Daily Dialogue — January 8, 2017

ROBBIE: Welcome to Altair 4, gentlemen. I am to transport you to the residence. If you do not speak English, I am at your disposal with a hundred and eighty seven other languages along with their various dialects and sub-tongues.
ADAMS: Colloquial English will do fine, thank you. This is, uh, no offense, but you are a robot, aren’t you?
ROBBIE: That is correct, sir. For your convenience I am monitored to respond to the name “Robbie.”
ADAMS: Nice climate you have here. High oxygen content.
ROBBIE: I rarely use it myself, sir. It promotes rust.
COOK: Doc, is it, uh, is it a male or a female?
ROBBIE: In my case, sir, the question is totally without meaning. Will you get in, gentlemen?
ADAMS: Quinn, track this. If I blink red…
QUINN: I’ll bring the tractor in a hurry, sir.
ADAMS: Right.
ROBBIE: Passengers will please fasten their seat belts.
DOC: Looks after us like a mother.

— Forbidden Planet (1956), screenplay by Cyril Hume, based on a story by Irving Block and Allen Adler

The Daily Dialogue theme for next week: Artificial Intelligence, suggested by Angry Cyborg. Today’s recommendation by Will King.

Trivia: This film marked one of the first times a science-fiction project had received a large budget. The genre had rarely been taken seriously by studio executives, and sci-fi films generally received the most meager of budgets. The critical success of this film convinced many in the film industry that well-funded science-fiction projects could be successful. Film historian Ben Mankiewicz has claimed that this film’s success made future big-budget science-fiction films possible.

Dialogue On Dialogue: Commentary by Will: “Talking, intelligent, autonomous robots have been a staple of science fiction from nearly the beginning of filmmaking. One of the best remembered from the 1950s is Robbie. What’s interesting is that even in the early years, even when written with a staid approach and acted with a somewhat monotone delivery, robots were still given at least a minimum of human appeal, such as here with Robbie’s joke about rust.