among their very first victims. And so it proves, as he discovers that evening when his typewriter suddenly chatters into life, spitting the words “Get Out Of Here Finchley”; and the phone and TV join the chorus.
His electric razor goes berserk, and on the street where he flees from his rampaging apartment, a car—a flash Aston Martin Lagonda—waits patiently to catch him.
The following morning, he is dead, drowned at the bottom of his swimming pool, and nobody notices the car waiting nearby, water still dripping from its chassis. Officially, then, the cause of death is a heart attack. Unofficially, with the coroner suspecting that Finchley was helped on his way to the grave by persons or possibilities unknown, other conclusions remain to be drawn. Possibilities that Serling insists are “filed under ‘M’ for ‘machines’ . . . in the Twilight Zone.”
TV Guide got the scoop on where the idea for the story originated. “This one I got [one] morning when three appliances in my house gave out,” Serling explained. “A washer, a dryer, and a television set. It occurred to me how absolutely vulnerable we are to gadgets, gimmicks and electronic gimcrackery. Then the progression took the form of a story involving a man whose appliances became entities and instead of just stopping on him, they went the full route and actually remonstrated against him.”
It was a great idea (and another that has enjoyed a remarkable half-life in subsequent stories). But Serling was not happy with the finished story, admitting in that same interview that the idea was stronger than the execution, and just a few weeks after broadcast he was even more self-flagellating in a letter to the ad agency that handled the show’s sponsorships. “Mr. Finchley drowned in his swimming pool. Upon reflecting, I wish I had before I wrote the bloody thing.”
As for Finchley’s own fears, they were not so far-out after all, as we discover every time we wait in line at the supermarket for hours, because the computers that control the cash registers have peremptorily decided to crash. You really don’t believe such things happen by accident . . . do you?
“The Lateness of the Hour” (First broadcast: December 2, 1960)
One of six episodes in The Twilight Zone’s second season to be recorded straight onto videotape, “The Lateness of the Hour” is another that pursues any number of past Serling fascinations—not least of all the dangers of overmechanization and the perils of making life too easy.
Here, Dr. William Loren is a scientist whose home has been designed to incorporate every labor-saving miracle he can conceive of. So many that, while he and his wife are perfectly content with their ultramechanized existence, their daughter Jana is aching to taste “real life.”
Her discontent is scarcely unique. Across the world, teenagers balk at the restrictions that their parents pile upon them, each and every one of them couched in the apologetic pledge that “we’re only doing what’s best for you.” As though they were any more appreciative when it was their time to be stifled by overprotective adults.
Jana, however, has passed the limits of token rebellion and brat-like acting up. Her ultimatum is crude but simple. Either her father dismantles all the machines and robots with which he has sapped the challenges from everyday life, or she walks.
Unfortunately, she has overlooked one small fact. Dr. Loren built her as well, and without any other robot maids to keep the household running, he has no alternative. Jana’s memory banks are wiped, and she is set to work as a servant.
“I Sing the Body Electric” (First broadcast: May 18, 1962)
At last, after three years of talking and not a little argument too, Ray Bradbury becomes a contributor to The Twilight Zone. The man whom Rod Serling’s trailer the previous week described as “synonymous with a new horizon of American writing” offered up a fabulous tale of love, loss . . . and robotics.
Or, as Serling’s introduction explains, “It doesn’t seem possible . . . to find a woman who must be ten times better than mother in order to seem half as good . . . except, of course . . . in the Twilight Zone.”
By most of the standards by which we hold Bradbury so dear, this is not one of his major tales; rather, it is just one more in his (and, by extension, most other sci-fi writers . . . Rod Serling included) ongoing campaign to remind us that machines per se are not evil. That they can be built for good as well as for bad.
The fact that industry and technology both appeared perfectly happy designing impersonal gadgets and death-dealing weaponry should never obscure the fact that some good has come out of mankind’s headlong rush into mechanization, and that even more good could come of it, if only we would allow it too.
“I Sing the Body Electric,” for example. Its decidedly uncatchy corporate branding notwithstanding (today, they would be called something short and meaningless, while probably locked in an eternal squabble with Apple over their right to have a name that begins with the letter “i”), this is a company that specializes in consoling the recently bereaved by fashioning robotic replacements.
In other words, when a family is shattered by the death of a wife and mother, what could be more reasonable, or even natural, than to . . . not replace her, but at least fill the void . . . with an elderly grandmother, who will love and care for the children while their widowed parent is at work.
And that is what has happened here. Unfortunately, not all the children are impressed. Ann refuses to accept the robot as a part of her family, shunning both her father and her two siblings’ attempts to convince her that they’re not simply playing “make-believe” with a robot. That granny really is a part of the family.
Only when the mechanoid saves Ann from an accident on the street outside; and then, in a tear-jerking heart-to-heart finale, swears that she will never, ever, desert the family, does the little girl finally accept the robot, and its unconditional love.
Pint-sized aliens with a ferocious disposition. An Invader action figure.
Officially licensed product. TM & © 2015 A CBS Company. THE TWILIGHT ZONE and TELEVISION CITY and related marks are trademarks of A CBS Company. All Rights Reserved. © JLA Direct, LLC. d/b/a Bif Bang Pow!
Bradbury’s recruitment to The Twilight Zone is one of those topics in which legend long ago elbowed chronology aside, aided at least in part by a rash of early newspaper articles that described him as already being on board. In fact, there was considerable back and forth before that became a fact, including the oft-publicized debate over Serling’s originality that erupted during the first season.
Bradbury certainly enjoyed reminding people that he had been instrumental in educating Serling on the requirements of the sci-fi and fantasy genres, to the extent even of loaning him a number of books to read . . . books (including several of Bradbury’s own) that the author believed fully delineated the realms and requirements of the genre.
Of course, Serling went off in his own direction regardless, but he and Bradbury remained in contact, and “I Sing the Body Electric” first crossed Serling’s desk in March 1959—only for Serling to reject it! A similar fate awaited Bradbury’s scripting of his own “And There Be Tygers,” a tale that was included in Serling’s original pitch for The Twilight Zone’s first season.
Bradbury submitted several other scripts thereafter; one, “A Miracle of Rare Device,” was even assigned a season three production number (#4812) before it was decided that it simply wasn’t going to work.
Serling’s thoughts had continued returning to that initial tale, though; and, in 1961, Bradbury submitted it again—at around the same time Serling first went public with his fears for the third season. It was, perhaps, this desperation that persuaded him to finally agree to use the story, despite his awareness that it was below par—an awareness that became unavoidable once filming had been completed in the fall.
After six months of growing unhappiness, Serling was back in touch with Bradbury, asking for certain rewrites and planning to reshoot swathes of the episode. Bradbury refused.
“I’m not sure how this Twilight Zone will turn out,” Bradbury told syndicated TV columnist Hal Humphrey. “It was shot six months ago. Then [in February] it was necessary to reshoot some of it, and they called me only the day before to do the rewriting. I was exhausted from working on a new novel and told producer Buck Houghton he’d have to get somebody else to do it.” (Director James Sheldon was also unavailable; the reshoots were handled by William Claxton.)
Neither was Bradbury happy with the end results. Guesting as a syndicated columnist for a time that spring, he remarked, “I wrote a Twilight Zone script about an electrical grandmother summoned in to raise a family after the mother dies. The point was my explanation of how a robot machine could be used to embody human and/or Christian principles, even as our heroes, servants, teachers embody them. This explanation was torn out of the script as being ‘too slow,’ thus ripping the heart out of the story and leaving everyone in the dark as to what it meant.”
Furious as he watched the broadcast, Bradbury had called Serling the following day to demand to know why the scene had been cut, and was even more incensed when the reply came back that they’d simply run out of time. Bradbury told Serling never to offer him work again.
He was true to his word. But Serling hit back in the June 1963 issue of Writer’s Digest. “Because The Twilight Zone has rather special requirements, we have done far better using established science fiction writers. They know the story telling milieu and are also accomplished dramatists. At the moment they’re supplying two-thirds of the story material for the show. Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont are the best known. Earl Hamner Jr. from Cincinnati has done some exceptionally good things for us. We were less fortunate with Ray Bradbury because, by and large, his material is harder to dramatize.”
“Uncle Simon” (First broadcast: November 15, 1963)
Rod Serling invites us into an extraordinarily dysfunctional relationship, an aging and bad-tempered scientist whose life is largely spent behind the locked door of his laboratory; and his dowdy niece, Barbara, who makes no secret of the fact that she has lived with him for the past quarter century purely for the pleasure of raising a glass in celebration when he dies, and inheriting the fortune that she is sure he has stashed away.
She is correct, and she is true to her word. Arguing on the stairs one day, the old man raises his cane as if to strike his niece, loses his balance and falls to his death. She immediately toasts his corpse.
His will, however, turns out to be a shocker. Yes, he has left Barbara absolutely everything, but there is one condition. Nothing can be removed from the house, and she must pledge to look after the experiment he was engaged in when he died. To ensure her compliance, the law firm executing his will has already been engaged to visit her once a week to ensure that his conditions are being adhered to. Should she attempt any kind of subterfuge, everything will be donated to a nearby university.
But what can be so awful about that? Of course, Barbara agrees, only to discover that Uncle Simon’s latest experiment was a robot that isn’t simply human in almost every way. It is Uncle Simon-human. It has his temper, his temperament, his viciousness, and, as time passes, it even starts sounding like him.
And this one will not be finished off by a simple fall down the stairs.
This episode provided Serling with a very welcome reunion. A decade previous, back in 1952, director Don Siegel (best known for overseeing the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers) helmed two of the episodes Serling wrote for the TV series The Doctor.
For many viewers, however, the movie’s true star was Robby the Robot, a veteran of the movie Forbidden Planet. Designed by Arthur Lonergan and A. Arnold Gillespie from an original idea by producer Nicholas Nayfack, he had since appeared in shows as disparate as The Gale Storm Show, The Perry Como Show and Hazel, while subsequent appearances included Lost in Space, The Addams Family and The Thin Man.
Star of the movie Forbidden Planet, Robby the Robot returned for “Uncle Simon.”
s_bukley/Shutterstock.com
“From Agnes—With Love” (First broadcast: February 14, 1964)
One of the stories that went toward Serling’s contractual obligation to provide CBS with possible pilot episodes for a new series, The Twilight Zone’s first-ever St. Valentine’s Day episode could scarcely have had a more apt title.
Paving the way, according to TV Guide, for a possible new comedy show concerning a scientist (played by Wally Cox) and a computer, writer Bernard C. Schoenfeld schemed one of the weirdest love triangles ever to make prime-time TV in the sixties—and, in so doing, predicted the equally unconventional love affairs that made so many real-life headlines during the twenty-first century, as apparent online romances eventually transformed any number of purported Juliets into nothing more than an Agnes.
James Elwood was the computer programmer charged with overseeing Agnes, the most advanced computer in the world. Agnes was not its official name, of course—she was correctly designated Mark 502-741. But she was so wise, so advanced, and so almost-human that Elwood found himself going to Agnes for all kinds of advice. Including matters of the heart and his love for Millie, one of the secretaries in the office.
Happily, the computer reels off its suggestions. No equation is too complicated or obscure for Agnes, not even those surrounding the workings of the human heart. But this time, it appears, her calculations are wrong. Millie is utterly underwhelmed by Ellwood’s advances—and slowly the realization dawns. Yes, Agnes’s advice was all wrong, but it was wrong for a reason. For she . . . it . . . however you want to term the machine . . . was in love with Ellwood herself. And she had no room for rivals.
“The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (First broadcast: May 15, 1964)
The Twilight Zone was no stranger to the conflict between man and machine, whether it was a human battling a robot in the boxing ring (as in Richard Matheson’s “Steel”) or a jealous computer pitting its wits against the lovelorn sap who asks it for advice.
Now, however, Rod Serling turned his attention to the age-old conflict between manual worker and so-called labor-saving devices—age-old, because for as long as man has worked the land or plundered its bounty, he has looked for tools and implements that will lighten his load, and lighten his payroll as well.
Wallace V. Whipple certainly understood that particular battle. The W. V. Whipple Manufacturing Corporation employed 283,000 people, until the day when he discovered that a single X109-B14 modified transistor machine could save him $4 million, and take 61,000 people off the workforce as well. In terms of industry, it’s a win-win situation; so much so that he envisages a day when all of his factories will be fully automated.
His plant manager Walter Hanley is not so sure. He believes that the human element is important in any manufacturing industry, but Whipple won’t be swayed. And so the job pool grows shallower and shallower. Hanley resigns when he discovers that he is to be replaced by an automated plant manager; and when Whipple himself is deemed surplus to requirements, and replaced by a robot with even less heart than he had, the story would seem to be complete.