I have no idea if escape artist Harry Houdini really was the first movie star to do battle with a robot, but obviously someone had to be! The interesting thing is that the Houdini film in which this robot appeared, The Master Mystery (1920), came out a year or two before the premiere of R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the Czech play that introduced the word “robot” in the first place. So in the film, this mechanical monstrosity with the electric fingers is known as “Q the Automaton”, instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh0F1glgKBk
Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In