John Robot
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- You may wish to consult
John (disambiguation)for other, similarly-named pages.
John Robot was a robot who worked at a banking company's wildly dysfunctional call centre.
After being handed the phone by the B9 Robot, John told a customer in broken English that there was an issue processing their call and there would be a "short wait", before attempting to hand the phone to a Grey Dalek. Unable to hold the receiver with its manipulator arm, an irate Grey Dalek yelled "Exterminate! Exterminate! Destroy!" and fired gunstick at John. (TV: Robots Ad [+]Loading...["Robots Ad (TV story)"])
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
The robot "John" is a character from Planeta Bur, a 1962 Soviet science-fiction film.
The character is referred to as actively "John Robot", and not simply "the 'John' Robot", in the behind-the-scenes featurette for Robots Ad [+]Loading...["Robots Ad (TV story)"] by Canberra Daleks & Robots jointly with the short's premiere. The documentary also revealed that, unlike the preexisting Dalek and B9 Robot props, the John Robot costume was a replica built especially for the production by Studio Kite, who also provided seven original robot designs.[1] Also unlike the Daleks and B9, the John Robot's appearance does not seem to have been actively authorised by his original creators, perhaps under the (controversial) assumption that pre-1973 Soviet films are still public domain in the western world, as was the case before 1973.
This former loophole notably led to the creation of two distinct localised versions of Planeta Bur in the 1960s, both spearheaded by Roger Corman — which reused special-effects-heavy footage while splicing in new scenes with English-speaking actors. As such, John also appeared in both of these productions, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. In all versions of the film, John is seemingly destroyed at the climax of the adventure, last being seen deactivated and sinking into lava.
The featurette also included a close-up of an in-universe prop which was not visible in the final cut, a whiteboard giving a partial list of the call centre's employees. There, he was listed as "John". The comical "scoreboard" reported that he had received 7 calls, resolving 3 while failing to help the callers in the remaining 4 cases. His numbers were written as simplistic tally marks rather than proper number, matching its less articulate speech.[1]
The operators scoreborad identifying the character as "John".
Footnotes[[edit] | [edit source]]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 9 March 2005 ANZ Bank Advert. Facebook. Archived from the original on 7 September 2024. Retrieved on 7 September 2024.
