Probably my all time favourite TV show as a little kid growing up in the 70s. One of my favourite T-shirts I wore to death had Steve Austin's face emblazoned across it, and of course I had the Six Million Dollar Man action figure. You were a no-body as a kid in the 70s if you didn't have one.

Six Million Dollar Man on TV started with a made-for-TV movie of the week, by ABC in March 1973. They had gained the rights to make the movie, after optioning the 1972 novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin. Which told the story of Steve Austin we know so well.

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man." The lines from the opening sequence that still stick in my head some 40 years later. Every playground in the 70s had dozens of lads pretending to run in slow-motion and lift heavy objects with the "du-du-du-du-du-du..." sound effect. Even recently I was looking to buy some new trainers, and had a look to see if I could get the exact Adidas that Lee Majors, as Steve Austin wore on the show. I couldn't, but got some very close approximation Gazelles. 

The massive success of The Six Million Dollar Man spawned a spin-off / cross-over show, The Bionic Woman. The show starred Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Summors, tennis star who suffered a near fatal parachute accident to become bionic. The Six Million Dollar ran for 5 seasons, and finally ended in 1978. The Bionic Woman ran for 3 seasons, from 1976 to 1978. The show made Lee Majors a huge international star, and the Bionic Man (as he was sometimes referred to), one of the biggest and most well remembered cultural icons of the 70s. 

Weird Retro Fact: The dialogue spoken Lee Majors during the opening credits, is based upon the real communication of test pilot Bruce Peterson, prior to the M2-F2 crash on May 10, 1967. "Flight com, I can't hold her! She's breaking up! She's breaking..." Peterson's aircraft hit the ground at approximately 250 mph (402 km/h) and tumbled six times. But Peterson survived what appeared to be a fatal accident. Actual footage from the crash was also used in the opening.

Another among the many movie tie-in games that appeared in the 1980s is RoboCop in 1989, produced for the home computer by the British company Ocean Software. Most of the versions that appeared were a reworking of the arcade game, published by Data East and Nihon Bussan, but licensed by Ocean. The Commodore 64 version was a uniquely different game, and notorious in the European version for being very "buggy". And so became an infamously bad game on that platform. 

The ZX Spectrum version however was a great success. Considered by many to be better than the arcade version. High praise indeed, for a platform that was well known for less than impressive graphics and sound. With The game became one of the highest selling of all time on the ZX Spectrum, and stayed at the number one spot in the sales charts for over a year and a half. It was voted the 9th greatest game of all time by Your Sinclair magazine.

The side-scrolling, shoot'em-up, come beat 'em-up platformer, referred to in geek gaming circles as a run 'n' gun, had the eponymous hero advances through various stages that are taken from the 1987 movie. The bonus screen is a target shooting range that uses a first-person perspective. The arcade and home computer versions also featured examples of digitised speech,sampled from the soundtrack of the movie.

The C64 version had a cheat mode, where by you could skip levels. Which was great, for a notoriously difficult and bugged version of the game. Nothing unusual about a cheat mode in a game, except the cheats showed the makers love of the singer Morrissey from the 80s band The Smiths. As the cheats you typed in were from Morrissey songs, "Suedehead" and "Disappointed" . And "disappointed" was just about right for C64 owners of this particular game.

Mild-mannered robot private detective Dick Spanner was the suitably square-jawed titular hero of Dick Spanner, P.I., a tongue-in-cheek British series produced the Thunderbirds creator Gerry Anderson. The series was made up 22, 6 minute episodes, that followed two story arcs, "The Case Of The Human Cannonball" and "The Case Of The Maltese Parrot". The show parodied hard-boiled detective noire movies. Set in a highly stylized, futuristic universe, the tongue-in-cheek show has Dick cracking jokes as he's immersed in the bizarre mysteries. 

The series was created, co-written and directed by Terry Adlam, who worked on the special effects for the Anderson series Terrahawks in the 1980s. The voice of Dick Spanner, was provided by Canadian actor Shane Rimmer, who was the  voice of Scott Tracy in the most famous Anderson series of the 1960s, Thunderbirds. Another piece of trivia about Rimmer is that he has appeared as a bit-part actor in more James Bond movies than any other actor.

Newton the robot, which appeared in 1989, was manufactured by SynPet. Advertised as a "practical" personal robot, it's a bit of a mystery exactly what Newton was, part from a PC on wheels. A bad R2-D2 rip-off, or a Metal Mickey without arms or the sense of humour. Newton was also an answering machine and a smoke detector. As far as being a "robot", Newton had motion sensors and could move around "autonomously" on "plush carpet" and even on a "5 degree incline". The best part of Newton was the cheesy 80s promo video for him. Check it out below.

Kids TV: Metal Mickey (1980 - 1983) - Designed by Johnny Edwards, Metal Mickey was a robot that got his own prime-time UK TV show in the 1980s. Directed by Mickey Dolenz of The Monkees.

Best Of British: Comic Book Robots - A look at the comic book history of the UK through the eyes of robots. From Robot Archie and Brassneck, to the robots of 2000 AD and C+VG.

Randy Retro Robot Romeos - Redressing the romantic balance, with Weird Retro's romp through the Romeos of the robot world. For all the ladies who like a love-bot.

Working on a piece about bad rip-off toys (usually from China), I came across these Titanic themed toys. Now back in the 1980s, hand held LCD games were all the rage. But this beauty came out to cash-in on the success of the Titanic movie in 1997. The idea of the game was to avoid the icebergs, by pressing left or right. Surely the point of the game would have been better if you had to steer the ship into the nearest iceberg, and end it all as quickly as possible.

But no, you had to gain enough points so that "the lovers" can have dinner together, and continue to dodge the icebergs so that they can go "dancing on the deck". Assuming after that, you aim the the Titanic head-long into an iceberg, at which point it transforms into a giant robot and flies away. Thus saving the passengers from a fate worse than becoming a bad rip-off toys.

Just when you thought they couldn't make anything else into a Transformer... We present Titanic-Bot. He floats in your bath, he avoids icebergs, he turns into a giant robot, with lethal looking hooked hands. It begs the question though...

Cybernetic revolt, the technological singularity! Is it just a matter of time now, rather than science fiction? Horror and sci-fi movies, literature and computer games have been warning us for years of the inevitable/possibility of a computer taking over and controlling humanity.

One of the seminal movies that addresses this is the 1970 sci-fi thriller, Colossus: The Forbin Project. Based on a 1966 sci-fi novel Colossus, by D.F. Jones. In the story a massive AI computer, designed to control the United States nuclear defence system, becomes sentient. Colossus becomes aware of the existence of a Soviet supercomputer, like itself. The two computers start to communicate, but their link is cut by their governments. So the two computers launch nuclear attacks on each other's country, until their link is re-established. The two computers become one entity, and proclaims itself "the voice of World Control". Making its mission to end war among humans. The human choice? They have none! They must accept that with peace comes control, its control, and that "freedom is just an illusion".

Below are other links to posts that cover computers/entities that have managed to or tried to take-over humanity. Now... That give me an idea for an article about computers that take over the world!

The Revolution Started Here: Beneath A Steel Sky- The "revolutionary" adventure game from a small software house in Hull, that went up against the big U.S. software houses, and kicked arse!

EarthBound: The Trippiest And Most Fucked-Up Cutesy RPG Ever! - The weird world of the SNES game from 1994. How it mirrored real world events, and created a nightmare.

I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream (1967) - Harlan Ellison short-story about a computer that take over the world, that was made into a creepy 1995 point-and-click adventure game.

A single from the stadium prog rock band Styx, from their 1983 rock opera album Kilroy Was Here.The story of the opera is of Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (ROCK), a rock and roll performer who was placed in a futuristic prison for "rock and roll misfits" by the anti-rock-and-roll group the Majority for Musical Morality (MMM). Kilroy, over powers a "Roboto", and hides inside its emptied out shell. The song tells of Kilroy's meeting with another character, as the robot, and his eventual unmasking. (Yeah, it was the early 80s, these guys had probably taken a lot of drugs in the 70s!) When the band performed the rock opera, they had robots designed by special effects genius Stan Winston, which featured on the album cover.

The video for the song, features the band dressed in the robot costumes, long before Daft Punk were ever around. And despite the over-the-top acting and dramatics of the video and the band's performance, the robots do add a creepy dystopian element to what is otherwise a bad 80s music video. Though I'm still confused as to how the prisoners in the video manage to over-power robots by a punch in the guts! Bit a design flaw in poor old Mr. Roboto.

The vocoded chorus is what the song is most well known for, with the repeated Japanese line, "dōmo arigatō misutā Robotto". Making the song popular in Japan. In 2002, the Japanese new wave band Polysics recorded a cover version of the song, which was a hit in Japan and Korea. And was accompanied by a fun video that paid homage to Japanese giant robot sci-fi movies and TV shows of 1960s, like Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot (1967-1968).

Sci-fi b-movie from producer William Alland, who brought us such classics as, It Came From Outer Space (1953), The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), and This Island Earth (1955). Directed by Eugène Lourié, it's the story of a scientist's son, who following an accident has brain transplanted into the body of "the colossus". A 7 foot cyborg, that has more than a passing resemblance to Frankenstein. Except for the laser beams for eyes, and the on/off switch under his arm-pit. His father believes that by saving his son's brain, he can continue to serve mankind. Obviously, in true b-movie style, things don't go to plan. And soon the robot monster is on the rampage in New York, or as the promotional tag-line puts it, an "orgy of destruction".

The colossus was played by 7' 4" tall actor and stuntman Ed Wolff, famed for his movie monster roles. Wolff also starred in The Phantom Creeps (1939) and Invaders From Mars (1953). Before becoming an actor, he was a circus giant. He had his first film role in The Phantom Of The Opera (1925), at the age of 18.

The film's trailer begs the question: "Can a man's mind function in the body of a monster?" According to the film's "terrifying" philosophy, the divorced human brain - from its own body, heart and soul - would become monstrous, cold, and inhuman. "Fantastic are the implications of this story today, as men delve very closer to the secrets of eternity!" ... It's "Fantastic science fiction. That may soon become science fact!"

Metal Mickey was a robot who featured in his own Saturday afternoon (5.15 pm) TV show in the UK. Humphrey Barclay, Head of Light Entertainment suggested that using his name to banner the show was "money in the bank". So the TV show Metal Mickey took its place in the annals of TV history. He thought the show had "the appeal of Star Wars, the Daleks and Mork and Mindy", after seeing the robot on the Jim'll Fix It TV show on the BBC. Former drummer and singer with The Monkees, Mickey Dolenz was invited by Humphrey to produce and direct the show for ITV.

Metal Mickey was created and voiced by Johnny Edward, musician, song-writer and ex pirate radio DJ for Radio City and latterly Radio London in the mid-1960s. 
Metal Mickey first appeared on TV in 1978 with 21 episodes of a Saturday morning kids TV show, The Saturday Banana. 

Metal Mickey is still waiting in the wings for Lady Luck to knock on his door once more. A team of professionals led by Hollyoaks producer Emma Smethwick has a team including director, script writer and a star in mind to co-star with Mickey in a new TV series. 

Surely everyone loves a robot?! Whether it be Wall-E or D.A.R.Y.L, 3PO or R2D2, we all have our favourites. Maybe it's the original Robocop! (Let's not mention the remake.) I bet for many it's those three cuties Huey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running. Whatever of whoever they are, like I say, everyone loves a robot. Especially Rocketship Weird Retro's co-pilot Xav. He's going through a big robot phase at the moment. Various robot based movies are on constant repeat on our TV. We've played the Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots we got off eBay to death, since it arrived 2 days ago. We built a robot out of toilet rolls, yoghurt pots and other boxes. It's robot central on the rocketship at the moment. So feeding off the obsessions of our 3 year old co-pilot, Weird Retro will be running a robot themed season during the month. And to get things kicked off, I've posted some links to robot related posts we've run so far.

Those Toys You Wanted, And The Ones You Got!!! - Childhood dreams shattered by poor parental purchases.

From The Archives: God Jesus Robot (1985) - A battery operated romantic fortune-telling robot produced by Bandai. Think a Magic 8-Ball with hearts and flowers.

Toys: Guile & Ryu Street Fighter II Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots (1993) - Capcom licensed a lot of products for the Street Fighter series of arcade and console games. This is by far the best.

Love It Or hate It? Heartbeeps (1981) - A bizarre Andy Kaufman romantic robot comedy. Well known for Kaufman offering to refund anyone that had seen it, it was considered so bad.