im the robot
Again, this is even funnier if you know what a fucking production nightmare, with a possible curse attached to it no less, this robot prop was for the Doctor Who crew…
I want to know about the cursed robot
So the robot isn’t a guy in a suit, it’s an animatronic/puppet thing, and it wasn’t built for the show. In fact, no one knows who built it, one of the producers just FOUND IT ONE DAY in a building near the studio. It had apparently been built for another production that was cancelled and then just left to gather dust. So they thought “oh cool, let’s make this dumb robot the Doctor’s new companion, it’ll look neat and weird, everyone will have a gas with it.” NOPE.
Kamelion was incredibly complicated to operate, so they assigned a guy named Mike Powers to figure out the best way to go about it. Apparently he did a great job streamlining Kamelion’s operation, and then he promptly died in a boating accident (which is where the “curse” idea comes from.) He didn’t leave any notes or instructions, and the show was already behind schedule, so they had to rush Kamelion’s scenes into production with no idea how it worked. It was a gigantic pain in the ass to use, took forever to set up, and needed constant upkeep and repairs. Everyone hated working with the prop, to the point that before Kamelion’s first episode even aired, they had already decided to kill him off later in the same season.
Peter Davison, who played the Fifth Doctor, had the most scenes with Kamelion, and absolutely hated it. When Kamelion dies, the Doctor is really sad, but Davison said later that it was one of the best acting jobs of his career, because in reality, he was absolutely giddy with joy at being rid of the thing.
tl,dr: In the 80′s a Mystery robot prop built by unknown hands caused chaos on the Doctor Who set.
Thanks, Ray.
GOD DAMMIT TUMBLR
NO they did not “find it one day in a building behind the studio” THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN FIRST PARAGRAPH AND A HALF IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT
Mike Power invented Kamelion. It was actually a pretty damned sophisticated piece of robotics with some very gnarly code behind the servo mechanisms. Unfortunately he was also the only one who could control it since it was a prototype, and he liked to keep his code to himself (actually a common thing), and it was prone to breaking down, sparking, randomly running when it shouldn’t (prototype again) and generally being a huge clumsy pain in the arse to work with.
When Mike died in a boating accident, no one else could work out how the fuck to operate it since he’d never provided anyone else the machine codes so they shelved Kamelion, and then killed him off to clear up the last of the loose ends in Davison’s penultimate story.
You want some really crazy Who lore? Kamelion is the only companion who was deliberately killed by the Doctor. With his own two hands, no less.