Futureworld commentary

[jolshefsky]

So I just got back from seeing Futureworld on the big screen. Yeah, at a theater—a random staff pick that I just had to see.
I had some peculiar observations.

First and foremost, there was absolutely no reason for Dr. Schneider to visit the robot-repair room. Thankfully he did, and gave us that great scene with the dismantled woman with her canonical 1976 looks. But aside from that, we never visit the robot women again.

The human repairman Harry sure is gay. He loves his robot pal Clark, commenting, "once you go iron, you won't go back." I would have picked up a different robot from the scrapheap to repair if you [straight cis guys] know what I mean, but good for him.

The bizarre dream sequence where Tracy Ballard (Blythe Danner) is romanced by "Gunslinger" (Yul Brynner) makes absolutely no sense. Tracy never even knew what he looked like, as far as the movie reveals, so for her to dream that he saves her is absurd ... and then to basically dream the entire "Total Eclipse of the Heart (Bright Eyes)" video is also insane. (Not to mention the red-suited medical orderlies were an awful lot like The Dude's nightmare scissor-men in The Big Lebowski.)

But my person icing-on-the-cake is that the PIN for the secret room is 74316. By an absolute coincidence, my 1986 CompuServ ID started with 74136. It's like I was programmed ... er ... predestined to be into robot women... According to IMDb, "the over-sized novelty check presented in the opening game show scene, the events of the film begin on June 20, 1985". I'd call that a match.

[Kano]

I remember seeing the VHS case for Futureworld in 1989 as a teen and the infamous dismantled 70s blonde was on the back cover. I said to myself, "This is gonna be good!" Boy was I wrong LOL Compared to the fembot content in Westworld, this movie did a complete 180 and that scene was the only good thing the movie had in it female wise. I was bitterly disappointed and the crazy thing is, the show Westworld (another huge disappointment and I only watched one episode) was more like Futureworld than it was to Westworld the movie! The robots weren't really robots per se and they were called hosts. Plus there was Eastworld (Shogunworld in the tv show) Futureworld was also a step backward in terms of the film itself. In Delos- the first movie, they took cool hovercrafts but in Futuureworld they were in airplanes. Westworld felt more authentic and there was more attention to detail; Futureworld felt like a cheap, sloppy gimmick. All in all, Futureworld was a huge letdown movie wise and fembot wise.

[Corey Fantoccini]

Through dumb luck, I learned that FUTUREWORLD had been set up and made at MGM as a proper sequel to WESTWORLD, but at the eleventh hour, was sold off to AIP for release. Perhaps because since former studio head James Aubrey was still attached as a producer, they wanted distance from him since he had a bad reputation (His nickname was "The Smiling Cobra"), or maybe as described, the production was such a drop down in quality from the previous film it was thought to be unworthy to go out under the bigger studio's aegis.
I agree that the Yul Brynner appearance is incongruous as all get out, and likely shoehorned in simply to have some connective tissue to the original and because by that time he was affordable for a quick return cameo.