Hugh Jackman plays Charlie Kenton, a washed-up fighter who lost his chance at a title when 2000-pound, 8-foot-tall steel robots took over the ring. Now nothing but a small-time promoter, Charlie earns just enough money piecing together low-end bots from scrap metal to get from one underground boxing venue to the next. When Charlie hits rock bottom, he reluctantly teams up with his estranged son Max (Dakota Goyo) to build and train a championship contender. As the stakes in the brutal, no-holds-barred arena are raised, Charlie and Max, against all odds, get one last shot at a comeback.

You know, I don’t think I’d be nearly as skeptical about this movie if the official synopsis wasn’t so full of canned cheeze. Also, how many robot crotch punches were in that trailer? I lost count, but it seems like way too many. Like I said before, I think the most interesting part of this movie is that 19 eight-foot tall robots were constructed for the film, and I’d kinda rather go see those real robots on display than I would the actual movie.

On the other hand, it is a robot boxing movie, and I do like robot boxing…

Real Steel is set for theaters October 11th of next year.

We wrote about Ruairi Robinson’s Bad Robot short film about a year ago, and now we’ve got this trailer to further pique our interest (and, let’s be honest, to freak us out). The movie is now called Blinky, and don’t forget the image on the original poster:

Yeah. Wow. I’m tempted to comment that a movie about a domestic companion robot turning into some kind of rampaging (or maybe just sneaky) death machine is probably not going to be the greatest thing to happen to the service robotics industry, but at least it’s a refreshing change of pace from the military killbot stories that have been so prevalent lately. Besides, maybe that’s not blood, but strawberry jam, and Blink was just making toast.

DEATH TOAST.

VIA [ io9 ]

You took Willow Garage’s favorite fictional robot survey, right? Right? Sure you did, and here are the results. Try to contain your dismay:

1. R2-D2, from Star Wars (81.5% ‘Like It’ votes)
2. Bender, from Futurama (76.4%)
3. WALL-E (73.9%)
4. Marvin, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (66.3%)
5. HAL 9000, from 2001: A Space Odyssey (65.4%)
6. Eve, from WALL-E (62.7%)
7. T-800 or T-1000 from The Terminator (60.8%)
8. Data, from Star Trek: Next Generation (60.1%)
9. C-3PO, from Star Wars (58.9%)
10. Johnny Five, from Short Circuit (53.3%)
11. Optimus Prime, from Transformers (52%)
12. Sonny, from I, Robot (49.8%)
13. KITT, from Knight Rider (40.1%)
14. Cylons, from Battlestar Galactica (39.9%)
15. Rosie the Maid, in The Jetsons (27.8%)

Yes, I’m feeling the nerd rage too, but here’s what WG has to say on who wasn’t included:

We also received nearly 200 write-in votes for our readers’ favorite fictional robots. Many of them were in our internal survey and didn’t get enough support to make the public survey, but there were some great examples that we just missed. All of these received multiple votes: the robot Andrew in Bicentennial Man; the robot servant GIR from the Invader Zim TV series; GLaDOS from the video game Portal; the robots V.I.N.CENT (“Vital Information Necessary CENTralized”), B.O.B. (BiO-sanitation Battalion), and Maximilian from the movie The Black Hole were all mentioned; R. Daneel Olivaw, who appears is Isaac Asimov’s Robot/Foundation Series.

R2-D2 is fine, and I love Wall-E, but GIR… GIR is something, you know, special.

Click through to see how the community choices differed from Willow Garage’s internal survey… Apparently, some of the people who work there are, like, old, or something.

[ Willow Garage ]

This is Hoops, an automobile welding robot retrained by the Carnegie Science Center to shoot free throws. Visitors can program Hoops to themselves to see how well they can shoot with a robot, but on his own, Hoops nails his shots 98% of the time. This sounds pretty good, and it definitely is, but the record for humans is about 96% over an entire season, which is much higher than I would have though. Of course, Hoops here isn’t a pro (he plays for free), and I bet with a little extra training, he could probably hit that 99.99% accuracy that we’re used to hearing about when it comes to robots performing repeatable actions.

As far as I can tell, you can go see Hoops (and a bunch of other cool robots) at the RoboWorld exhibit in Pittsburgh, the next time you find yourself in Pennsylvania with nothing to do.

[ RoboWorld ]

Willow Garage has noticed that people like to name their robots, and that most of the time (at least where PR2 is concerned), the name is that of some fictional robot. So, they’re wondering what the right name is for a robot, if you’re one of those people who thinks that endowing an occasionally animate object with a name is a good idea… They’ve got a survey listing their top fictional robot choices, and they’d like you to tell them what you think.

Why? Well, you definitely won’t be entered into a drawing to win your very own PR2, which is sad, but “why not” is a pretty good reason too. I won’t tell you who I voted for, but I did include an angry comment wondering why I didn’t see Tom Servo or Crow on the list, and hoping that next time they’d include GIR.

Complete the survey (it takes like 15 seconds) and include your own angry comments by clicking here.

[ Willow Garage ]

You might remember Daniel Wilson from (among other things) his Keepon snuggling escapades, but he’s also the artistic and technical brains behind such books as ‘Robopocalypse‘ and ‘How To Survive A Robot Uprising.’ It’s now looking like Steven Spielberg will be directing a movie adaptation of the former, which will start shooting in January of 2012 for a 2013 release. The movie is about the human race’s attempt to survive an apocalyptic robot uprising, and it strikes me that it would have been smarter (or at least, better for humanity in general), if ‘How To Survive A Robot Uprising’ had come out on film first… But that book has only just been picked up for a movie by Jack Black, of all people. This doesn’t mean that Black is going to act in the movie, he’s just picked up the rights to make it, so we’ll have to see what comes of that.

Of course, it’s hard for me to condone movies about robot uprisings and Robopocalypses and stuff… But, as long as people can take these movies as they’re intended (as fiction), I guess that’s okay. Meantime, I’ll be bracing myself for the inevitable slew of breathless “Robopocalypse: Could It Really Happen?” articles that’ll be popping up as soon as the first trailer for the movie hits.

Sigh.

Robopocalypse (the book) should be available in June of next year, and How To Survive A Robot Uprising is in stores now.

[ Robot Uprising ] VIA [ Deadline ] and [ io9 ]

[If you can't see the above clip, it's probably because you have AdBlock enabled and CBS is whining about it]

I watched The Big Bang Theory for the first time last Thursday, specifically because Willow Garage’s Texai was guest starring, along with Steve Wozniak. While the show was funny at times, it was a little too much HEY WE’RE A GEEKY TV SHOW ::POKE POKE POKE:: for my taste… It’s sort of like The IT Crowd except absent any sort of comedic reserve or understatement. Certainly, having Texai and Woz guest starring makes it totally worth watching, but unless PR2 shows up next week, I might go back to Antiques Roadshow.

Wow, apparently we do TV reviews here on BotJunkie, who knew?

The Big Bang Theory is new every Thursday on CBS at 8pm.

You may not have learned this in school, but Boilerplate, a robot constructed back in 1893, was an instrumental part of many famous historical happenings, as you can clearly see in the video above, which I’m sure is an actual documentary or something. From Teddy Roosevelt to Lawrence of Arabia to Pancho Villa, Boilerplate has seen it all and done even more, and now J.J. Abrams has apparently purchased the rights to make Boilerplate’s story into a feature film. There are basically no more details than just that fact, but if you want a preview, you can just buy the book. Boilerplate: History’s Mechanical Marvel is available on Amazon for $17.

[ Boilerplate ]VIA [ Robot Living ]

That music, btw, comes from (I think) the spectacular HBO miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon” which you should absolutely watch right now if you haven’t already.

“I probably shouldn’t have given it a superclaw, or a laser eye, or the power to control dogs’ minds.”

This is a picture from a beautifully illustrated children’s book entitled Oh No! Or, How My Science Project Destroyed The World, starring a a 5th grade girl and her misbehaving (to put it mildly) giant robot. Written by Mac Barnett with illustrator Dan Santat, you can find the book on Amazon for an absurdly reasonable $12. One more image, after the jump. (Read more…)

[Cue Don LaFontaine voice]

Imagine a world… In which the last human boxers… Have been crushed… By machines. Mechanical titans rule the ring… And one man’s destiny… Lies… With them. This… Is the world… Of… Real Steel.

I didn’t make that up. Here’s a bunch of other stuff that I didn’t make up:

The story, set in 2020, features Jackman as an out-of-work fighter who bonds with his estranged son when they go to work rescuing a junkyard find named Atom, and grooming it as a potential champion in the World Robot Boxing league.

“The heart of the story is this father and son relationship and in comes this junkyard robot called Atom that the kid’s in love with,” Jackman says. “I abandoned the kid pretty much at birth. But we come together because the boy’s mother has died. We have a lot of distance to make up. It’s through this mutual interest in robot boxing that they find a way to come together and form a bond.”

The one immediately redeeming feature of this move is that it’s not all CGI… Nineteen eight-foot tall boxing robots were created for the human actors to interact with. So, that’s cool, I guess.

Real Steel will be in theaters in November of 2011.

VIA [ USA Today ]