Monday

Todays evil robot is...



The Cybermen

These tin-plated, Doctor-worrying, gold-avoiding menaces are one of Doctor Who's most persistent enemies, turning up again and again to meddle with the universe, terrorise people, harass the Doc and generally bugger things up for all and sundry. I love these guys, they're damn near perfect in the evil-robot stakes and, again, as a child I would've swapped my entire Star Wars figure collection (except for Boba Fett, Chewie and that bum-faced one of course) to be one.
The Cybermen are in actuality a cyborg race originating from Earth's twin planet Mondas (left that one of the Guardian's free 'Our Solar System' wall chart didn't they) who were originally humanoid but took to 'upgrading' themselves by adding mechanical parts in a quest to reach perfection. Part of this upgrade was to ditch emotions and become fault-free. They then set about spanning the universe smashing anyone who got in their way, conquering whole worlds and upgrading their inhabitants. They'd march around screaming, "Resistance is futile." (Sound familiar to you Trekkies out there?)



The design of the Cybermen has changed throughout the years from a kind of mummified man with an accordion on his chest through to blokes in silver jump-suits with bit's of hoover attached to the legs, the '80s saw the Cybermen involved in pure bacofoil silliness (but with a cool helmet) but thankfully the recent redesign made them more mechanical, imposing and terrifying than ever before. Throughout all these changes the scariest thing about a Cyberman to me as a kid was always the uniformity. They all looked, sounded and acted the same. Sure the Cyber-leader always stood out in some minor way by having a big, see-through head showing his brain or black tubes on his helmet but they were essentially all equal and they acted like one vast machine army.



During the run of the original show, the Cybermen were pretty much indestructible but for one weakness, gold. Yep, like me, they hated gold. It clogged up their airways you see and they couldn't breathe. This started out all fine and dandy as a quirky Achilles-heel but then the '80s came along and (as always happened in the '80s) everything went a bit shit. Suddenly the Cybermen were being killed off left, right and centre by gold-tipped arrows, guns that fired gold powder and even gold coins. The vicious, evil, mechanical crazy men of the universe were even defeated by a weedy-maths-boffin-child when he scratched his gold medal against one's chest. (He died himself though when the spacecraft he was on crashed so it's not all bad.) It took Russel T. Davies' new Doctor Who to redress the balance and get them back to their arse-kicking glory days. Gone was the silly gold allergy, gone were the hoover based outfits but the robotic, nightmarish, all alike, kill-happy, emotion-free, freaky voiced monsters were back and well and truly kicking bottom. This time they were back to their scary selves, terrifying Earth in a parallel universe and then later in our universe where they even got to square up against the Daleks.
Awesome.

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