Nerding Day: Robot in the Family (Patreon)

We have fun around here, don't we? We get silly. Ribald, even. We plumb the depths of the pop cultural landfill and have ourselves a great big chuckle at things that should not exist. But there are limits. Each of us here at 1-900 Hot Dog at some point encounters something so soul-rending, so antithetical to life, that we are faced with a question: do we leave it be and write a nice little article about Police Academy action figures or cross the moral event horizon and expose you — and ourselves — to the full horrors of the Warp?

Swaim made his choice with Walnuts. If they hadn't already years ago, then Sean and Brockway did when they covered The Milky Life. And now, I stand on that same precipice. And that reminds me, did you know that while the Police Academy precinct playset looks suspiciously similar to the iconic Ghostbusters firehouse, it's actually a different mould, whic—

No. This isn't the way. Courage, merritt.

This article is about Robot in the Family, a 1994 "comedy" "film" "starring" Joe Pantoliano and John Rhys-Davies. As far as I can tell, it was created for the express purpose of making a robot movie more racist than Short Circuit.

From the very first shot, something is terribly amiss. You might assume, based on the cover, that this is a movie about a wacky robot babysitter. And it's kind of about that. But it opens with the theft of a priceless helmet from Mecca. Recall that it is 1994. Review the stars of this picture. And understand that whatever you're picturing, the reality is much, much worse.

Cut to Jack Shamir, wacky ethnic inventor type dreaming about a magical robot. "Oh, Golddigger, come to me," he cries, as an expository theme song introduces us to the robot, who, yes, is named Golddigger. "You will be as gentle as a butterfly, 100% American," Jack whispers, "A protector and a gold detector. If you are ever in danger, you call police right away. Golddigger I love you. Everybody gonna love you."

Jack Shamir is played by Joey Pants doing what I can only describe as the world's laziest hateful accent. Now, there's a longstanding on-screen understanding between the Italian and Jewish peoples whereby each is more or less allowed to depict the other, but this goes a little beyond that. It's never explicitly stated where Jack is from, but he's based on the Iranian-Jewish director and Joe's doing a sort of vaguely Middle Eastern thing and saying things like "Eli responsible for robbery at warehouse." That said, I'm splitting hairs here. It was 1994, an Italian could play Iranian and John Rhys-Davies could legally play any race.

But those are small potatoes. You want to know what the robot sounds like. I like to think I'm an alright writer, but a Hot Dogger's got to know their limitations. Please watch as much as you can tolerate of this scene in which Golddigger attempts to make breakfast for Jack's family.

If you remember the part in the Transformers movie where that junk robot voiced by Eric Idle just kept quoting commercials, it's kind of like that, only if instead of a member of Monty Python reading from a script, it was the cheapest available Jerry Lewis impersonator adlibbing non-stop whenever he was on-screen.

Jack's wife and five children are unimpressed with his ability to create a walking, talking artificial life form. After all, he's supposed to be an antique dealer, not an inventor. "You promised after my father died that you'd give up on these inventions and take over the business," his wife, Exposition Shamir, explains. And fair, if I was raising five inexplicably anglo white children I'd be pretty pissed if my husband spent all his time moaning about a robot he loves. It sure wouldn't help if the robot called him daddy and said that he was his sixth child.

Jack's plan is to mass manufacture Golddigger robots and sell them for $13,000 as babysitters slash crime stoppers that immediately dial 911 whenever anyone screams. Except, whoops, Golddigger actually calls a Chinese restaurant, and that incident is played with all of the care you'd expect in a film where Joe Pantoliano is giving 1986 Fisher Stevens a run for his money. Sure, maybe he didn't do the full brownface, but keep in mind that Robot in the Family was eight years after Ben Jabituya hit the silver screen, so you have to adjust for inflation.

In addition to being a walking racial incident made of trash, Golddigger — as his name implies — is programmed to detect gold. Again, this is a Jewish-coded robot. Who detects gold.

That said, it's a running gag that Golddigger fucking sucks at his job. In his first venture outside, he steals Jack's neighbor's mailbox, squealing "I have found a gold for my daddy!" Jack's neighbor, Eli Taki, is portrayed by John "50% of the children in Holland under the age of 18 will be of Muslim descent in 2020" Rhys-Davies. He's playing it a little more subtle than Joe, kind of doing a voice but mostly just being himself.

It's difficult to summarize the plot of Robot in the Family, because it doesn't really have one. Mostly the movie seems like an exercise in being racist towards all ethnic groups. Every character is a broad cartoon stereotype, and Golddigger electrocutes all of them, an act he refers to as "tickling."

There are '90s New York black guys, Texan cowboys, Hasidic Jews, and murderous Asian gangsters in a sauna, for a start. And before you ask, yes, Joey Pants covers his face with a towel and makes racist noises while pretending to be a sumo wrestler in an attempt to conceal his identity in that last scene.

Then there's Jack's brother Isaac, who plays no role in the narrative and only appears to do things like blunder into a sewer or gesticulate wildly in a dirty t-shirt while screaming broken English. He's played by the director, for reasons we will get into later.

But that's all standard hack fare. The truly weird characters are the ones who don't conform to any established trope. There's a guy named "Doctor Playhand" who is a "bone doctor" and art collector obsessed with helmets.

His thing seems to be that he makes these casts for people that are really elaborate and detailed? At one point a woman walks out of his office in a huge titty cast. That isn't how breast implants work. Are we meant to assume that she broke her titty bones?

Doctor Playhand and Eli are running a scam together where they make reproductions of sculptures and use them to smuggle artifacts out of the Middle East, or something. These two thieves named Bono and Clyde — which is so close yet so far from being a joke — work for them in an unclear capacity and show up for each scene in different costumes.

Jack gets suspicious of his deceitful Iranian/Welsh neighbor and starts investigating his dealings. Golddigger electrocutes some more people, including a cop who tries to ticket Jack's stupid fucking idiot car that's covered in circuitry and starts exploding whenever it rains.

The first time the cop tries to write Jack up, he seems to be under the impression that he receives a commission on parking tickets, and that this commission is proportional to the rarity of the vehicle. He believes that ticketing Jack's "solar car" will allow him to take a vacation to Disneyland. Unfortunately, Golddigger incinerates his ticketbook.

Throughout all of this, Golddigger never shuts up. Ever. I'm pretty sure they just dubbed his lines after shooting the movie. He riffs on everything he sees like the world's most irritating toddler on a long car ride. He goes to pick up a newspaper which informs us that the disappearance of the helmet at the beginning has led to a new holy war in the Middle East, and says "newspapers are food for the mind, cereal is food for the stomach." At this point Eli tries to drown/strangle him to death with a garden hose, which is the first and last reasonable action any character takes in this movie.

The second half of the film separates Jack and Golddigger. While Jack's doing something at an auction, Golddigger just wanders around the streets of New York. First, he encounters a Japanese man selling toy robots on the street. The man howls in terror and flees from Golddigger immediately, and then there's a little bit where Golddigger says he's going to lead the little robots back to him. This is the closest I came to laughing in the entire runtime — you know when your friend shows you something kind of amusing on their phone but not actually funny? That little puff of air from your nostrils? I did that here.

Then there's a scene where a blind man (also played by the director) bumps into a Hare Krishna and a Hasidic Jewish man and they all start fighting for no reason.

Another man appears to try and assist the blind guy, but then starts robbing him. Golddigger calls the pol— I'm sorry, no, he electrocutes him. They should have called him "Heartstopper" or something. I'm just saying, so far he's detected zero gold and electrocuted most of Lower Manhattan.

Obviously, the button on this scene is that Golddigger restores the blind man's sight using his electrocution powers, then the blind man runs out into the street and gets killed by an oncoming truck.

Eventually Eli captures Jack and his son and dangles them above a pit of molten gold, which he has for some reason. "You play with boys' toys," John Rhys-Davies exclaims, "I play with the fate of nations!" This is when we learn that he stole the helmet knowing that it would instigate a holy war, which would let him profit by selling weapons to both sides. It feels like John Rhys-Davies just decided here that he was in a completely different picture and made all of this up.

Golddigger arrives, there's a strange cut, and suddenly he's also being lowered into the boiling gold. At the last minute, he calls 911 and electrocutes Eli.

Everything's now fine, except the bank is still coming to repossess Jack's entire life because he owes so much money. Golddigger finally fulfills his purpose when he smashes a plaster head he grabbed from Eli's auric murder chamber and it contains the stolen helmet, for which Jack claims the $50 million reward.

Robot in the Family is at least three different movies, each of which would be awful on its own. There's an international political thriller about a man exploiting religious fervor to sell arms to warring factions, a family drama about a father trying to restore his wife and children's faith in him, and a Short Circuit where Johnny 5 is a mad god wandering the earth and punishing people at random for the crime of existence by running 20,000 volts through their bodies. The experience of watching these three movies simultaneously is like getting stabbed by that three-bladed weapon from The Sword and the Sorcerer. Just one would have done the job, and mostly you're kind of embarrassed that you got caught by the full trio.

This is a movie that should, by all rights, not exist. But the story of its creation is even stranger than the finished product.

In the late '80s, Mark Richardson was in his final year of film school at NYU, 32 years old and anxious to make up for lost time when he was introduced to Jack Shaoul, an eccentric antique dealer who bragged about selling fakes to his customers. He thought Jack might finance his first feature, a thriller in the vein of Body Heat that he was calling Live Bait. But Jack wasn't interested. What he wanted was a director for his comedy The Long Island Expressway, a 300 page script about nothing.

The original script involved a final confrontation atop a Manhattan skyscraper, SWAT teams, helicopters, and tanks. It was 300 pages of expensive action scenes, angry racist commentary, and characters getting covered in poop. Mark demurred, returning to his student film. He showed it to Martin Scorsese, who hated it. The bills were piling up, so Mark offered to get involved with Jack Shaoul's bizarre film project as a producer. He was immediately drawn into the orbit of a madman.

Mark's efforts to find a director failed, and Jack finally convinced him to do it himself.

Critically, the robot wasn't even in Jack's original script. Mark accidentally gave him the idea for it when he pointed out that the inventor protagonist doesn't actually invent anything. Jack Shaoul built the Golddigger suit himself. It was so heavy and hot because of all of the lights and garbage attached to it that it sent the first two people who wore it to the hospital and a third had to step in to finish the movie. The character was initially voiced by Tony Randall before Jack replaced him with a guy named Don Peoples.

Jack wanted to play himself, and was petulant when Mark suggested they get a trained actor for the lead role of their film. Joe Pantoliano signed on for unclear reasons, and Mark created the character of Jack's brother to occupy Jack Shaoul and keep him off his back while he tried to actually get the movie finished. And then Mark showed it to Marty Scorsese.

They got a few offers for distribution, but Jack Shaoul turned them all down. He wanted $4 million from Disney. Then he fired Mark, re-cut the film himself, and began hounding his ex-director for "ruining his movie." Mark tried to get back to working on his own movie, but strangeness kept following him. At a wedding in Texas, a woman approached him and asked him about making a movie based on her life. A few days later, she showed up in headlines as The Fatal Attraction Murderess, a 28 year old teacher who had shot her lover's wife to death.

Mark's film Live Bait never got made, whereas Robot in the Family did. Is the lesson here that the wealthy always profit, while those dedicated to art and beauty are inevitably trampled and destroyed? Not exactly.

See, after Mark bailed on Jack Shaoul, the antique dealer was tried and convicted for insurance fraud after he claimed that a painting worth $1.5 million had been stolen from his shop. He had been slandering Mark to anyone who would listen for months, until one day he called up from a federal penitentiary in upstate New York, asking him to be a character witness. This time, Mark wisely passed.

And while Mark may never have directed another film, he went on to found a successful New York-based production studio that's still in business. Jack Shaoul, meanwhile, has spent the last thirty years in and out of court.

Help me, Golddigger! I love you Golddigger. The whole world gonna love you…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Nick Lovino, who sees no difference between this robot and the deadpool films.

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