Gort

It was great.

You walk in and you immediately see, like, Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Oh, yes.

Oh, Jesus, yeah.

Serving as an object lesson to us all, towards the finale of the classic nineteen fifties sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien spacecraft lands in an American city park, the line of dialogue, "Klatu Barada Nikto," uttered by the heroine, saves the Earth.

By using this phrase from an alien language taught to her by the hero, an alien but human-looking ambassador from the spacecraft, the heroine instructs a robotic enforcer slash bodyguard slash policeman called Gort to rescue and reanimate his by now dying charge, that is, the ambassador, instead of systematically laying waste to the entire planet.

The film ends with an impassioned farewell speech delivered from the rim of the saucer by the altruistic ambassador prior to his departure, earnestly pleading with us to abandon our aggressive tendencies, interscene rivalries, and most importantly, the nuclear arms race, and live in harmony.

The film was very much of its era and reflected the bone-chilling paranoia and fear generated by the Cold War.

And I don't know how this came to me.

I think I was watching a montage of scenes and Gort showed up on it.

And I thought, oh, yeah, this is a movie that fits within our era of golden age of cinema.

It had a big impact in terms of science fiction and sort of the idea of a moral story around

well...

Yeah, I know.

scared people more in the 50s than obviously he

Voiced by Jesse Eisenberg.

And Dort is clearly... a mixture of Gort and the human...

Klaatu, is it? Klaatu, isn't it? Yes.

So, you've got Cthulhu monsters, and then, weirdly, suddenly, we've got the Day of the Earth.

Oh,

no, Klaatu is the robot, right? No,

Gort's the robot.

Gort's the robot.

I mean, from, yeah.

And the only part where the head, in the head area, there was nothing except for that one split second where you said it looked like a visor, like a light there, similar to Gort from Day of the Earth Stood Still.

Yeah, that's correct, yes.

When I first looked at it, like i saw like something like go well yeah like a visor that just went up and there was like this brief flash that that was like direct the point at me i don't know what i don't know if it like took a picture of me or if it was like trying to say like oh hey i can see you over there i can see you looking at me um that kind of startled me like like imagine like If I'm right, this was an alien, which maybe they have a picture of me somewhere.

But the first one, Michael Rennie, I'll never forget that because the ship was so believable.

And the big robot, Gort, was his companion and also kind of his bodyguard.

But nobody was ready.

for the National Guard to be there, and one of the guys shot the visiting alien, who came, if you'll recall, who came to the Earth in peace with gifts like universal health.

Well, there's been so much of that, though.

Uh, we go back into the 1950s, we had Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, uh, the big robotic creature.

Mm-hmm.

Which by the way, if you'd read the original story, the robot was in charge.

Refreshing, yeah.

You know what it looks like? Gort from the Day the Earth Stood Still.

[laughs] It does, yeah.

It, it looks like very 1950s-