Earl Holliman: May He Rest in Peace on the Forbidden Planet

Earl Holliman garnered attention in the scifi classic movie Forbidden Planet (1957) as the ship's cook who takes advantage of Asimov's Second Law to persuade Robby the Robot to make 60 gallons of bourbon for him.

Like Earl, Forbidden Planet is one of those always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride movies. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Special Effects but didn't win, which in retrospect seems an oversight as the scene from the Krell is recreated in Star Wars and pretty much every movie or media showing the inside of a massive spaceship or alien machine. Forbidden Planet was also nominated for the top 10 best scifi movies by the American Film Institute, but didn't make the cut. Earl never won (or was nominated for) an Oscar though he did win a Golden Globe. Like Earl, who finally achieved career success in middle age, Forbidden Planet took off years after it was released and became a classic.

Holliman's scenes with Robby were there for comic relief but did highlight concerns about intelligent robots that persist to this day. One is lack of contextual awareness. Robby is there to be helpful, but there are good reasons why a military spaceship isn't stocked with liquor. Helping Cook isn't really helping the large collective of humans. Another concern is hierarchies of authority: why should Robby obey any human it encounters versus its two "owners" Morbius and Altaira?

Forbidden Planet is definitely worth watching, it holds up well and it's fun to see Leslie Nielsen in his first starring role. You'll see how it inspired Star Wars and Star Trek and countless other scifi.

The scifi movies with movies that did make the cut for the top 10 of all time are:

• (1) 2001: A Space Odyssey (we can argue about whether a spaceship is a robot later)

• (2) Star Wars

• (5) The Day the Earth Stood Still

• (6) Blade Runner

• (7) Alien (remember, Ash is a robot)

• (8) Terminator 2: Judgment Day

You can learn more about how scifi robots compare to real robots in my books. Plus you can search the site for books and movie suggestions.