Robert Kinoshita

Robert Kinoshita was a senior designer at MGM when he created Robby the Robot for the Cinemascope big-budget space opera Forbidden Planet, which hit the big screen in 1956.

Robby the Robot was so popular he not only starred in his own sequel, The Invisible Boy, but also made numerous appearances in TV shows, including The Twilight Zone. Later, he appeared on Lost in Space battling the Space Family Robinson’s B-9 robot, always knows as "The Robot," also designed by Kinoshita.

Born in Los Angeles in 1914, Kinoshita graduated from the USC School of Architecture and began working on movies in the late 1930s, but his career was interrupted during World War II when he and his wife were held in a Japanese internment camp in Arizona.

He worked for a time as an industrial designer in Wisconsin, but eventually returned to California, where he resumed his production design work in the 1950s and expanded widely into television.

In addition to Forbidden Planet, his film credits included The Broken Star, Bop Goes Calypso, Gun Fever, Macabre, Tokyo After Dark, Here Comes Tobor, Going Ape! and The Man with Bogart's Face.

His numerous TV projects included Science Fiction Theatre, Men Into Space, Harbor Command, Mackenzie's Riders, Highway Patrol, Sea Hunt, Bat Masterson, Hawaii Five-O, Kojak, Project U.F.O. and Barnaby Jones. He also worked as production designer on the 1976 telefilm Farewell to Manzanar, about the Japanese-American internment program that he endured during the war.

For his contributions to science fiction, Kinoshita was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame by the Carnegie-Mellon Institute.

Kinoshita died December 9, 2014, in Torrance, California. He was 100.