The most famous robots, android and cyborgs from movies and TV

The world of “Star Wars” is full of robots. It’s all robots and weirdo monster aliens and guys just dressed as the Christian Devil. Okay, so that was just one alien in one cantina. R2-D2 is one of the iconic “Star Wars” robots, and for our money, he’s the best of the bunch. He doesn’t talk, but he beeps and boops and occasionally seems to scream. All in all, R2-D2 is our favorite rolling trash can.

It’s only fair to have a second robot from “Star Wars.” Now, you might think to pair R2-D2 with C-3PO, but C-3PO is annoying and R2-D2 is the one who should have gotten its own cereal. BB-8 is fun, but it’s really a “Malibu Stacy has a new hat!” take on R2-D2. K-2S0 is a different story. A reprogrammed murder bot, in “Rogue One” and “Andor” K-2SO manages to do something rare for robots in “Star Wars”: actually be funny.

In terms of funny robots, though, nothing beats Bender Bending Rodriguez. He proved to be the standout character in “Futurama,” which is impressive because that’s a great show with several fun characters. Bender’s amoral gusto for life takes the cake, though, with John DiMaggio’s voice work taking the robot to another level of quality.

The T-800, forever identified as the  Terminator, starts off as a horror movie villain. He’s a killing machine that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Terminator manages to be menacing while barely speaking. Once his synthetic skin has melted off and revealed his metal skeleton, he’s even eerier. Of course, the T-800 then becomes the good guy robot, but that’s pretty cool too.

Because Vision, as opposed to Ultron, wears clothes and has something akin to skin, it’s easy to forget he, too, is a robot. A super powerful robot, at that, even if Thanos manages to ice him. Played by Paul Bettany in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Vision brought a fantastical element to the Avengers, and also paved the way for “WandaVision.”

We’ll be honest, we mostly find the first-draft name of the Metal Men delightful. Created for DC comics in the 1960s, the Metal Men delivered what the name promised. They were metallic, robotic men. Aside from Platinum, though, who was the female robot of the group? They were all made of a different metal, and of course, they all had different powers and personalities. While the Metal Men aren’t exactly the Justice League, they have appeared on television and in movies. None of the big movies, but movies nonetheless.

With the “Transformers” universe, options abound. Shout out to the Dinobots, for starters. First, we can eliminate all the dumb and/or racist caricatures among the robots. Obviously, Optimus Prime and Megatron get a lot of the love. However, Bumblebee is sort of the heart of the “Transformers” franchise. Plus, Bumblebee is the namesake for the spinoff movie that is comfortably the best of the bunch.

How does one maintain their sanity when trapped in space and coerced into watching cheesy movies as part of a mad scientific experiment? Well, with the help of their robot friends. Much of the appeal of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” comes down to the inclusion of Servo and Crow. Yes, the riffing on the bad movies is the driving force, but if it was just three humans, it wouldn’t be the same. The fun of the robot puppets being in

Back when Pixar was still really cooking, it could do something like “WALL-E.” It’s a largely silent movie about a trash-collecting robot. Wall-E chills, collects trash, and watches “Hello Dolly.” Then, he meets fellow robot Eve and falls in love. Even then, though, the two only really just say their own names. And yet, Wall-E still pops on the screen.

Brad Bird made his name directing 1999’s “The Iron Giant,” a favorite animated film of many. If you were of the right age to see “The Iron Giant,” there’s a good chance you left the theater misty-eyed. It’s the classic tale of a boy befriending a giant alien robot, with a pre-fame Vin Diesel providing the voice of the titular Iron Giant.

Robby was basically a character actor robot. He gigged! The first time Robby the Robot was seen was in the classic 1956 sci-fi film “Forbidden Planet.” However, that was just the beginning. Robby would pop up in films and TV shows for years. He hung out with Columbo and Mork and Mindy, and Joe Dante had a real affinity for sticking the Robby the Robot suit into his movies. It’s crucial to point out, though, that Robby the Robot is not Robot from “Lost in Space.”

Sure, Johnny 5 hung out with Fisher Stevens pretending to be Indian, but we still like him. Johnny began life as Number 5, a military robot with no personality. One lightning strike later, and Johnny 5 was born. “Short Circuit” was successful enough that a sequel was made. That one focused on Johnny 5 and, um, Fisher Stevens’ character.

Eventually, the world of Austin Powers would build up quite a bit of iconography. When the first film came out, though, the poster was Austin and the Fembots. The perfect weapon to take down a womanizing superspy, the Fembots were all blonde hair, skimpy nighties, and machine gun breasts. In the end, though, Austin’s raw sexual power proved too much for even robots to resist. It’s all incredibly silly, of course, but that’s the point of “Austin Powers” and its sequels.

“Alien” is one of the best horror movies ever made. There are so many elements that make it intense, scary, and the good kind of gross. There are facehuggers and chestbursters and the Xenomorph, of course, and the H.R. Giger of it all really creates a mood. However, Ash’s role in the horror can’t be overlooked. Played by Ian Holm, you, and the crew, assume he’s just the science officer on the Nostromo. Then, it turns out he’s an android, one with no compassion for human life at that.

It’s a freakin’ robotic Godzilla. Mechagodzilla, in all its iterations, always looks like such an old-school sci-fi robot, too. The idea is so silly and so obvious, but we don’t care. There is a 100 percent return on investment every time you watch Godzilla square off with Mechagodzilla. It’s perhaps the best Godzilla villain of them all. Certainly better than the Smog Monster.

The fatuous cynicism of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” universe is probably best exemplified in Marvin. Marvin has “a brain the size of a planet.” He’s smarter than most living beings in Adams’ universe. His role on the spaceship the Heart of Gold, though, is about as rudimentary as possible. Forever fully intellectually unfulfilled, Marvin is about as depressed a robot as you will find. Plus, he gave Radiohead a killer song name.

If you were not a child in 2014, or you did not have a child in 2014, you may not be aware how big of a hit “Big Hero 6” was. The film made $657.8 million worldwide and spawned a TV show. It was also well received, winning the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. So, if you are “Big Hero 6” aware, Baymax is probably a top-tier robot for you. He is very Disney in that they figured out a way to make a robot big, soft, and round.

The Gunslinger is not big nor soft nor round. Also, he wants to kill you. In the original film version of “Westworld,” and then later “Futureworld,” the Gunslinger is a dangerous adversary. While the HBO show based on “Westworld” was all heady and had “ideas,” the film keeps it simple to its credit. There’s a futuristic theme park for adults with different worlds populated by robots. In the Western-themed world, the robots start to go haywire. Suddenly, the Gunslinger, played by Yul Brynner, is primed to actually kill any guest that he comes across. He’s essentially a horror slasher with a sci-fi twist in a world rife with Western motifs. That’s how you do it.

“M3GAN” is one of the Dumpuary success stories of the last decade. It clicked on social media and became a surprise hit. “M3GAN” is silly but not in a way that makes you roll your eyes, and it proved to be a lot of fun for audiences. An inventor creates a robot friend for her kid, M3GAN, but the robot takes her connection to the child quite far. As in, M3GAN is down to kill if push comes to show, even if it means taking a break from dancing. “M3GAN” was so successful it earned a summer sequel in which M3GAN is getting the T-800 treatment and becoming an anti-hero.

“Star Trek” doesn’t hit you with as many robots as “Star Wars,” but they are there. The most famous of them is Data from “The Next Generation.” Played by Brent Spiner, they did the “Pinocchio” thing with Data, oh, three-dozen times? “TNG” liked to milk “What does it mean to be human?” type stories out of Data, but it helped make him a defining character from that show.

The two different versions of “Battlestar Galactica” are stark in terms of intent and tone, and the same rings true of the Cylons. In the 1970s version, the one that is really drafting off of “Star Wars,” they are just big, boxy sci-fi robots with future guns who want to kill humans. A big part of the reimagining of “Battlestar,” though, is that there are now synthetic humanoid Cylons who can walk among humans without necessarily being detected. They still want to kill humans, though.

One of television’s first iconic robots, Rosie was the robot maid of “The Jetsons” when the Hanna-Barbera cartoon debuted in the 1960s. She’s basically a sci-fi version of all the maids that used to be on sitcoms in the ‘50s and ‘60s. For some reason, the Jetsons need a maid even though Jane doesn’t work and much of the house is semi-automated. Rosie is mostly there to be sassy and be a robot in a maid outfit which in the early 1960s was enough to qualify as “clever” and “a joke.” And yet, we have an affinity for Rosie.

By dint of being based on a not-famous book, “The Wild Robot” is about as close to a big-budget original animated film as we get these days. It was a smash success, though, lushly animated and earning three Oscar nominations. ROZZUM Unit 7134, aka Roz, is the only robot to survive a sea disaster and washes ashore on an uninhabited island. Roz wakes up and then has to adjust to animal life, and adapt to surviving on the island. Naturally, a sequel is being developed. Original ideas only get to be original once.