Scopitone Week: The Tornados, the British instrumental band with the most famous version of Joe Meek's "Telstar," made a knock-off hit in 1963 called "The Robot," and an accompanying Scopitone film as well. It's a very telling demonstration of post-nuclear society's fear of a robot invasion because, as you can see here, the first thing they do is steal our women. The Tornados play the first half of this video wearing robot heads, traipsing through the forest like they own it, and meet up with some attractive girls they start dancing and, more memorably,
making out with. The robot heads then come off, and the Tornados' faces look even more detached and a little disturbing. They then start a bonfire in the forest, which is a terrible idea, and get rightly scuttled off to civilization by a pair of unidentified forest rangers, who presumably get to keep the left-behind robot heads, paving the way for a technocratic fascist society in which humans are turned into Slurpees and the robots get courtside tickets at the Garden. Joe Meek warned us. But did we heed him? And how well do you
really know your Roomba?
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