By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

Who doesn't want to play god? Maybe that's why the perils and pleasures of creating machines in our own image fuel so many sci-fi movie plotlines.

It's only human to dream of worry-free maid service and garbage collection, ambulatory weapons and ultrasmart computers, lover-'bots and supertoys -- a Stepford underclass obedient to our every whim and directive. And who wouldn't want to live forever, replacing worn-out organic parts with bionic spares, eventually downloading our memories into a brand-new and improved android body?

Too bad our machine-made paradise almost always short circuits. Electric sheep suddenly and inexplicably upgrade, growing human emotions and dreams of their own. What's more scary than android Adams and Eves who outstrip their creators in smarts, muscle, morals, even the capacity to love?

In "Westworld," "Star Wars," "The Terminator," "Hardware," "Eve of Destruction," "I, Robot," and "Transformers," malevolent Mechas attack humankind, out of simple revenge or the desire to be No. 1. Even Dr. Strangelove's bionic hand can't be trusted -- and beware of Kubrick's HAL, that paragon of artificial intelligence turned stone-cold killer in "2001"!

What do we do with machines that suddenly grow souls? How do we define human, if 'bots and 'droids perfectly mirror us? Think back to the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz," questing for a heart, or Data of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," nicknamed Pinocchio for his passionate wish to become "real."

Big Philosophical Questions aside, the movies teem with just plain lovable robots like Huey, Dewey and Louie ("Silent Running"), C-3PO and R2-D2 ("Star Wars"), and Robby the Robot ("Forbidden Planet"). And now Disney/Pixar powers up "WALL-E" (Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-Class), the last, ultra-lonely robot stuck on Earth, after humans fled centuries ago. This animated adventure promises to warm the cockles of every heart -- or motherboard! To welcome "WALL-E," we activate 10 of his cinematic kin.

10. "Short Circuit" (1986)
A laser-armed robot gets juiced by a couple of big-time electrical surges during a thunderstorm, and upgrades to something like "human" on the spot. Number Five sports a kind of projector head with binocular eyes, a "torso" that rises out of a base propelled along by tank treads -- actually he looks a lot like WALL-E, the robot star of Disney's new animation. With his nasal computer voice, improbable chassis, and affection for John Wayne and the Three Stooges, this little machine is designed to charm -- and he totally upstages the rest of the (human) cast. Accidentally squashing a grasshopper, Number Five jacks into the possibility of his own death when he's told the bug can't be "reassembled." Nice moment comes when creator (Steve Guttenberg) and creation meet on a moonlit mountaintop to debate Number Five's status -- machine or something more -- and it all comes down to a robot cracking up at an old joke about a priest, a rabbi, a minister, and God.

9. "Making Mr. Right" (1987)
Red-haired kook Frankie Stone (Ann Magnuson) hires on to do PR for a corporation that's just produced Ulysses (a very funny John Malkovich), an android who looks exactly like his scientist-creator (also Malkovich) and turns out to possess far more human emotions than his maker. Skewering sexual contretemps and clichés for maximum laughs, "Making Mr. Right" targets the difficulty of finding and keeping a good man, so the sweet, sexy android -- a warmer, more human version of Gigolo Joe from "A.I." -- looks like Everywoman's fantasy of a boy toy. Built to spend long years in deep space sans loneliness, Ulysses unfortunately short-circuits into passionate love for Frankie. In a screwball switcheroo, the scientist who's "not very good with people" rides the rocket, while Ulysses hooks up with his lady love. "Nobody's perfect," the android lover quips, echoing the last hilarious words in "Some Like It Hot," as two gender-mismatched lovers (Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown) sail off into the sunset.

8. "Android" (1982)
Manning a deep-space lab, a prototypical nerd grooves on rock 'n' roll while fashioning a doll-sized metallic woman for her male counterpart to embrace, and checking out a sex-instruction program. Comes as no surprise that Max is less than human: smooth-skinned, helmeted with perfect hair, this skinny fellow's a tad edgy in his own skin, though he telegraphs very human horniness. Full of allusions to classic movies, "Android" mines major hilarity and horror out of the contrast between human savagery and Max's sweet dreams of getting to Earth -- off-limits following an awful outbreak of android murder and rape. Max's wide-eyed innocence can kill, but mostly it charms -- so that it's truly stomach-turning when the mad doctor (Klaus Kinski, a dead ringer for Rotwang of "Metropolis") pries open a panel in the back of our boy's skull to extract his "moral governor." Just-activated Cassandra saves the day, and she and Max head for Earth, his android ubermadchen hinting ominously of things to come: "We're not meant to be governed by the whims of men."

7. "RoboCop" (1987)
This rip-roaring actioner never wallows in the horror of reformatting a shot-up cop (Peter Weller) into an unstoppable cyborg -- "RoboCop" is all go! go! go! from start to finish.

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