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Irwin Allen knew that if
you were going to steal, steal big. After all, the entire
premise of The Time Tunnel was travelling through time to
periods where Allen could use dirty great swatches of stock footage.
For the television
series Lost in Space, Allen needed a robot, so he figured why
not go for the best and ripped off Robby the Robot. Not directly,
mind you. Robby had far too good an agent for that.
Instead, he brought in Robby's designer
Robert Kinoshita to come up with something suitably Robbyesque:
Environmental Control Robot B-9, or "Robot," as he was called with
striking imagination. Though the design of the B-9 is an
impressive mixture of elements from actual industrial robots of the
day and the original concept was a powerful, though dangerously
literal-minded machine, it quickly sank into some of the most
painfully campy performances ever to blight the living rooms of
America and the world. |
