At the bottom of the page are a number of stunning and rare photographs and blueprints from the article.

[MGM’s Art directors Arthur] Lonergan and [A. Arnold “Buddy”] Gillespie first directed their attention to the design of Robby the Robot because if was the most complex of the mechanical props required by the script, to be used extensively throughout the picture in scenes with the main actors. If Robby was not ready and working smoothly by the start of principal photography, the result would be costly production delays. The concept and design of Robby was a collaborative effort. While Cyril Hume finished the Forbidden Planet screenplay, Irving Block made little idea sketches which attempted to get away from the “tin-man look” which had dominated robot design in films up till then. “I saw the robot to look like [producer] Nicholas Nayfack,” said Block. “He was shortish, with stubby legs, somewhat bald, and a very sweet guy.” The original screenplay describes Robby along those lines: “He has no face — only a complicated arrangement of electronic gadgets which crackle and light-up at unexpected moments. In spite of his disproportioned arms and legs, he only very roughly suggests the human shape. His hands are tools, and various spare parts (one of these actually a metal hand) are neatly clipped to his body, back and front. He is able to rotate the upper part of his dome, and so seems to ‘face’ the person addressing him. A small radar antenna [comes] up out of Robby’s dome, and [slowly rotates].” From this description, “Buddy “ Gillespie came up with the design that everyone liked, according to Arthur Lonergan, after he and Lonergan had sketched and discarded numerous ideas. Gillespie based his design (see sketch page 29) on the shape of the old-fashioned pot-bellied stove, “like the ones they used to have in grocery stores. Up to that time,” Gillespie told researcher Paul Mandell, “robots in science fiction films looked like men in starched aluminum suits.” Lonergan turned over Gillespie’s rough design sketches to production illustrator Mentor Huebner, who refined the aesthetic look of the robot [Huebner claims that Robby was his design. “I designed about fifteen of them, and they finally lit on one that was used,” he said. Huebner explains Gillespie’s early Robby sketch as a refinement of Huebner’s concept. Lonergan, however, remembers that Gillespie originated the idea, and points out the Huebner would refine Gillespie’s ideas, not the other way around.]. Huebner abandoned Gillespie’s slip cast rubber legs, similar in design and operation to the arms, and hit upon the jointed ball configuration for the robot’s legs. “I thought of having a very short man inside, being able to look out of the stomach, and then have a false head built on him which brings him up to average height,” says Huebner, . Gillespie’s concept had the operator’s head inside the robot’s clear plastic dome. Huebner’s changes didn’t alter Gillespie’s basic design, but resulted in the clean lines and well-proportioned appearance that makes Robby so popular and pleasing to the eye.

At the end of December [1954], Lonergan turned Huebner’s work over to Bob Kinoshita, head draftsman of the art department, who would produce the working drawings and blueprints for Robby’s construction under Gillespie’s supervision. “One of the first things you do when you design a robot or monster,” recalled Kinoshita, “is to try to confuse the audience as to where you put the guy inside. It’s difficult to completely fool an audience because they know there is someone inside. But if you make an effort to confuse them it can work in your favor and make the whole creation more believable. Robby was designed so that the man inside could see out of the voice box below the glass head. The total concept for Robby came from different areas. Irving Block had some ideas, so did Lonergan, Nayfack and Gillespie. That was one of the problems with the whole show, I had something like six people to satisfy. That is why I am a firm believer in miniatures. Nayfack wanted one to show the other executives first because Robby was a very important part of the whole film. I had to bend up all sorts of paper clips and wire, and work in all the little indicators to give the Robby miniature that computer effect. The first Robby was a little wood model, and that’s what sold the idea.” Kinoshita’s little Robby eventually became part of a jeep miniature built to film long shots of the robot driving Adams and his officers through the desert toward their first encounter with Morbius.

With his miniature scale model of Robby approved, Kinoshita began drafting the plans from which the robot would be constructed. He completed a 1½ scale plan and elevation drawing of Robby on January 6, 1955 (see page 47), and with the help of other draftsmen in the department spent the next eight weeks on the design and drawing of full scale plans for the construction and assembly of the robot’s component parts. Kinoshita’s working drawings were turned over to Jack Gaylord, head of MGM’s Prop Shop, who was in charge of the molding and assembly of Robby’s plastic parts. Gaylord worked out final mechanical problems encountered during construction with his own group of technicians, including Cliff Grant, Andy Thatcher, Rudy Spangler and Eddie Risher. Mechanical effects expert Glen Robinson worked closely with Gaylord and the prop shop in engineering the electrical system that would make Robby’s complex head dome and chest effects panel operate. Electricians Jack McMasters, Bob MacDonald and Max Gebinger installed the wiring and motors required. Gebinger, a glass blower, made Robby’s neon voice tubes, which were rigged to a voice actuator by the sound department, to switch on and off according to the sound of Robby’s dialogue spoken by the operator. Robby’s electrical apparatus was powered and activated from a remote control panel, attached to the robot by a cable which could be plugged into either heel. “I was the nursemaid for Robby.” Said McMasters, who activated via the controls the six rockler arms in the robot’s dome which clicked as if in computation whenever Robby answered a question. For brief shots in which the cable attaching Robby to the remote control panel would be visible, the robot’s electrical system could be run off internal batteries, but “they didn’t last too long,” McMasters remembered, “because Robby drew a lot of power.”

Although Robby was designed to stand about 6’11” tall with an outside diameter of 2’5”, the tangle of mechanical and electrical internal workings called for a small operator. The task fist fell to prop shop technician Eddie Fisher who, at 5’6” in height and 120 pounds in weight, was just the right size. Says Fisher, who is now retired in Oregon, “The close confinement and lack of air was almost overpowering. It was hard work and one could endure it for only short intervals. One of the drawbacks of Robby was that you could not go up or down stairs or any incline. You had to be on a level surface because you could not raise the feet of the robot more than ¾” from the floor. This gave Robby a distinctive, sliding-like mechanical motion in his walk. I had to carry 70 pounds of weight on my back, consisting mostly of Robby’s head dome, plus the weight of the batteries on my belt. This made Robby somewhat top-heavy, and being inside amounted to a balancing act. If you bent over too far, the robot would go crashing to the floor, taking you with it!” Fisher never got to play Robby in the film, although he later operated the robot for television work (see page 67). Before the start of shooting, the Screen Actors Guild stepped-in and demanded that an actor be hired to operated Robby because the robot had dialogue. MGM capitulated and Fisher was replaced by actors Frankie Carpenter and Frankie Darro, who alternated in the role during filming.

Robby exudes an aura of class, due in large part to the voice dubbed-in later by actor Marvin Miller, and the dry, witty dialogue written by Cyril Hume, expressing a friendly, benign superiority. Robby proved to be one of the film’s most powerful science fiction concepts. Story writers [Allen] Adler and [Irving] Block exhibited their knowledge of the field by including in Robby’s programming the three laws of robotics as proposed by Isaac Asimov, which have as their overriding directive the command to preserve and protect human life. Thus Robby symbolizes the harmonious synthesis of scientific advance and social good, at last the powerful tool which man is unable to turn upon himself.

The following Extract is from another part of the article:
Frederick S. Clarke and Steve Rubin. “Making Forbidden Planet.” Cinefantastique, vol. 8, no.s 2-3 (Spring 1979): pp. 4-67. [here, pp. 65-66].

MGM followed Forbidden Planet’s brief glimmer of quality with The Invisible Boy, a low-budget spin-off featuring Robby the Robot and reuniting producer Nicholas Nayfack, writer Cyril Hume and Irving Block, the co-author of the original film, who this time handled special effects with partner Jack Rabin. Says Block, “They corrupted poor Robby and made him into a heavy. He was always designed as a good robot, not a destructive machine.” The Invisible Boy was the initial project of Pan productions, an independent company formed in the summer of 1956 by Nayfack and named for his wife, Pandora. Tired of bureaucratic pressure and interference and anxious to reap the benefits of a successful production, Nayfack was seeking independence like many harried contract producers at the time. it was easy to become trapped at MGM, as director Herman Hoffman, Nayfack’s associate in the new company, points out: “Nicky had to get out. He never saw a penny of his film’s profits. A failure, or a success, was treated the same way. You simply picked up your weekly paylcheck and were handed a new film. MGM had no such thing as percentages for line producers. And if you ever mentioned the thought of leaving they would really seduce you, offering you another raise, more money here or more money there. Nicky was no dummy, he knew it was time to get out.”

The idea to capitalize on the reuse of Robby the Robot occurred to Nayfack when he spotted a story by Edmund Cooper in the June 23, 1956 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, an innocuous little farce subtitled The Story of Timothy — the World’s Worst Problem Child, about the dullard son of a computer scientist who is transformed into a precocious supergenius by the electronic brain run by his father. Nayfack bought the story and made a distribution deal with MGM that included the proviso that he was permitted to use any of the material left over from Forbidden Planet, including Robby. MGM also offered Nayfack their studio facilities, sound stages, crew and special effects team for use in the production of The Invisible Boy, but Nayfack turned them down, preferring to make the film in black and white, away from the studio, on a paltry budget of only $400,000.

Although there is no robot in the original short story, Nayfack instructed Hume to make Robby a key element of his script. To comply, Hume has Timmy (Richard Eyer) find Robby in a pile of rusty junk sitting in a dusty storeroom, the forgotten relic of some late scientist’s experiments with time travel. The dialogue wryly suggests that Robby was brought back from the Chicago Spaceport of March 16, 2309 A.D., providing a tenuous link with Forbidden Planet. Once Timmy is turned into a scientific genius by his father’s supercomputer, he soon has the old veteran of Altair IV walking around, good as new. The computer is not benign as in the original story, and uses Robby in a plot to take over an experimental Army rocket armed with nuclear warheads. However, Robby is still governed by the three laws of robotics which prevent him from harming humans, especially cute freckle-faced boys, and in the end saves the world by smashing the supercomputer’s feedback apparatus.

Nayfack hired Merril Pye, a fellow ex-MGM employee, as production designer on the film, and Pye utilized the staff and equipment of Remington Rand and Radiophone Company to put together the computer set on 18,000 square feet of stage space at Samuel Goldwyn Studios at the cost of $75,000. “Our shooting schedule was for 28 days, period,” remembered Hoffman. “We used very few opticals and no miniatures. To film Timmy’s invisibility I used mainly ‘jump cuts.’ We weren’t trying to sell The Invisible Boy for its effects. We were making a relatively simple little story. All it really had was Merril Pye’s wonderful computer and Robby. In fact, the only spectacular scene in the whole film was when Robby attacked a Nike base, and all we had then were seventy-five extras and a flame thrower.”

Hoffman remembered a tense moment near the end of shooting, when Robby the Robot had an accident. “We had Frankie Darro doing Robby and he had had a few drinks to lunch that day. And he started getting a little wobbly. Before he put his head on, I briefed him on where I wanted to go, then I returned to the camera and began shooting. Darro took three steps and fell right on his ass. It was a horrible moment. You could hear glass shattering, and all of his electrical gear shorting out. His arm twisted under him and his head twisted out of its fixture. We stopped the cameras and got the electronics expert over on the double. He set up a long table and we laid Robby out. It was a regular operation and we didn’t know whether he would be fixed or not. Robby was a pretty damned important part of our production. Nicky was a mental wreck. I remember he had a nine-year-old son at the time, and Nicky eventually came up to me and said, ‘You know, if my son was on that table, I couldn’t be more worried!” A few hours later, the electrician operated successfully, refitting Robby with new parts, and shooting was resumed. We had lost four hours, bit it had seemed like an eternity.”

The Invisible Boy was released at the end of 1957, about a year-and-a-half after the release of Forbidden Planet. MGM found little in the finished product to promote, and simply dumped it on the market, where it failed to turn a profit even on its modest production investment. After Robby’s cheap exploitation, a further feature film career was out of the question. The robot was consigned to the MGM prop department, where he was occasionally retrieved for use on television. Robby appeared in episodes of The Thin Man, The Gale Storm Show, Hazel, The Twilight Zone (two episodes), The Affairs of Dobie Gillis, Lost in Space (two episodes; one, “War of the Robots,” pitted Robby against the series’ robot, designed by Bob Kinoshita, the MGM draftsman who drew-up the original plans for Robby), and The Addams Family. In 1971, MGM sold Robby to Movie World in Buena Park, California, where he appears on display in this retirement. In 1972, special effects technician Bill Malone constructed two exact replicas of Robby from the original MGM blueprints, and continued his show business career with television appearances on Columbo, Ark II, Space Academy and Project UFO. In an episode of Wonder Woman and in New World Pictures' Hollywood Boulevard, Robby played “himself,” now the world-renowned robot star of film and television.

The following paragraph is drawn from: Richard Eyer. Interview with “The Invisible Boy.” by Paul Parla. URL: http://www.classicimages.com/1996/may/richardeyer.html
In a 1998 interview, Richard Eyer, Robby’s juvenile co-star in the film recalled his memories of working with Robby: “I know there was a man inside of it (Frank Carpenter), but a battery pack was used in far away camera angles, but the power was limited in time. The purpose of the battery pack was to keep the sensors, feelers, and the antennas turning on the Robot along with the lights which blinked on and off. Now, the man inside of Robby actually made the Robot walk, but whenever possible, they would hook a cable into the Robot for some above ground shots which, of course, were out of camera range. But we would have to be aware of this cable and not trip. There was a man assigned to feeding the cable properly so it would not get hung up on anything around the set, but at least twice this man was either asleep or day-dreaming, and the cable did get hung up and the poor guy inside the Robot had no way of knowing it had been snagged and went crashing down forward onto the floor. I’m sure it must have been a jarring experience for him! He would pick himself up off the floor saying a number of choice words my young ears were not supposed to be hearing!”
 
 
 

Click on thumbnail image to see the full size photograph

Special effects technician Andy Thatcher wheels Robby’s upper torso across the Central Core Area of the Morbius Home set.	Special effects supervisor A. Arnold “Buddy” Gillespie’s original concept sketch for Robby the Robot.
Effectsmen Cliff Grant (left) and Andy Thatcher help Darro on with the metal and leather harness which attaches him to Robby.	Frankie Darro, inside Robby.
An early preproduction sketch by Mentor Huebner of a rear view of Robby and his passing jeep as he transports Adams and his officers to the Morbius home.	Filming the jeep and actors in front of a process screen using rear projected shots and whip pans.
An inside view of Robby’s jeep.	F.S.D. 2D, Kinoshita’s design for the operation of the head dome mechanisms.
1½ scale plan and elevations for Robby the Robot.	Full scale drawing by DeShields of Robby’s chest hopper panel.
Robby poses with three of the men who built him.	Robby in The Invisible Boy with Richard Eyer.
Robby appeared with Rod Serling (top) and Richard Deacon (bottom) in two episodes of The Twilight Zone.	MGM effectsman Eddie Fisher suits-up for Robby’s appearance on The Gale Storm Show in the late fifties.

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robby the robot, frederick mansfield hodges, forbidden planet, the invisible boy, robert kinoshita, richard eyer, berkeley robot project, lost in space, irwin allen, CBS, billy mumy, bill mumy, guy williams, b9 robot, lost in space robot, robby the robot, jupiter 2, jupiter II, jupiter two, june lockhart, bob may, dick tufeld, bob kinoshita, frederick hodges, environmental control robot, b9 club, b9 robot builders club, robotics, angela cartwright, mark goddard, jonathan harris, forbidden planet, marta kristen, no place to hide, the reluctant stowaway, there were giants in the earth, island in the sky, the derelict, the hungry sea, welcome stranger, my friend mr. nobody, invaders from the fifth dimension, the oasis, the sky is falling, wish upon a star, the raft, one of our dogs is missing, attack of the monster plants, return from outer space, the keeper, war of the robots, space family robinson, will robinson, dr. smith, dr. zachary smith, bubble headed booby, penny robinson, john robinson, maureen robinson, judy robinson, major west, major donald west, don west, bloob, alpha control