LOS ANGELES — Robert Kinoshita, who designed beloved film and TV robot characters, including the bubble-headed “Lost in Space” robot who made “Danger, Will Robinson” a catchphrase of the 1960s, has died. He was 100.

Kinoshita died Dec. 9 at an assisted living facility in Torrance of congestive heart failure, his daughter, Pat Aoki, said Wednesday.

The “Lost in Space” robot had a deep male voice but no name – though aficionados refer to him by the model designation B9 that was visible in an episode. The machine had sustained popularity long after the 1965-68 series, and to this day there are B9 fan clubs, including those that build meticulous re-creations of the robot.

By looks and even personality, B9’s ancestor was Robby, a robot that Kinoshita helped create for the 1956 MGM sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet.”

Kinoshita was a designing draftsman at the studio when Robby was being developed.

“We had five guys designing, and we just knocked out must have been a couple thousand drawings,” Kinoshita said in a 2006 short documentary, “Robby the Robot.” “So I said, ‘The hell with it, I’m going to make me a model.'”

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The studio went with it. When fully built, Robby had a plethora of flashing lights, spinning antennas and pistonlike mechanisms. But none of it was random.

“Robby was a great design,” Oscar-winning special effects artist John Dykstra said in the documentary. “He had a head, shoulders, feet, arms. You knew where to look to see him express himself.”

Using built-in apparatus, Robby was depicted as being able to fulfill a wide range of requests. But perhaps his neatest trick was stealing scenes from a cast that included Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen.

“You can’t think of ‘Forbidden Planet,'” Nielsen said in the documentary, “without thinking of Robby the Robot.”

Kinoshita was born Feb. 24, 1914, in Los Angeles as a Nisei first-generation Japanese-American and grew up in Boyle Heights. He graduated from Roosevelt High School and went to USC to study architecture. But at the school, he saw an exhibit of sketches by an alumnus who worked for a movie studio.

The character was central to numerous episodes in which he saved the space-traveling Robinson family – and especially young son Will – from peril. Toy models of the robot were big sellers, which delighted Kinoshita, even though he got no share of the sales.

“I think it’s tremendous,” he said of the toys in 2000.


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