Garco is the robot
equivalent of the celebrity who is famous for being famous. They
were people like the Gabor sisters or Orson Bean who lived on quiz and
chat shows, where they were always being introduced as being famous,
though famous for what we were never very sure. Something of an
actor at one time? Married to somebody big? Invented the
ferret whistle? Whatever, they were now in a Möbius strip where
fame came just from having fame.
It's
bad enough when a human has to make a living
that way, but when it happens to a machine it's downright criminal.
A singularly strange robot that seems to be all complicated arms, yet
sporting the spindliest pair of legs outside of a first-form rugby
team, Garco is one of those robots with a somewhat hazy provenance.
One story I've heard is that he was built by the Garrett company,
another that he was put together as a hobby. Whatever the true
story, Garco would often show up for no readily apparent reason in all
sorts of places in the late '50s. Open a paper, and he'd be
doing cheesecake to promote a new sci-fi film (though not, thank
heavens, as the principal subject). Turn on the television and
he'd be introducing Walt Disney one minute, and hanging around behind
the presenter of Science Fiction Theater the next. There
never seemed to be any explanation of what he was doing; he was just
there.
One theory is that
Garco was, in fact, a prototype for Charles Nelson Reilly, though this
has never been confirmed.
