Robot Sanitorium

Gort Comes to the Robot Sanitorium for Help with Anger Issues

Bender was Court Committed for Substance Abuse and Personality Disorder

This Rosie is REALLY BIG! A 15-Meter Gort is Barely Visible on the Landing

Written 18 July, 2008

Robot Sanatorium

They’ve been serving us for nearly a century now, and even before that, when they didn’t have a real name.* They build our cars, clean our houses (think Roomba), and entertain us as actors and actresses on television and in movies (Robby the Robot was soooo deserving of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Forbidden Planet, don’t you think?).

There’s no shortage of repair shops for robots with dead batteries or busted sprockets, but when robots have a mental malfunction—when they go robopsychotic, when they refuse to open the pod bay doors, when they abuse Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, when they refuse to comply when told Klaatu Barada Nikto, what then?** Where do we sent them? Where, oh where, are the robot sanatoriums?

We understand the Matt Groening TV show Futurama once depicted a robot asylum, but we didn’t see that episode. So we at Whimsy are moving to provide a much-needed social service by opening a robot sanatorium.

The sanatorium-to-be can be found 3500 meters above Whimsy Kaboom; just look for the 100-meter replica of the head of Rosie, the Jetsons’ robot maid. We’re only just getting started, but already robots are beginning to gather on Kaboom. We had to hurriedly construct a tier of tightrooms because some of the celebrity robots were getting out of hand. They’re used to getting what they want when they want it and didn’t want to wait for us to finish our build. Gort, the big robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still, kept threatening us with his death beam and Bender overdosed on hydraulic oil, and there was no recourse but to medicate them and lock them up for their own good.

Although far from finished, the Robot Sanatorium is open for visitors.

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* The term robot was introduced by Czech playwright Karel Čapek in the 1920s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).

** Not to mention the many berserk steampunk robots in the Caledon sims!