Evening @ The Barn

The Man Behind the Amazing Robots

By Mike Clark and Pat Aoki

Bob Kinoshita’s robot creations…the Robot from the 1960’s television series Lost In Space, and Robby the Robot from the feature film Forbidden Planet (1956), are just two outstanding examples of his design skills.

In a career spanning 50 years, Robert Kazuo Kinoshita served as draftsman, art director, and producer on motion pictures, television programs, theme parks, and industrial design.

Kinoshita was born 90 years ago in the downtown area of Los Angeles. According to Mr. Kinoshita he was born twice. He was “physically” born on Feb. 24, 1914 and “typographically” born on March 1, 1914. This was all due to a very slow and exhausted midwife who didn’t arrive at the county record office until March 1, to register his birth. He grew up in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles. As a youth he was known as “Buddy” and headed up an Asian Our Gang that came running whenever he blew his bugle. As a teen and young adult he attended Roosevelt High School, LACC and later USC where he graduated with a degree in architecture.

While studying aeronautical engineering and architecture in the 1930s, Kinoshita landed a summer job at Universal Studios making miniatures for the feature film 100 Men and a Girl.

Kinoshita’s movie career was sidelined in the early 40’s when he was held at the Poston Interment camp as a response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Kinoshita and his wife were eventually sponsored out of the camps and moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he started a family and a ceramics shop. While working with ceramic manufacturing, Kinoshita began experimenting with plastics, something that would later serve him well when the time came to create robots for use in movies and television.

Moving back to Los Angeles in 1949, Kinoshita later joined the art department at MGM Studios during the planning of their groundbreaking 1956 science fiction motion picture Forbidden Planet. Kinoshita designed the Krell Brain-Booster, readout gauges in the main lab, and most famously, he refined and melded a myriad of concepts into the movie’s most popular non-human character, Robby the Robot. Constructed of a lightweight but strong plastic material, Robby is considered the ‘grandfather’ of most modern robots and continues to work to this day…most recently in the Warner Bros. feature film, Looney Toons…Back In Action.

Kinoshita spent several years with ZIV studios for television programs such as Science Fiction Theater and Men Into Space before producing two motion pictures, Phantom Planet and Adam and Six Eves.

In 1965, producer Irwin Allen invited Kinoshita on board his latest Sci-Fi television series, Lost In Space. Kinoshita modified the spaceship designed by Bill Creber to include a lower deck, and then turned his attention to creating a robot companion for the Space Family Robinson. The resulting robot became not only a star of the series but a cultural icon as well. Six feet tall and silver, with claws that extended past a lighted voice box, the cylindrical mechanical man bore a slight resemblance to his ‘grandpa Robby.’ “Danger, Danger Will Robinson” was his most famous utterance (voice supplied by Dick Tufeld), as The Robot was called upon to perform a multitude of tasks in the varied story lines. Kinoshita’s design allowed for much flexibility…The Robot (with operator Bob May inside) could play chess, take soil samples, emit electrical charges, roll, walk, and occasionally, lurch over when his ‘power pack’ was removed. The Robot’s trademark ‘bubble’ brain was also the result of Kinoshita’s talent for molding plastic.

Kinoshita served two seasons as the Art Director for Lost In Space before moving on to work on Hawaii 5-0, The Six Million Dollar Man, Project: UFO, and Gene Roddenberry’s Planet Earth.

Now at the tender age of 90, his career focus has turned to bowling and achieving the ultimate goal of being the oldest 300-frame bowler in the world!

The Hollywood Heritage Museum is proud to honor this gentle man…. who through his designs and imagination has entertained audiences for many years…and for many years to come.

Joining Mr. Kinoshita on May 19 in an Evening @ the Barn event at 7:30 pm at the Hollywood Heritage Museum in the Lasky DeMille Barn will be several guests there to pay tribute including Forbidden Planet stars Warren Stevens and Richard Anderson with more guests to be confirmed.