User Reviews

Mercedes McCambridge and Everett Sloan star in this episode of "Tales of Tomorrow". And, while the basic story isn't bad, the execution is just embarrassingly bad—mostly because it appears as if the budget for this show was about 39 cents!

The show begins with a guest visiting a retired professor. Oddly, the professor has built a robot to read to him and entertain him. But, the robot is LITERALLY made from cardboard and packing tape—making it the dumbest robot in TV history! The robot in "The Human Robot vs. The Aztec Mummy" is 1000 times better—and I used to think it was the dumbest robot ever! Because of this, you can't take the episode seriously and it all comes off as a silly joke. I could try to explain the plot (the basic idea isn't bad), but it isn't worth it—the show is THAT dumb!

I remember watching Mercedes McCambridge in "Johnny Guitar." She was a really intense, classy actress. Here, she finds herself playing second fiddle to one of the worst robots in the history of cinema. Somebody got hold of some cardboard boxes, a little sheet metal, and a bunch of tape, put a man inside of it, and asked us to believe that it was some kind of high tech creation. Everett Sloan, another pretty good actor, plays a man who has devoted his life to science. Because he has paid his dues, he builds a mechanical man who reads to him from the classics. Unfortunately, the big moving trashcan begins to get emotions from reading Dumas and Cervantes and develops a thing for Mercedes. He turns the table on the professor, making him read mathematics and science to him (it). How the actors were able to keep a straight face (this was live, of course) is beyond me. It does have a kind of touching conclusion, but even that is so sappy, I couldn't believe it.