Let me run this scenario by you: A flying saucer lands. Humans crowd around it, eagerly anticipating what will emerge from it. Soldiers create a perimeter surrounding the landing site, weapons at the ready. Out from the saucer rises a mysterious metal man with a single slit for an eye. It proceeds to fire a beam that destroys the weapons carried by all the soldiers. Sound familiar? Odds are your answer was yes, or if it was no, you recognize the image above, even if you cannot name the film it was from. In creating science fiction iconography, The Day the Earth Stood Still stands tall as one of the originals - the raw material from which most modern science fiction takes inspiration. Gort, the most famous character in this film, is memorable in very much the same way. One of the more iconic, but less remembered Androids, Gort is a humanoid robot that wrecks havoc on the earth in this classic science fiction film and its far less classic remake. Distinguished by a complete lack of mechanical joints (save for the headpiece), Gort is employed as a bodyguard to a group of Alien scientists trying to warn Earth against taking their conflicts to outer space. For those who grew up with science fiction, Gort established the golden standard for what an android was supposed to look and act like.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
