Robot Me

One of these is not like the other.

Bill: Wow! Evil robot us's! Ted: Excellent! —Bill and Teds Bogus Journey

A robotic version of an existing character. May have vastly different abilities and personality, especially if it's developed as an Evil Knockoff. Sometimes, this robot may simply be a stand-in for the original with a justification, either sinister or mundane. The key point of this trope is for there to be interaction between the original and the robot, even if it is simply the original having knowledge of the robot's existence.

Examples of Robot Me include:

Anime & Manga

• Armitage III: Dual Matrix has robot clones of the android lead. Their world has three kinds of robots, dumb mechanical ones, menial work bots, and the outlawed Thirds which are organic/mechanical robots and can bear children. Armitage herself is a Replacement Goldfish of their creator's dead daughter, and Corrupt Corporate Executive steals her father's notes and makes more of her. Yech. Of course, since they were more like "twins" than Robot Me's, they were Evil.
• Hyakko's Mecha-Torako.
• Amanatsu from Gakuen Alice, Mikan's robotic copy as created by Hotaru.
• Afro-droid
• Robo-Pecola from Pecola
• Perman by Fujiko F. Fujio (creator of Doraemon). Each of the three superheros (an everyday school kid, a girl child star — and a chimp) is given a morphing robot that serves as a stand-in, so that when they come back from their call, they don't have to answer the embarrassing question of "where have you been?".
• Hilariously Lampshaded in Trouble Chocolate when Mint creates a killer robot version of Deborah and no one can tell it's not her (despite it being blindingly obvious). Even Murakata can't tell the difference.

advertising

• Flobot, a robotic version of Flo from this Progressive Insurance ad

Comic Books

• Tony 2.0 (Sentient Armor)
• The Superman Robot Duplicates. Made by Superman to fill in when he's unavailable and help him maintain his secret identity.
  • And, inevitably, the Suprematon Decoys. Unlike the Superman dupes, one of the Supreme's robots, S-1, is self aware, though.
• Mecha-Dawn, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight
• The Archie Sonic comics have Sonic temporarily become one of these when Robotnik finally succeeds in roboticising him. Robotnik later uses the schematics to build Metal Sonic, Silver Sonic, etc.
  • Recurring character Fiona Fox also had one of these, though in that case the android double was introduced before the original.
• Dr. Doom's Doombots.
• Page 1 and Page 2 of What's New with Phil and Dixie from Dragon magazine #63 (July 1982).
• Kang's robot spider-man was made with the assumption it would not meet the original. The robot was created to trick The Avengers into believing he was the real deal.

Film

• Evil robot us's
  • Also good robot us's
• Mecha-Godzilla and Mechani-Kong.
• Robot Maria.
• Beta, from The Last Starfighter. Most of the time they're in different galaxies, but they do get together briefly when Alex walks out.

Literature

• In the Ray Bradbury short story Marionettes, Inc., a man acquires a Robot Me to stand in for him at home while he goes away. (A very sophisticated robot that eventually develops sentience, but still one that, if you place your head to the chest, you can hear a clock ticking instead of a heart beating.) However, the robot decides that he likes the original man's life and doesn't want to be stored away in a box in the basement. The solution? He betrays his owner by locking HIM in the box forever while he (the robot) lives the life of the owner, his family completely unaware of the switch.
• Star Wars: Leia Organa II
• Beth Kittridge's simulacrum from Tek War. The robot gets destroyed, but Jake meets the real Beth not long after. True, the robot only cared about protecting Beth's life, but even so... poor, poor l'il robot.
• The Adventures Of Electronic by Russian author E. Veltistov have a robot built after a real boy. The robot escapes and meets said boy, who is very happy to have his Robot Me go to school instead of him and then...
• In The Caves of Steel, R. Daneel Olivaw is a robot built to look exactly like his creator. Elijah Baley makes a joke that he was "made in his maker's image", but it's lost on the robot.
• Asimov's story "Evidence" (the second last in the "I, Robot" collection), is about a man being suspected of being a robot created after the real man was crippled in a traffic collision.
• A Spider Robinson short story about a company that rents sexbots makes one to represent the secretary who takes people's orders (because she ends up being the most popular request). She's rather upset about this and steals it. Then the inevitable happens.
• In Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman, the titular antagonist builds evil robot versions of George and Harold: Robo-George and Harold 2000.
• Alfred Slote's My Robot Buddy series involves a kid named Jack who is given a Robot Buddy, Danny, as a present; at his request, Danny is made to look exactly like him. Much use is made of this throughout the series.

Live Action TV

• Robo SG-1
  • And Repli-Carter
• Buffybot(s): Specifically, it differed from the original in terms of being obsessed with Spike when it didn't go out on patrol, or even when it did. When it was reprogrammed it was closer to the way Buffy was, except that to call it a Cloud Coocoo Lander would be an understatement.
• Robot Rangers in both Power Rangers Turbo and Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue. The former were Ridiculously-Human Robots built by the originals to help protect an alien planet; the latter were mindless remote-controlled drones (with no "civilian forms" to make them seem more human) that... well, AI Is a Crapshoot.
  • Don't forget Cyber Cam from Power Rangers Ninja Storm
• Android Kirk in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"
• A robot Kermit (with a wind-up key in his back) took over hosting duties in one episode of The Muppet Show.
• Data, Lore, B4, and presumably all the other previous prototypes in Star Trek: The Next Generation were exact (if Palette Swapped) duplicates of their creator, Dr. Soong (also played by Brent Spiner, the actor who portrays Data, et al).
• Unsurprisingly for such a long-lived show, Doctor Who has done this more than once: there's the robot First Doctor created by the Daleks in "The Chase" as well as the android replicas of the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane in "The Android Invasion".
• In the Buck Rogers in The 25th Century episode Ardala Returns, the villains create an android version of Buck.

Video Games

• Mech Hisui
• Metal Sonic
  • Plus Silver Sonic, Mecha Sonic, Metal Knuckles and the Tails Doll. And those Egg Robo things probably count as well.
    • Don't forget about the Shadow Robots--so realistic that Shadow initially believes Eggman when he claims that Shadow is one of them (Eggman eventually admits that he was lying and that Shadow is the real thing.)
• Robo Ky
• The robot Invaders that assist Earth's Final Weapon in Space Invaders Get Even.
• Miharu and robot Miharu in Da Capo. Miharu knew about her robo version but they never really interacted because the second Miharu only came out when she was in a coma. The personalities were almost exactly, but not quite, the same. Robo Miharu is also apparently somewhat less intelligent due to limitations on the design nor does she possess any superior strength or abilities.
• Axel has an evil robot knockoff as a boss fight in Streets of Rage 3. The robot has the exact same appearance as Axel, except for the color of the gloves. The robot clone has all of Axel's techniques, and it can do them a lot faster than Axel can.
• The Mini-Mario toys from Mario vs. Donkey Kong are a Redshirt Army of these.
• Metroid Zero Mission introduces the aptly-named Ridley Robot, a robotic version of Ridley, built by him. Given that it's incomplete, and still serves as the Final Boss of that game, it makes you how devastating it could've been if it had been finished before Samus blew it up.

Web Original

• Mecha Mario, of the Flash series Super Mario Bros Z. Made by none other than Robotnik.
  • Not to forget the Big Bad of the same series: Mecha Sonic.
• The evil video game directors send robotic versions of their games' critics at them to kill them in the third Declin of video gaming. See the Page quote.
• Mechakara.
• Ansem Retort has a one-off appearance by an android version of Zexion, set up to provide "political talking points" while Zex was otherwise occupied.

Robot Zexion: FUCK TIBET!

• In the Touhou doujin Life of Maid, Nitori makes a Robo-Marisa to screw around with Patchy's emotions. Marisa herself is surprised to discover her robotic clone after its head fell off.

Western Animation

• Inverted in Beast Wars, where Dinobot meets a flesh clone created by Megatron to infiltrate the Maximals' ship.
• The Phinedroids and Ferbots from the Phineas and Ferb episode "I, Brobot".
  • Also, the "platyborg" version of Perry in The Movie might also qualify, though he's technically a brainwashed cyborg.
• In one episode of The Snorks, the villains create two robotic Snorks as part of a scheme. Unusually, the robo-Snorks pull a Heel Face Turn and become regular characters.
• The British government once gave Danger Mouse and Penfold robot doppelgangers to help with their workload. The robots were mindlessly stupid, and Hilarity Ensued.
  • In another episode, one of Dangermouse's enemies covertly replaced Penfold with a robot double who was braver and more confident. The downside was that at the villain's command, the robot would transform into a Humongous Mecha form and follow its true programming....destroy Dangermouse!
• Mr. T had one in Mister T. The only thing that's cooler than one Mr. T is him fighting his robot self.
• In one episode of the Teen Titans animated series, Cyborg builds a robot copy of himself before going undercover at the Hive Academy (oddly enough, using an identity based around his real name). Brother Blood later builds an entire army of them.
• Herbie and Jane from Ka Blam!, which were robot lookalikes of Henry and June to replace them on the show.
• An episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes had Heloise build a Do-Anything Robot double to be her lab assistant. Jimmy falls in love with it, completely missing its similarity to Heloise.
• On Catscratch, The cats build robot versions of themselves to help around the house. It backfires.
• In Batman: The Animated Series, according to the DVD commentary, the finale of the two-part episode "Heart of Steel" was going to involve Batman battling a duplicate of himself, and it got bigger and bigger before the whole idea became the foundation for the sequel episode "His Silicon Soul".

Real Life

• This Japanese researcher, attempting to build a robotic duplicate of himself, certainly counts. In a very creepy way. [1]