The Invisible Boy sets itself apart from many of the other films we’ve covered for Atomic Age Cinema with its relatively modern approach: Appeal to the youth and capitalize on their investment in your already popular characters. I don’t think I’ve seen a lot of ’50s sci-fi films geared towards kids, so this was a somewhat interesting watch. Depending on who you ask, MGM’s followup to the massively successful Forbidden Planet is a semi-sequel, as the story largely revolves around the 1956 film’s breakout star, Robby the Robot.
There’s a brief indication that Robby may have somehow traveled back in time from the 23rd Century to the then present, but otherwise there’s no real connection. It’s just a reused prop.
It makes sense that MGM wanted to reuse Robby. In addition to Forbidden Planet being a successful film, it was also an expensive one, and Robby had a big part in that. The development and construction of the robot cost over $100,000, making it almost certainly the most expensive movie prop at the time.
But it paid off, in a sense. Robby immediately became an icon of science fiction, and would make cameo appearances in films and series as varied as The Twilight Zone, Joe Dante’s Gremlins, and of course Columbo.
There’s a cute charm to Robby, but it’s a charm that 1957’s The Invisible Boy only somewhat capitalizes. The film primarily concerns an evil supercomputer that’s reached self awareness, and blesses a young boy with unnaturral intelligence that gets him to assemble Robby.
You might expect Robby to kind of become a father figure to young Timmie (Richard Eyer), but he’s almost immediately a bad influence.
It’s never 100% clear if Robby is a truly separate entity from the supercomputer, because at times the two machines seem to have similar goals. If you’re wondering where the title comes from, yes, Robby convinces Timmie to drink some kind of potion that makes him invisible. The movie has some fun with those effects, most notably in a scene where he eats his soup.
Yet it never feels like it’s a huge part of the movie. The conflict doesn’t involve him being invisible. Eventually he sort of gets kidnapped by Robby, and the only way the invisibility plays into that is his parents figure out that he’s missing a little later than they would have othewise.
The film touches upon some interesting ideas, but never truly lets them breathe. The self-aware supercomputer is put on the backburner for wacky kiddy hijinks including invisibility and a kite that flies him above the clouds.
The Invisible Boy was probably quite an amusing film if you were a kid in 1957, but it’s the first film in this series that I don’t recommend. It’s no Forbidden Planet. That being said, it is a film that in someways foretold a lot of how Hollywood would operate going forward. After all, you could argue the last 20 years of super hero cinema was studios reusing props in an attempt to gin up characters nobody really cares about in stories that barely make sense.
