Childrens television is a remarkable world filled with both works of wonder and imagination on the one side and complete pap and nonsense on the other. Some children's entertainment is engaging enough to hold the attention of any adult, deft works of fact or fiction that rival productions specifically aimed at the adult market. However, there are also efforts that don't even captivate the intended audience and while novelty value maintains interest for a while this soon wears off. The series 'Metal Mickey' comes somewhere below the borderline of average, running from the late 70's until the mid-80's.

The Premise

A common, run-of-the-mill family becomes the unwitting, adopted family of a massive robot, called Metal Mickey. The family consists of a mother and father, a couple of children and their grandmother. The robot has limited understanding of the world at large, has all the dexterity of a brick and seems to attract trouble and misfortune like a bad karma magnet. Mickey was capable of various feats, but was at the height of his power after consuming an Atomic Thunderbuster ¹   .

This was Saturday morning entertainment in the UK aimed, apparently, at children who hadn't quite gathered their senses enough to notice that the plots here were regularly thinner than tissue paper and usually relied heavily on slapstick comedy, blatant misuse of inoffensive, thrown liquids and freak incidents. Much of the activity in the series took place inside the family home, but often the action spilled out into the streets and other common, everyday locations.

Micky Dolenz, of 'The Monkees' fame, co-created, produced and directed this London Weekend Television series.

The Robot

Metal Mickey looked like an escaped extra from the Tom Baker period of 'Doctor Who'. He was a huge, vaguely human-shaped robot - presumably a necessity to allow someone to lurk inside to move all the bits around. Primarily metallic silver in colour he also had a liberal scattering of coloured plastic panels and blinking LEDs. He had a head like a half a two-foot wide Smartie ²   with ears that stuck out like metal-and-plastic waffles. His head was crowned with curls of a thin metallic material, to simulate hair, and Mickey had round, red eyes with wandering eyelids and a wide, thin mouth.

The robots torso was split between a chest and abdomen section, tapering towards the bottom. The chest section had two plastic panels, the larger on the left with multi-coloured, blinking lights behind it, and the smaller on the right with a glowing red heart. Mickey's arms and legs were chunky and jointed, the arms terminating in two-fingered, clamping hands and the legs ending in massive, clunky, brick-shaped feet.

Overall, the whole robot was ponderous and probably scared small children. No matter how funny you try to make it look a monstrosity of metal and plastic is always going to have an inhuman edge that is going to disturb the young and innocent.

The Cast

The series starred Anton Rodgers, as the father of the household, and Irene Handl, venerable screen star of what feels like most of the century, as the grandmother who Mickey affectionately referred to as "old fruitbat".

The Future

We can perhaps be thankful that no major TV channels have shown any interest in providing 'Metal Mickey' with a fresh airing, even in the dead of night. The series ran for several years, the robot making several guest appearances on other shows. There was some limited merchandising, with annuals and models of the robot, but very little else. Mickey was a short term fad amongst the masses of the young until something else came along and stole it's crown.