Mister 8

I don’t know much about this short film, other than that it was a sort of thesis project for three students in the French school supérieure d’informatique de communication, or SupInfoCom. I’m hoping that the students, Laurent Gillot, Aurélia Verhnes and Clement Bolla, got good grades, because it’s beautiful--tied for first with two others as my favorite animated short ever. Similar in visual style to Pixar’s The Incredibles, Zoudov tells the story of a spy on a sabotage mission, who encounters some complications along the way.

This video got lots of play in the animation and design communities, but I think fans of Bond / spy fiction would also get a kick out of it. The references to 007 are numerous, from the John Barry score, to the resemblance between the heroine and actress Daniela Bianchi, aka Tatiana Romanova in From Russia With Love:

Daniela Bianchi

I’ve emailed the creators to see if I can get some more information on the project, their influences or possible continuations of the storyline for next week….

(Not spy, but Muppet-related: one of my other favorites also came from SupInfoCom: Over Time)

We COBRAS had a ton of fun with the Costumed Adventurer Month last month (or was it the month before?), and so have been planning another team-up behind the scenes. This week at all of the COBRAS sites (a handy list of which is available in the footer of this very website), we’ll be looking at spies versus dangerous Cold War era technology — killer cybernauts, fembots, super computers, and more!

For our first Man v. Machine post here at Mister 8, I wanted to look at one of my all-time favorite cartoons. Johnny Quest may not have been a spy show, strictly speaking, but it’s definitely a product of the Cold War spy era. Writers Timothy and Kevin Burke hit the nail on the head when they describe the series in their book, Saturday Morning Fever: Growing up with Cartoon Culture:

For us, the original Quest episodes, which began appearing in prime time in 1964, are as perfect a distillation of their time as the early James Bond films, a luscious cocktail of technophilia, blithe masculinity, and charmingly innocent cold war ethnocentrism. Like James Bond, the Quest team lived off of a regular diet of evil Oriental masterminds, vaguely East Bloc no-goodniks, various supersecret gadgets, and manly derring-do, though they didn’t indulge in women, martinis, or caviar.

Particularly Bond-like is the bodyguard Roger T. “Race” Bannon, an agent from Intelligence One sent to protect the scientist Dr. Benton Quest and his inventions, lest they fall into enemy hands. In fact, according to Quest creator and artist Doug Wildey, Joe Barbera wanted to specifically draw on the James Bond series to set the tone of the series:

The Barbera influence was felt there because he had gone to see a movie called Dr. No and wanted to get in stuff like “007″-- numbers. Which we included, by the way, in the first Jonny Quest. It was called “Jonny Quest File 037″ or something. We dropped that later; it didn’t work. But that was his father’s code name as he worked for the government as a scientist and that kind of thing. That influence was felt.

Dr. Benton’s son Jonny, his friend Hadji, and the family dog Bandit were the real heroes of the show, which premiered in prime time (following the success of The Flintstones), but quickly transitioned to Saturday morning. If Jonny Quest indeed counts as an espionage show, I’m sorely tempted to call the theme song, by Hoyt Curtin, the greatest spy theme of all time (sorry, John Barry!). Often playing the Dr. No role for the series (appearing four times in the original series and returning for updates and movies) was the villainous Dr. Zin….

Because this is the Man v. Machine roundtable, we want to feature Dr. Zin’s most popular appearance, and certainly one of the best episodes of Jonny Quest: The Robot Spy. In the episode, Zin sends a new invention to spy on Quest headquarters, an invention that is one of the most recognizable robot characters ever on a Saturday morning cartoon show. Without further ado, The Robot Spy:

Jonny Quest was a high quality television show from a time when Hanna Barbera held high standards for the quality of their animation. If you’re interested in seeing other episodes (and I hope you are), Amazon carries The Complete First Season (quite inexpensively too, if you’re willing to take a used copy).

A memorable show is sure to spawn imitators and homages, and Jonny Quest led to one of the best: The Venture Brothers, soon to enter a fourth season on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. In a second season episode called Fallen Arches, the robot spy makes an appearance as an invention of Dr. Rusty Venture, in a quite humorous send-up of comics, Quest, and Cool Hand Luke. Track it down!

Fiction, especially spy fiction, is rife with robots created by evil geniuses bent on world domination and/or destruction. Sometimes those robots are destroyed by superhero secret agents, but sometimes they miraculously develop a moral consciousness, turn on their creators, and choose to do good. Let’s take a look at a pair of those today!

The first is truly a “cybernaut,” a human-looking (specifically Dick Gauthier-looking) bot named Hymie, invented by Dr. Ratton and dispatched by KAOS to kill Maxwell Smart (of Get Smart, naturally). In the end, when Hymie’s creator calls him a monster, he short circuits and is able to overcome his programming and save the day:

Hymie became a full-fledged member of CONTROL, though he was sure to say that his first preference is IBM, which he thought would be a, “nice way to meet some intelligent machines.” I’m wondering if, since the Avengers episode that seems to have coined the term “cybernaut,” hadn’t aired in the U.S. yet, if the episode where Hymie first appears was the first time American audiences heard the word. I also wonder if the writers of Get Smart used the term independently of the Avengers?

(For anyone interested, Dick Gauthier sells autographed pictures of himself as Hymie, for a relatively inexpensive price, as far as celebrity autographs goes.)

Our next good guy robot is not from a secret agent television show, but, like Jonny Quest, exists in a world predicated on Cold War tensions. Even beating out the Pixar movies, which I adore, this is my favorite animated film of all time: The Iron Giant.

Based on a novel by Ted Hughes, The Iron Giant was directed by Brad Bird, who later went on to make The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The film features a giant metal man who crash lands off the coast of Maine, and the young boy who teaches him about the important things in life: love, fun, Superman. A four-story tall robot is hard to hide, and so rumors begin to spread about the Giant. Those rumors are investigated by the U.S. Army, specifically Kent Mansley, who comes to see the Giant as a threat to the American way. Mansley, though the villain of the piece, does have a semi-valid point: the Iron Giant is a weapon, though with Hogarth’s help, he learns to suppress his violent programming.

If you haven’t seen this film, go out and find it. Playing the voice of the Giant is by far Vin Diesel’s best performance, and I still prefer this over Bird’s Pixar films. If you have seen it, perhaps you’ll enjoy revisiting the climax of the film:

Two questions to think about today:

1. Isn’t a robot that breaks programming, by it’s very nature, defective?

2. Is it wrong (speaking hypothetically) to build robots that do bad, or morally ambigious things, to give them self-awareness to realize this, and yet to not allow them to break their programming?

***

A few additional notes:

NOTE #1:

I play pub trivia every week with my wife and other students in my program. Our trivia czar is a swell guy, and each week, the winning team gets to choose a category for one of the rounds of the next week’s trivia. My team had won the week before, and so last night, we answered questions in a category of my choosing, “60s spy TV shows.” We aced the round. How would you have done?

1. Who was Maxwell Smart’s partner on Get Smart?
2. How many seconds does Jim Phelps have before the tape self-destructs?
3. What is the cover career of Alexander Scott and Kelly Robinson?
4. Why is KAOS located in Delaware?
5. If you referred to yourself as a Steedophile, you would be a fan of what show?

Bonus: For whom was Artimus Gordon a sidekick and master of disguise?

Unfortunately, we lost all of our points on a wager in the final round, so we didn’t get to pick the category for the following week. Maybe next time!

NOTE #2:

The next Man v. Machine post may be a little late, because I’m having a birthday party tomorrow night! Expect our week-long look at spies and technology to extend into the weekend, and perhaps even spill over into next week….