I’m always rather amused to see robot vacuum cleaners at Fry’s, and I’m quite sure many of us are looking forward to the day when automated devices will take care of the household chores like Rosie on The Jetsons.
Of course, for geeks with lots of money to spend, it would also be cool to have replicas of a Robby the Robot, or Robot from Lost In Space, or your own Wall-E and R2-D2, like one guy in Orange County whipped up.
As Moviefonereports, a talented designer from Orange County named Mike Senna has built his own working R2-D2 and Wall-E robots, and he took his R2 to hospitals to entertain ill children.
The R2 was a big hit, so he built a Wall-E because as ‘Fone reports, he wanted to make a robot with “more emotion.”
Senna started building his Wall-E in 2010, working twenty-five hours a week on average putting it together. All together, he put in 3,200 to 3,800 hours, all on his own dime to make the trash compactor of the future.
Senna has his own blog, where his bio tells us he’s “a skilled prop maker-hobbyist” who rebuilds these famous movie robotos “because he was looking for a challenge and wanted to bring joy to children.”
His day gig is a computer programmer, and his R2-D2 has made a ton of TV appearances, and now has the honor of being featured here on TG.
We recently ran a report about the movie Chewie, a comedy that’s in the works which tells the story of the making of Star Wars from the point of view of Chewbacca, and maybe this R2 can make a cameo in it.
By the way, here’s a big “duh” moment for me, I recently saw an interview with Bruce Dern on YouTube where he was asked about the influence of Silent Running on Wall-E. didn’t put two and two together on that one, but if you’ve ever seen Douglas Trumbull’s ‘70s sci-fi classic, Dern was up in space in the last greenhouse with three little robots that were named after Donald Duck’s nephews, Huey, Duey and Louie. It even fits in with their names: Huey, Duey, Louie, Wall-E. And I call myself a geek…
