Garco

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If you don't type faster, I'm going to rip your diodes out!

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.

Garco backstage during his stint as guest host on the Tonight Show.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. 

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