I’ll admit it. The Black Hole is less of a guilty cinematic pleasure for me, and probably more along the lines of a harmless obsession. When I saw this then-shocking PG-rated Disney movie at the age of seven, the thought of Maximillian drilling folks to death terrified me – this wasn’t make-believe stuff here like Star Wars, because my dad had a drill in his workshop! But I also knew that, if it came to that big red behemoth chasing me, VINCENT and Old BOB wouldn’t let me down. They’d have me covered. They’d know what to do. Because they were the two coolest movie robots to come down the pike since R2-D2. I later outgrew my abject fears about the movie’s most violent scene, but found that my affinity for its two robotic heroes never quite waned. Most accounts of the making of the movie have pinpointed these two hovering robots as the source of countless production difficulties, since the props were heavy enough to require piano wire to suspend them, and the piano wire then had to be optically hidden in as many shots as possible – back in the day when you couldn’t just “run it through the computer” to accomplish that. Ever notice how many opportunities the director took to get close enough that you couldn’t really see the robots floating in mid-air?
70s uber-toy-maker Mego (not to be confused with 70s uber-disco-maestro Meco) nailed down the Black Hole toy license and proceeded to manufacture figures of all of the human characters, plus the robots VINCENT and Maximillian, with a generic sentry robot as well. In the U.S. market, that’s as far as it got – The Black Hole was one-upped by the massive publicity rush to Mego’s other big movie toy license that year, something about a ship named Enterprise. In other parts of the world, an abbreviated second wave of figures was released, including the STAR sentry robot captain and that lovable old dilapidated robot, Old BOB. Whereas VINCENT was all smooth lines, his elder counterpart was harder to reproduce in plastic: Old BOB’s casing bore the brunt of some very specific damage, its head hung at a very specific off-kilter angle, and it had only one hover-motor “leg” to VINCENT’s two. When I got older and had disposable income to direct toward solving my lack of an Old BOB action figure, I discovered that the cost of obtaining one of these extremely rare chunks of plastic would be prohibitive at best – and simply silly at worst, at least for a single figure. I gave up.
Lo and behold, in late 2003, Japanese toymaker Medicom came to the rescue. As part of their popular line of miniature Kubricks figures (several Tron-related sets of which we reviewed here), Medicom mined the Disney vaults to produce several waves of characters both popular and obscure. I was stunned to find, while looking through several coveted sets of Star Wars Kubricks on eBay (Editor’s note: sorry folks, it ain’t gonna happen – I don’t have that kind of money!), that Medicom was making an Old BOB Kubrick. Unlike most Kubricks, which resemble buffed-up Lego men, Disney demanded a little more character-specificity for its licensed products (of course), and the result was a very accurate Old BOB. In keeping with the scale of other Kubricks, Old BOB also comes marvelously close to matching the scale of the 1979 Mego VINCENT figure.
In terms of articulation, Old BOB’s body pivots in three sections, with the turning head anchored to the uppermost section (technically, I guess that means four sections). Unlike the classic VINCENT figure, which had a flat stand that would only accomodate the figure standing on its two extended hover legs, the Old BOB Kubrick has a transparent stand that mounts to the bottom of the figure and holds it “airborne.” One bit of assembly is required to add BOB’s single hover leg to the appropriate socket on the left side of his body. As is often the case when you put a toy from the 70s or 80s side-by-side with a similar product from today, the detailing is quite a step up. In short, I’m ready for Medicom to tackle VINCENT as well. Not that Old BOB looks bad next to an even older VINCENT, mind you. While there is a discernable difference in scale, it’s on an order of a mere handful of millimeters.
So there you have it – the end of a search for a childhood icon. A toy I waited 25 years for. And just how harmless is my Black Hole fixation? You can see it in nearly every page of this site, what with the green gridwork over a space background, and that very specific retro-futurisic computer font…
Maybe not so harmless after all.
Old BOB detail.
Old BOB detail.
Side and top views.
Front and back views.
