Ogden Johnson III <oj3usmc.DeleteThis@yahoo.com> writes:
>schultr@mail.biu.ack.il (Richard Schultz) wrote:
>> To me, those two actions
>>sound pretty much like a demonstration of the Three Laws. Or is it just
>>a coincidence?
>Probably not. Released in 1956, Forbidden Planet's writers,
>producer, or director could easily have read some of IA's robot
>stories [the first collection of which, I, Robot, was published
>in 1950 or his first robot novel, The Caves of Steel, which was
>published in 1954.
I'm a touch surprised to discover not only don't I know as much
about the making of Forbidden Planet as I had assumed, but there's not
as much laying about ready to be picked up on the Internet as I would
have guessed. I don't see much of substance in background material on
a quick search, but Wikipedia's page about it does point out co-writer
for the screenplay, Allen Adler, as a science fiction writer with at
least one novel and, apparently, one other science fiction movie to his
credit (The Giant Behemoth).
Irving Block, another of the writers, has credits for other
clearly science fictional productions, including Rocketship X-M,
Invaders From Mars, War of the Satellites, and The 30 Foot Bride Of
Candy Rock.
That doesn't actually *demonstrate* much of anything, but it
seems reasonable to me that Adler or Block were reasonably familiar
with a highly successful science fiction convention like Asimov's
treatment of robots as having plausible safety precautions. That they
were obviously trying to make a grown-up movie avoiding the more silly
or sloppy conventions of movie science fiction underscores to me the
advantages of those.
However, it seems to me we can't overlook the good dramatic
need for Robbie to be unable to hurt a human being: when things start
attacking the C-57-D, it would be an obvious thing to suspect the robot
(in fact, as I remember without having seen the movie in ages they *do*),
so having it established that the robot can't possibly do harm to human
beings the mystery is heightened and hopefully the peril enhanced.
And there's also good dramatic value -- not to mention plot
advancement -- in Robbie being unable to attack the Creature From The
Id. That forces the story to have some reasonable justification for
Robbie's inability to be established ahead of time.
Then, too, the original Ariel was under instruction not to harm
the shipwrecked. This would seem to reverse the order of the relevant
Laws, but it has the same ultimate effect in the adaptation (granting
that there's elements of Ariel and Caliban mixed together in Robbie).
Anyway, there's a couple of plot points simplified or made
better by having Robbie obey a First Law equivalent, and it echoes a
piece from The Tempest, so it might be an independent invention of the
same dramatically useful premise.
--
Joseph Nebus
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Stay informed about: Robby the Robot: Asimovian? 
FAQ
Profile
Private Messages
Log in
