Saturday, October 8, 2022

The Synthetic Six

 


I have a group of robot heroes on this blog in Robo Force, but I thought for this team I would use heroes that were once fully human, only to begin new lives in powerful artificial bodies.  I think that such a fate would drive me bonkers, so I have to admire that these characters choose to use their new forms to help others.

30 comments:

  1. WoW!! Just Wow!! These beings are so rare, having been truly alive and then moved into a non organic form. They have been around at least since the 1960s in America. Thank you very much Ross.

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  2. Actually, the storyline that revealed Iron & the other Metal Men to have been originally humans was later retconned to be just something that Doc Magnus hallucinated while off his meds...

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    1. Actually, there are no Metal Men present.

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  3. Egads! Does Rosie have a 'tragic backstory' I never knew about?

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  4. I can't say as I've ever heard of Eight Man. Not unless his theme song includes the endless chanting of his name with a lot of "Na-na-na's" in between! Yet, any super-group that has both the Golden Age Robotman and his Doom Patrol namesake has two thumbs-up in my book!*

    Just one question, though: was it during the 1980's update of the Jetsons that Rosie's organic back story was introduced?

    *Especially if their having human brains and/or minds gets them past that anti-robotic security. ;-)

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  5. https://www.cbr.com/dc-comics-jetsons-shocking-rosie-robot-origin/

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  6. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GzeVe6vUMMk
    an episode on Eight Man and his main villian from around 1963.

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  7. Eighth Man was one of my favorite cartoons as a kid. One of the things that killed it was that the atomic power cells he used to recharge were disguised as cigarettes. You think Hourman popping pills to get his powers looked bad; a hero who had to smoke a joint to energize was even worse.

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  8. Until an official animated cartoon makes the DC one-shot canonical, I'll stick with the original backstory from the original TV series. As in, Rosie is pure XB-500 from the get-go!

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  9. On a slightly digressive note? I'm sure you've already got something else planned for your annual Halloween cover, this year. So, I would like to suggest something for next year. Kolchak the Nightstalker vs. Michael Myers!

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  10. "There's a prehistoric monster that came from outer space..." i loved 8-Man when I was, what, 6 or something.

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  11. @Alaric: sounds vaguely similar to the theme song from Halas/Batchelor's DODO.

    "Dodo! The kid from outer space. Dodo...can go-go anyplace.
    With antennas on his ears, and propellers on his heels,
    He's a science-fiction pixie from a strange atomic race!
    Dodo, the Kid From Outer Space. Dodo!"

    Come to think of it? He'd be ideal for Astroboy's next partner/ally of convenience!

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  12. how does rosie count shes built not former human same with astro boy

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  13. Astro Boy was at least based on a real boy, Tenma's late son who died young. Rosie's origin, or at least the DC version, comes from an alternate take than the Rosie seen here and is not her original origin. It's from DiDio's Darker DC and their "realistic" takes on Hanna-Barbera properties.

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  14. Unlike the Transformers, who are purely robots, the Go-Bots were organics whose minds were placed into robot bodies.

    I suppose one could also mention the end of Star Trek: Picard season 1, but it's probably best not to. Really, it's better that way.

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  15. I always thought he was “Eighth Man”, like the 8th of his kind. Even as a kid I knew that his name, “Tobor” was robot spelled backwards. I loved the show’s opening theme song and never forgot it: “There’s a prehistoric monster that came from outer space, created by the Martians to destroy the human race. The FBI is helpless. It’s 20 stories tall. What can we do? Who can we call?”. (Someone help me get this out of my head.)

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  16. Ross said...
    "Iron isn't on this team"

    Oops... I mis-read "!ROM".

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  17. Steven S, he was the eighth body being worked on by different scientists in that lab building in that other country. Later, we learned about Samantha 7, a "big sister" robot, and Professor Genius' son who was angry and jealous about the robot projects.
    It was a cartoon show but there were some adult stories, like his secretary being told who he was by his enemy scientist. This same scientist who lost his military ranked daughter who gave her life to protect Eighth Man from her father. Some episodes are on youtube. Black & White from the early 1960s.

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  18. Thank you, Detective T. (Any relation to Eighth Man?)

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  19. yep. been using it as a form of advertisement to see if it was known.

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  20. O! And, here, I thought it was a reference to that old B-movie "Tobor The Great" (about a telepathically-controlled robot).

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  21. Carycomic, it also lead the way for a pilot episode of a tv series at that time called,"Here Comes Tobor."

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  22. I used to have a remote controlled toy called Tobor. Well, control on a technicality. You click the thing and it turns. You click it again and it goes straight. The commercial even sold it as "Tobor is robot spelled backwards" because they thought they were too clever for kids and wanted to show off or something.

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  23. Hokey Smoke, Bullwinkle!

    I had to give up comics in 2007, chiefly due to the expense, so I had ZERO idea of the retcon of Rosie as a former human!

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  24. @Kid Charlemagne: Anon1010 raises a fair point, though. Unless and until that ret-con is made permanently canonical in an audiovisual format (even if only as a made-for-DVD animated flick), it's still just as much corporate fanfiction as the so-called "eighth through-tenth seasons" of BTVS. Or even the "origin" of Space Ghost as a the sole-surviving member of an ancient astronaut version of the GL Corps (otherwise rendered extinct by a poor-man's Parallax)!

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  25. Blogger filmsandvidgames07@gmail.com said...
    robocop?

    Many consider [Special Agent Brady getting "killed" by those criminals and then having
    the Professor coming across his dying body. Professor Genius taking the person back to his lab and replicating his mind into the Robot's body. The person "waking up" in the new body and seeing his own dead body across the room. Then learning from the Professor he is in a robot form with powers, without the scientist getting his permission to do so.] being a possible basis for Robocop.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0iB2ZLvdF7U&t=281s first episode


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  26. What?! Still no Bozo and Hugh Hazard?

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  27. Well, in lieu of that, I'd be willing to settle for a variant of/homage to "The Brave & The Bold" (v.1) #78 where Mary Marvel and the Scarlet Witch are playing amorous tug-of-war with a shrunken Superman. Shrunken because Mxyzptlk (laughing his head off in the background) turned those ladies' costumes into red kryptonite!

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