The first movie robots possibly are buried somewhere in the archives of the silent films of George Melies, who is famous for making A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans La Lune) in 1902, a film whose credits claim that "it was based on both H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon and Jules Verne's From Earth to the Moon."1 However, "the 'automaton' film comedies popular in the first decade of the twentieth century" contain identifiably manufactured beings. In films "such as The Mechanical Statue and the Ingenious Servant (1907, dir. Stuart J. Blackman), The Rubber Man (1909, dir. Sigmund Lubin), and Dr. Smith's Automaton (1910)," it is "worth noting" that "these early out-of-control robots were considered appropriate subjects for comedy, and the threats they posed were local and easily containable, unlike their later descendents, whose behavior and motivations often pose more widespread threats, in the age of nuclear war, to humanity at large and the planet as a whole."2

Despite the popularity of these comedies, there were early filmmakers who took the idea of manufacturing artificial life seriously. For instance, 1910 saw the first adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, produced by J. Searle Dawley. Also, in 1918, a "primitive robot known as 'Q, the Automaton,' made its appearance in The Master Mystery," a serial starring Harry Houdini, though the end of the serial reveals the robot to be nothing more than a fraud controlled by the villain. Another example is Paul Wegener's The Golem, made in 1914. Also, borrowing "from the golem and Prometheus legends, Otto Rippert made Homunculus in 1916," a film shown in six 1 hour parts about a laboratory-created man without a soul. Outside of Frankenstein, Homunculus is the first film to portray the scientist as a dangerous figure for creating an artificial being. In this movie, the creature cannot deal with his lack of a soul. He wanders from country to country, eventually becoming a tyrant because he cannot blend in anywhere. Although Homunculus is destroyed by a bolt of lightning from "the outraged universe," he becomes a "a figure of national admiration," showing the "curious and...illogical imputation of superior physical strength to the manufactured creature, as if pure reason implied a natural mental and physical tyranny."3