Tobor the Great review

I put the trailer here.  the trailer pretty much gives the movie away though!  haven't watched the movie in a while, so I did last night.  it runs a swift 77 minutes and is just right.
basically Tobor is designed to take rockets into space, so the human cost would be lessened.  smart thinking.  he must have what is now known as a positronic brain, but back then it was just programmed to adapt to any situation.

he's run on ESP, which is something rather new in 1954.  there's a certain amount of disdain for the press during the opening of this movie  evil commies want to get the formula for Tobor and the ESP process so they can take over the world, or something.  it's never quite made certain what they want, but it's dire, you can bet on that.

of course, the professor and Gadge, his grandson, get captured by the spies, but the old man figures out a way to get Tobor to come to the rescue.  the robot has immense strength, and since commies are all stupid, they try fisticuffs with the machine man of steel anyway.

Tobor also has emotions, because he responds to Gadge (who's a boy genius, by the way.  he never gets too precocious in the movie, but he does cause some trouble).  Tobor is also not above doing some Three Stooges type moves on the villains.

by the end of the movie, Tobor is headed off to space at the wheel of a rocket.  there was never a sequel made, but there was at least a pilot episode of a tv show produced.  too bad they never made more use of that suit, it's very mobile, much more than you would think.  wiki claims a sequel was being made two years ago...