Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Robert Kinoshita, the designer responsible for both Forbidden Planet‘s Robby the Robot and the Robot in Lost in Space, died on 9 December, 2014, aged 100.

Los Angeles born Kinoshita started working in movie design before the Second World War, but was interned for much of the conflict. He returned to films in the 1950s, creating Robby for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet from various different concepts submitted by the various departments on the movie; the following year he created the robot Tobor for the film Here Comes Tobor.

As part of the art pool at 2oth Century Fox in the 1960s, he was selected by Irwin Allen to be the art director on Lost in Space, to which he contributed the Robot at very short notice. He also acted as art director for the second Six Million Dollar Man TV movie Wine, Women and War and for Gene Roddenberry’s pilot Planet Earth, both in 1974, as well as the 1978 series Project UFO. His final work was on the short-lived spy series Cover Up in 1984.