Bill Malone Interview by Ted A. Bohus

Someone told me that you sold your reproduction of Robby the Robot. Do you still have the original?
I sold the replica in ‘91 or ‘92.
Who did you sell it to?
It was a Japanese firm, they actually called me and wanted to buy the original, and I said you don’t have enough money. They offered me a million bucks for him, which was hard to turn down.
I’ll tell ya, Robby is my favorite movie prop, but if someone offered me a million in cash, I’d have to really think twice about letting him go.
I didn’t feel I had to sell him even though I don’t know if I’ll ever get an offer like that again. I just enjoy him too much. I offered to sell them the replica instead.
What did they pay for the replica?
Well, I’m not at liberty to say, but it was in 6 figures.
When did you start collecting props?
That all started back at the time of the MGM auction, 1970, I think. I heard about the auction and thought, what did MGM ever make that I’d want. Uh-Oh, Forbidden Planet, so I went. I was young at the time and very broke and surprised to find out that they were not selling Robby. Robby the Robot, for me, had always been a childhood fantasy and the studio’s attitude was “We keep everything, we never get rid of anything,” so when I heard they were selling props I got very excited. As a matter of fact they had very few Forbidden Planet props at the auction. The things they thought were worth selling were the ray guns, the big blasters, the flying saucers and that was it. I kept bugging the studio about Robby but they wouldn't sell it and I heard they finally sold it to a guy in 1971 named Jim Brucker who has a place called Movie World in Buena Park. Robby was on display down there and he’d gotten vandalized a lot, they had no security there whatsoever and people would just come down and break things off. It got pretty bad. By 1980 they went out of business and I got a call from a writer named Mike Clark. He told me they were selling everything and to get my butt down there. So I went down and sure enough they were selling Robby, but he was in really bad shape.
Didn’t they have Robby’s car too?
Yes they did but when I bought Robby, I really had no intention of taking the car because I didn’t know what to do with it. Brucker said, “You want the robot, you take the car!” So in retrospect, I’m glad I did. You have to remember, I was paying thousands of dollars at a time when movie props were really pretty worthless. I paid under 10 thousand, but at that time it was a lot of money, for props. This was when a one sheet [Movie Poster] for Forbidden Planet was going for about $100.
When did you decide to build the replicas?
Back in 1973, when I had gone down to Buena Park to see the original Robby on display I was convinced I could build one. I had never done anything in plastics before and if I’d known what was ahead of me I wouldn’t have built it. I worked for a year and a half on it full time because I was basically unemployed then. The first time I saw the original in Buena Park, I was so in awe that I snuck up behind the ropes, felt it and said, “Awww, it’s plastic...” Having thought all those years it was some form of metal.
It’s hard to imagine Robby made out of plastic.
So I photographed the original in great detail and drew up my own set of blueprints. I was still trying to get the original set of blueprints but didn’t even know if they were still in existence. Not knowing anything about plastics, I did a lot of experimenting, trying to copy the studio’s method of building him. Eventually the domes I’d made were so close they fit the original. The first head made however, I was not happy with and ultimately gave to Bob Burns. The upper torso, I also wasn’t happy with and eventually sawed up because I didn’t want it kicking around, so I practically built a second copy to improve on the first one.
You eventually started bringing it around to Sci-Fi conventions.
Well, what happened was that almost immediately after it was finished we did a Halloween show with Bob Burns which was based on Forbidden Planet, and there was a picture of it in the local Burbank paper. The next morning I got a call from Universal, where they were doing an episode of Columbo and they needed a robot, so he immediately started working. That’s when I started renting him out and he got a lot of work.
It was easier to rent from you rather than get the original Robby and refurbish it?
Yeah, plus mine was new so I was able to transistorize it.
You never had any difficulty renting it even though MGM owned the design?
At that time I never got a call.
How did you finally connect with the MGM Art Department?
In 1975 Brucker got me in contact with a guy named Jim McClennon at MGM who was the the head of construction at the time. I wanted to talk to him about Forbidden Planet. He’d worked on it when he was younger and was very sympathetic to my desire to retain as much of this old stuff as possible. This was a time when the studio was taking stuff out and just bulldozing it. He was a real good guy and took me to the various departments and even to the prop department and told the guy to give me whatever I wanted. I became friendly with the head of the art department and he made me some blueprints from Forbidden Planet. A few of the things I found from that period were the original drafts of some blueprints. I found stuff that would have been thrown out by the art department, like rejected designs. These were blueprints that hadn’t seen the light of day since 1955 so that was kinda cool.
When did you acquire the bulk of Forbidden Planet props?
I was going to do my first directing job which was a pilot for a Saturday morning show and I needed a spaceship interior. They had just finished up the feature film Logan’s Run and I called up Jim and told him that I needed some spaceship interior stuff, can I come over and rent or borrow something from that and he said yes. When I got there, he said the studio wouldn’t let me have the stuff because they were going to make a T.V. series out of it. But he said he had some old stuff from an Elvis Presley picture, and he took me to a back lot. Inside the building was most of the Krell Lab and my teeth nearly fell out of my head. He said he could sell me anything in this room but he couldn’t rent it to me and I said, “Not a problem!.” I asked what they wanted for all the stuff and he said about three fifty and I said no way can I get 350 thousand and he said, no 350 dollars! I said okay, I can handle that! I had to go home and rent a van to pick the stuff up and it was the most sleepless night I think I ever had because I had visions of the studio burning down or something. After that he became so sympathetic, that he just gave me a pass to go anywhere I wanted in the studio and search out this stuff. I spent about 2-3 days searching the sound stage rafters and found all kinds of stuff in places you’d never expect. I found the spaceship radar screen inside some sort of rigging equipment and kept walking by this thing that looked like a generator for a long time until I finally looked at it. There were a couple of white globes sitting next to it and when I stuck them on either end I realized it was the miniature from the Krell shaft, the power generator. It was pretty amazing. I was able to pick up, a lot of force-field fenceposts, some of the Krell power panels, the controls to the spaceship, the combination locks to the Krell doors...
Did you find any costumes or rifles?
No, the guns I got fairly recently from a guy I met at the studio a while ago. From a call out of the blue I got 3 rifles and a box that had about 5 or 6 pistols in it and parts for more. Mostly what I was getting at the studio were the big pieces.
Were the saucers there too?
No, all of them were sold at the auction. One went to a guy named Wes Shank and he still has it. The big one is missing in action and the middle one went to a guy in Venice, California who had it for years. He bought a bunch of stuff at the auction and I was able to track his daughter down who still had the saucer with a broken edge. I fixed it, but it broke again in the earthquake.
That has to be about 4 feet around, right?
I think it’s 41 inches across, the 7 footer is the one missing. It was in a museum in Pittsburgh but that place went out of business and since then I can’t track it down. The wardrobe pretty much scattered all over the place. I have a few of the crewmen outfits and I have a few of the standard dress uniforms which include Leslie Nielsen’s, Richard Anderson’s and a stuntman’s.
You’ve reconstructed the original Robby back to it’s original condition?
Robby was in such bad shape it could sit in the back of my car so you can just imagine because the thing is big. It was just in pieces. Fortunately, Brucker had gotten the original shipping cases which were the actual studio cases they used to move him around in. The cases hadn’t been touched since the day he got them, so when I went to his storage bin and picked them up, inside was this huge drawer containing lots of spare parts, some of them brand new, that the studio had never used. Fortunately, it was a lot of the stuff that had broken off. I guess they could foresee what would break.
Were most of the pieces in the dome still there?
Some of the stuff was missing like the clear plastic pieces that clack. They call them sax valves or something. The gyros were missing, the ears, the spinners were missing. Those things were all in the bottom of the case, brand new. What was missing that I had to reconstruct from scratch was the mechanism in the front box, the clockwork mechanism. I spoke to a guy named Dion Hansen who operated Robby for the Twilight Zone episodes and he was Robby’s custodian at MGM. He said they had torn out that box and thrown it away at the time they did that episode.
You must have been thrilled when you hooked up the fence-post and it actually worked.
Yes. I think other than Robby the two other important things are the spaceship and the combination locks. They’re all machined out of aluminum and beautifully made.
Forbidden Planet is my favorite Science-Fiction film, so for me, going over to your place and seeing Robby and all that stuff was a big thrill.
Well, I took Robby to the last Famous Monsters Convention here in L.A. I also brought a lot of the Krell pieces. I thought it was important for people to see the stuff, which is why I try to keep it together.
You also have Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
You could tell that one.
My friend Steve Rubin was doing a story for SPFX #2. He found out that Gort was in Larry Harmon’s garage after talking to his son. Larry was the guy who played Bozo the clown. The robot was sold to him early in 1952 and he wanted to use it in a TV show called General Universe. That TV show never happened, but he did use it in another called Commander Comet. He called it Rotar and put fins on its head and speakers in its mouth and stomach. I asked Steve to find out if he’d sell it. Larry said he would, but the price plus shipping was more than I could afford at the time. I called and asked if you wanted it. Oh boy, looking back...
It was expensive at the time, but in retrospect it was nothing. We’ve all turned down things we regret later. I remember turning down a Day the Earth Stood Still one sheet [Movie Poster] for $12 because I thought that was an outrageous price.
Do you remember how much you paid for Gort?
From what I remember Gort was $500, which was a huge amount of money back than.
You refurbished Gort.
Yeah, I scraped all the junk off that Larry put on, the fins and all that stuff and got him back to the way he was.
Well thanks a lot for the great stories, I’m glad Robby and Gort are in such good hands.
Thank you, and good luck.