Before There Was a Rock-'Em, Sock-'Em Robot, There Was...

Dystopia isn’t just for 21st century superhero movies. Battling, out-of-control robots populated cartoons 90 years ago. There was Van Beuren’s The Iron Man (1929); Walter Lantz’s Mechanical Man (1932); Ub Iwerks’ Techno-Cracked, Harman-Ising’s Warners’ short Bosko’s Mechanical Man, Columbia’s Technoracket (all 1933) and the title character in Terrytoons’ The Mechanical Cow (1937).

Uncle Walt tried it, too, in Mickey’s Mechanical Man (1933). For some reason, Mickey has built a robot to take on the King Kong-ish “The Kongo Killer,” and alternates between playing a happy, childish song on a piano to urging his metallic charge to “sock ‘em.” Why this violent streak, Mr. Mouse?

The “out-of-control” part comes when Minnie blows her car horn. The robot goes wild at the sound. You pretty well know how this cartoon’s going to end.

The climax of the cartoon has energy and action, which gives the animators a chance to show their stuff. The mechanical man sprouts boxing gloves from all kinds of places inside his frame to beat the you-know-what out of the ape. Here are some examples. The scene is animated on ones.



Wilfred Jackson directed this short.

Because this is an animated cartoon, it naturally contains a portion of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which Mickey played in The Opry House (1929). It probably appeared more in cartoons more than robots; I think every studio but Iwerks found a use for it.