okay, so i posted this one already, give me a break.
i’m only doing it again because nobody has replied since i put up the picture.
so i’ll ask again, does anybody know what happened to this robotman? i’m not talking about jim meddick’s cartoon strip robotman, i’m talking about the one you’re looking it. if this guy later evolved into jim meddick’s robotman, tell me about it.
i scanned that from a cup i have. he used to be fairly popular and they had vidoes, dolls, and i think even a saturday morning ‘robotman & friends’ cartoon.
so, he’s not just some random robot… but rather one that was just forgotten.
“human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust; we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.” - albert einstein
There was a Robotman cartoon for a short while (it may have been just a one-shot TV special, but I seem to recall that they tried to make it a series) made by DIC (the Inspector Gadget/Heathcliff people) in the early-mid eighties. I even remember seeing a plush Robotman doll in a toy store, so I think at one point there was a merchandising push for the Robotman comic strip, but it did not last long.
Here’s where it gets wierd: I cannot back this up, but I remember reading an interview with Bill Watterson once where he was talking about the times leading up to the syndication of Calvin and Hobbes, and I could swear he said in the interview that the syndicate asked him if he could work the Robotman character into his strip! He refused, of course, but it leads me to think that Robotman might be a character that the syndicate had kind of “laying around”, and that the current artist is just a hired gun kind of artist. Can anyone verify if the artist doing Robotman now is the original artist, and if so, if Robotman is his original creation?
I seem to remember Robotman living with a family. He started out as a companion to the younger boy and then to the older boy. I think that there was a Mom, Dad and little sister as well. I did not follow it too closely and missed the change over to the mad scientist guy, so I don’t know what may have happened.
So it may have been another cartoonist.
As for the the robot family part of the Robotman cartoon you saw, TV and movie producers are famous for straying from the source material, so they could very well have concocted a whole robot family for Robotman. I remember a Fantastic Four cartoon from the eighties that replaced the Human Torch with Herbie the Robot, and I think we have all seen the Batman movies with the outlandish costumes with rubber nipples.
If it helps, I share similar memories of the early, round-headed Robotman – only NOT as a Saturday morning cartoon but as a comicstrip. About a year ago I started reading the Robotman strip available from United Media again, and it just didn’t jibe with the memories i had of Robotman (tho I love the current strip. I look forward to it more than any other strip on my reading list).
But, yes, there was a different-STYLE Robotman at the very least. I’ll putz around and see what I can find…
-An epistle most prosaic, courtesy of Calamity Jon.
Jon can be seen swinging from trees at ape-law.com
It’s not a complete answer, but if you’ll check out the cartoons that this fellow archived at his site ( http://drycas.club.cc.cmu.edu/~jae/xrobot.html ) you’ll see that the 1980’s versions of the Robotman characters are pictured and mentioned.
Looks like Jim Meddick was the original creator of the round headed-style Robotman and just evolved the story beyond that simplicity …
I’ll keep looking.
-An epistle most prosaic, courtesy of Calamity Jon.
Jon can be seen swinging from trees at ape-law.com
