ROBOT WARS

ROBOT WARS. Albert Band, dir. Milo (sic: just Milo), prod. design. Charles Band, prod., original idea. USA: Full Moon Entertainment (prod., copyright holder) / Paramount (dist.), 1993. **¢+SciFi flick for kids, which offers at least a fight between two robots of sorts, if not a real war. The robots are giant machines with people inside, including a pilot and co-pilot (as minimal crew), in the manner of the Imperial Walkers in RETURN OF THE JEDI and, much more, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK; cf. also the robots in ROBOT JOX, all listed in this Category. (initial compiler Rich Erlich recalls similar game-playing—football?—machines in a Buck Rogers Sunday comic he read as a child, with men in the machines' heads, controlling the movements of humanoid giants.) Note that the robot finally associated with the good guys is humanoid, and symbolically resurrected from an underground space beneath a preserved 20th-c. town in a future toxic-waste wasteland; the robot taken over by evil forces is a mechanical scorpion, complete with deadly tail (with a laser canon). Caution: The film contains vestiges of a shrew-taming motif and more than vestiges of a warning against a "Yellow Peril" trying to get hold of American-developed weapons. Note scorpion design for the insect/robot connection; cf. Ovions and Cylons pilot for the original Battlestar Galactica. Rev. John Thonen, Cinefantastique 26.4 (June 1995): 41-42.