I, Robot Supplemental

This is supplemental materiel to the video found here.

Fun fact about the book I, Robot: its name was taken from an earlier short story by Eando Binder where the classic creator-killing robot gets put on trial for his actions, despite them being an accident in this case. That short story was even once made into an episode of The Outer Limits with the same name starring Leonard Nimoy and another in The Outer Limits The New Series in the 90’s. So Asimov’s wasn’t the first and his book has nothing to do with the original.

However, it wasn’t trying to be like the original. This movie purported to be an adaptation to the book and failed on just about every front. Reminds me of Starship Troopers… I’ll probably get to that abomination eventually.

Another fun fact on the same vein is the short story “I, Robot” by Cory Doctorow written in 2005. He wrote it in response to the fact that Ray Bradbury blew up over the fact that Michael Moore called his documentary about Bush “Fahrenheit 9/11”, obviously an allusion to his book Fahrenheit 451. Doctorow found it ridiculous for Bradbury to claim such a degree of ownership over the title to his classic work and wrote a series of short stories with the same name as some of the most famous pieces of science fiction.

This story has nothing to do with any pervious version of I, Robot (actually it probably has the most in common with this film), but again it’s not trying to be an adaptation of an earlier work. An interesting note about U.S. copyright laws is that the title of the work is never copyrighted with the content. You can use the name of other works as your heart desires; however, don’t be surprised when its fans get upset at you for it.

Isn’t history fun? No? Well, I find it all very interesting. Hey! Same to you, bub.

But seriously, there’s a lot of stupid things in this movie that I didn’t have time to talk about: how the military didn’t show up because apparently USR controls it, this one really stupid CGI shot of a shotgun shooting out a window, how Sonny is sometimes rather intelligent and sometimes really foolish. There’s a lot to talk about and I couldn’t stuff it into my already too long video.

So, to sum up, this movie sucks, history is cool and Isaac Asimov thankfully never lived to see this film.

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