Word: servo
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Action. Science fiction. Graphic-novel source. Bruce Willis. That was supposed to be a recipe for minting money. Yet Surrogates, with Willis in a dual role as a futurist FBI agent and his platinum-blond servo, fizzled, while the 3-D animated feature Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs sizzled. The Sony cartoon pulled in $24.6 million to win the box-office weekend, according to early official studio estimates. Other segments of the potential audience may have renounced moviegoing - attending to more manly pursuits like watching football games and begging God's forgiveness - but moms and their kids went...
...Takeshi Matsumoto, who wore the computerized exoskeleton built by Japanese tech firm Cyberdyne (not to be confused with the fictional Cyberdyne Systems, which created the killer robots of the Terminator movies). The suit mimics a user's motions by detecting the bioelectrical nerve signals that control muscles, and its servo-motors can nearly double a person's strength. After earning its mountaineering stripes, HAL's mission will be to assist the growing ranks of Japan's elderly in daily life. Maybe the rest of us should cut the machines some slack...
Area 51 must be a busy place; everyone has a theory about what's inside. Aliens. Abductees. Elvis. "I think what's hidden in Area 51 is Kyle MacLachlan's career, particularly after Showgirls," suggests comedian Kevin Murphy, the voice of the robot Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000, which last week found a new home on the Sci-Fi Channel. "Or how about this? All those socks from all those dryers get sucked through your dryer vents into a porthole, and they end up in Area 51. The government scrapes some of your DNA off the socks...
Each TV show starts with a jingly theme song explaining that a mad scientist, Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu), is conducting a bizarre "experiment." He has launched into space a satellite containing a human named Mike (head writer Michael J. Nelson) and the automatons Tom Servo (operated and voiced by Kevin Murphy) and Crow T. Robot (Beaulieu again) and forced them to watch bad films: Ed Wood classics like Bride of the Monster and stuff way, way worse, like the 1965 Attack of the the Eye Creatures--a movie so inept that its makers put the word the twice...
...Deezen ("heir to the Arnold Stang fortune"), Ram Dass, Georgia O'Keeffe, Haile Selassie, Sister Mary Elephant, Iron Eyes Cody and Roddy McDowall ("as Dr. Casabamelon"). Crow notes that "this movie was run through a highly technical process called 'tension extraction.'" And in an especially inert section of Laserblast, Servo says what might be said of any MST3K experiment: "There's a point where it stops being a movie...