Gort:
The giant metal robot Gort accompanied Klaatu, a visitor to Earth from a distant planet, on board a flying saucer in the 1951 movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (remade in 2008 with robot-like actor Keanu Reeves). Robots like Gort, explained Klaatu, have the authority of an interstellar police force: “There’s no limit to what Gort could do. He could destroy the Earth.” Fortunately Gort responds to the command “Klaatu barada nikto” before carrying out this threat.
The Daleks:
Although not technically robots, because they enclose the bodies of mutant extraterrestrial Kaleds from the planet Skaro, the Daleks – first seen in the British TV series Dr Who in the 1960s – display such machine-like dedication and lack of compassion that they should serve as an inspiration for the killer robot armies of the future. Exterminate! Exterminate!
Westworld’s Robot Model 406:
The menacing gunslinger robot from Michael Crichton’s 1976 movie Westworld, played by Yul Brynner, foreshadowed the much later Terminator in its single-minded pursuit of human victims. A stock character at an adult-entertainment theme park called Delos, the expressionless robot gunslinger let theme-park guests kill him in shooting matches, but had his revenge when the theme park computers went haywire.
Robocop’s ED-209:
The Enforcement Droid Series 209 robot – seen in the Robocop movie series – was heralded as “a self-sufficient, law-enforcement robot” for the purposes of “urban pacification.” Things started to go terribly wrong during the boardroom product launch, when the ED-209 mistakenly uses its miniguns to obliterate an unfortunate corporate executive.
T-800 Terminator:
The Cyberdyne Systems model T-800 cyborg, which first appeared in The Terminator in 1984, was an early attempt by the killer robot overlords of the future to meddle with the late 20th Century. Played in the movie by Arnold Schwarzenegger (as the human form housing the metal killing machine) the original T-800 was soon followed by even tougher robot assassins.