One of the many posts I have been planning to write here is a piece on the history of sex robots in popular entertainment. A few months ago I watched the B&W sci-fi classic ‘Metropolis’ for the very first time. Only I didn’t watch it in B&W however, because using AI, the original film has been colorized and uploaded to YouTube. Watching it in color (as well as on a huge virtual cinema screen in my Quest 2 headset), it seems remarkable that it is almost exactly now 100 years old. Particularly so, because it not only introduced the notion of the female sex robot into the popular imagination but also the idea of ‘cloning’ a living person to create that sex robot, which we are now seeing with the advent of AI sex chatbots based upon influencers, as well as the 3D printed sex dolls of DS Doll.
Well, today I saw a newly released video on YouTube that explores the same theme of sex robots in popular entertainment. It’s a short but informative outline, that takes its starting point that Fritz Lang classic, and continues up to the arrival of the first commercial ‘sex robots’, eagerly awaited by the public that had been expecting them for nearly a century. The channel behind it – ‘Digital Porn Pimps‘ – is worth subscribing to, as it covers identical sex and porn tech trends as this site does.
The video presentation correctly points out that the ‘sex robot’ in Metropolis isn’t specifically portrayed as such, but there’s no doubt it is the first depiction of a female robot with sex appeal. In fact, it literally drives men mad with desire, as can be seen from the famous dance scene below, also colorized.
As well as introducing the idea of a sex robot and ‘sex clones’, the film also pretty much established the wild-haired mad scientist cinema cliche. In the film, the scientist is grieving for his dead lover and creates a robot version of her in order to bring her back to life. But this isn’t the sex robot of the film. No, that is the cloned version of ‘Maria’, a saintly figure who has been stirring up dreams of a better life among the downtrodden proles in her highly class-divided city (the ‘Metropolis’). It is for that reason that the master of the city (who happens to have married the lover of the heartbroken mad scientist) decides on the cunning plan of employing the scientist to clone Maria and turn her into a very sexy and slutty robot version of her virginal and prim real self. And as you can see from the dance clip, it works very well, not only on the ruling class, but the oppressed workers too.
The part of Maria, and her sex robot double, was played by a young German actress by the name of Brigitte Helm, who was only 18 years old when the filming of the movie began, and who was making her film debut.
