Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Robot

The Terminator is a classic in the science fiction genre, known for its brutal human versus robot combat, extremely humanoid antagonists, and of course the infamous "I'll be back" line. Now I wanted to know what inspired the desing of the first terminator. I wanted to know why the creator of this movie wanted him to look exactly like a human.

My interest in this piqued when I remembered the discussion on how C3-P0 from Star Wars was designed somewhat after the robot from Metropolis. Was he designed to go along with the plot? Was he modeled after some earlier android? I decided to do some research.

It turns out that the decision to make the terminator look like a human was purely so that the plot would make sense. The man who wrote the original screenplay for the movie said that his main inspirations were a couple of episodes from a science fiction show from the 1960's, neither of which had robots in them. I couldn't really find anything about inspiration for the terminator itself, and it seems like he was made to look human in accordance with the story line, where the terminators need to appear like just another human so that they can blend in when going after targets in the past. Anyway, sorry for the anticlimactic ending.

Giant Japanese Robots

As we did an independent study about the influence of various famous science fiction works for our project a while back , I thought it would be interesting to delve into the inspiration for one of the best science fiction movies to come out fairly recently. This movie has enough action for even the most hardcore adrenaline junkie, explosions galore, and most importantly, tons of giant robots. Yep, you guessed it, it's Pacific Rim.

You may have gathered that I'm being sarcastic when I call Pacific Rim one of the best movies to come out in the science fiction genre lately. Although the movie scored an astounding 7/10 on IMDb, it came under harsh criticism for having no plot, and just a stereotypical and underdeveloped story line. I wanted to know what great works were used as inspiration for this $190 million money pit, I was not expecting what I found. I was expecting Godzilla and other monster movies of the sort to be in the mix, but it turns out that the plot was almost a complete ripoff of Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime series from 1995-96. This brought up an extremely philosophical question rarely dared to be addressed by humans: can anime be science fiction?

As crazy as this sounds, I think it can. I mean, Evangelion is about aliens fighting giant robots, which sounds pretty science fiction-esque to me. It also has strong religious references and mixes them in pretty heavily with the aliens and robots. Now I don't know how you can classify this as anything but Science Fiction, so it is in my book. This perfectly illustrated to me just how broad of a genre scifi is.

Vietnam, But in Space

I really found it interesting how clear of an analogy to the Vietnam War Star Trek was making in "A Private Little War". Given the ban, basically, on political topics that was enforced in pop culture, this was a pretty risky parallel to draw. I also was drawn into the reasoning behind Kirk arming the peaceful villagers. 

I'm a huge military history fan, but Vietnam is one war I have never really looked into the reasoning behind. When Spock justified arming the villagers just to even out the technology that was being given by the Klingons, it got me thinking. Now this means the Star Trek creators thought we were only arming the South Vietnamese because the Communists were arming the North. The itch to go fight back was furthered by our already in place hatred for Communism. The authors clearly thought that we were arming them to get even with the weapons given by the Communists. The thing is, our weapon aid evolved into us dumping masses of soldiers to go die fighting in Vietnam. It makes me wonder where the authors would have gone if they had to expand on this episode.