I'm obsessed with robots.
I think it was Voltron, Mighty Orbots or Transformers that started it... back when I was a kid in the 80s. The idea of huge robots that joined up to form even bigger ones was always something that fascinated me, or maybe just robots that turned into other things. I remember being insanely envious of kids at school who had the Voltron toys, which of course I was never allowed to have because my mum thought Voltron was Satanic. Transformers was perfectly fine though - no magic, devils or witches to be found there. So me and my two brothers amassed an impressive collection of Transformers, mostly the more obscure Autobots, because they were smaller and cheaper, but we did manage to get the whole set of Constructicons, two of the Seekers, a couple of Insecticons and some of the Stunticons. When I was a little older and started to get some money of my own through doing paper rounds after school and other part time jobs, I managed to get some of the 'bots I'd always wanted... including Starscream, Bumblebee, Ratchet, Grimlock and Megatron, and my mum bought my younger brother and I the Holy Grail of Transformers for Christmas one year - Optimus Prime, which we had to share, much to my frustration. I never did manage to get Soundwave or Shockwave though, my two favourite Decepticons, and in fact my two favourite Transformers. Oh well.
After that, anything with robots in immediately grabbed my attention. Other cartoons like COPS, The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers and even Gargoyles, movies like the Star Wars films, Short Circuit, Batteries Not Included, The Black Hole and Robocop, even silly live-action TV shows like Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. I started looking for older TV shows and movies with robots in them, and grew fond of The Jetsons, Lost in Space and old movie classics like Metropolis, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Forbidden Planet. My interest in robots continued unabated, right up to Steven Spielberg's epic A.I. and Pixar's brilliant Wall.e... In fact, robot-wise, there's very little that I haven't seen.
My obsession's not limited to just robots, of course, I'm also fascinated by all the many cyborgs of film and TV, from Star Trek's Data and the Borg to Doctor Who's Daleks and Cybermen, the Synthetics from the Aliens franchise and the various Terminators from the films of the same name. I still have a lot of my cyborg and robot-toys, packed away in boxes at my mum's house, and I have every intention of collecting them and putting them all out on display when I have a place of my own. Sigh. One day...
