Directed by: Herman Hoffman
Starring: Richard Eyer, Philip Abbott, Diane Brewster
This is certainly a strange movie. Well, actually, it’s fairly straightforward, but it’s toted as starring Robbie the Robot. You know, from Fantastic Planet? One of the most famous robots in film history next to the Lost In Space robot and Gort? Yeah, he’s in this movie… for some reason. Strange.
A kid is doing poorly in school, so his rocket scientist father brings him into work to get tutored by the supercomputer he’s been designing. After it turns the kid into a genius in a couple hours, the kid goes and finds a robot (there he is), fixes him up, and makes him be boy’s best friend. When the robot won’t endanger his life, aka have fun, the kid brings the robot to the computer to take away it’s stupid “human protection programming.” Pfft, stupid.
Little did anyone suspect that the computer is actually self-aware. Not only that, but it wants to rule over the planet, and it uses the robot’s friendship with the boy to make the kid invisible, then strand him on a rocket and take him hostage. The latter half of the film is really very straightforward science fiction, and the computer is pretty unabashedly evil, which is very strange for the kid’s movie it seemed to start out as.
The invisible boy part of The Invisible Boy was really almost an afterthought, plot-wise. The craziest thing was when the boy’s parents found out that he was invisible, they took it EXTREMELY well. Just kinda sighing to themselves and saying, ‘well, they do those sorts of things, I guess.’
So with the inclusion of the awesome evil computer and Robbie the Robot, I actually kinda recommend this one. It’s certainly different, and it’s a pretty decent sci-fi story.
Films in Boxes 
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