‘Rick and Morty’ Pass the Butter Robot Becomes Reality. It Didn’t Go Well.
People think that engineers/inventors are boring. When they imagine one, they tend to think of someone like the socially-awkward Dilbert. That’s not a true stereotype – there are PLENTY of creative engineers out there… who may still be socially awkward. They just devote their energies to building robots that smash, char, bludgeon, and do many other brutal things to each other in tournaments. There was one REALLY cool robot recently – one that appeared in the cartoon, Rick and Morty.
The actual robot names were “Flame War” and “T-800”. I assume the inventor couldn’t call Flame War “Butter Passer Robot,” what with creative rights and all. The “T-800” looked like a giant Roomba, featuring spinning blades, so I called it “Roomba of Death”. For the rest of this piece, I’ll be calling them Butter Passer Robot and Roomba of Death.
The announcers at Robogames 2017 were agog that someone had created a large-scale version of the Butter Passer Robot, with one of them exclaiming “He DIDN’T”, right before the match. I guess he’s a big Rick and Morty fan. After a countdown, the fight was on!
For a while, it looked like the Butter Passer Robot was going to best the Roomba of Death, what with it sending it spinning on its side around the arena like a giant coin while trying to flambe it. Sadly, though, it got a little too cocky and the poor Butter Passer Robot was smashed onto its back.
The Roomba of Death then flopped over. This seemed like the two of them were reprising the end of Rocky II, though there was the notable absence of Talia “You Can’t Win, Rocky!” Shire. They also didn’t simultaneously try to get up to beat a 10-count, though the Roomba of Death eventually did manage to get back right side up, taking advantage of one of the slowest counts I’ve ever seen. The Butter Passer Robot just laid there in a stricken pose until it was wheeled off.
A woman interviewed the Butter Passer Robot’s inventor, who was wearing a white lab coat in homage to Rick of Rick and Morty. She laughed gamely at his reference to the robot’s moving past its purpose of serving butter. You could see her thinking, “I have no idea what he’s talking about,” though. Not coincidentally, she wrapped up the interview very quickly after that and they resumed showing more robots smashing each other. Just as it should be.
