Cambot: Difference between revisions

Cambot is one of the fictional robot characters on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 television series. It is through Cambot's "eye" that viewers watch Joel Robinson (later Mike Nelson) and the other robots watch the movies that are sent to the Satellite of Love each week. Cambot also frequently provides music, video clips, and other enhancements to host segments. When Joel or another character requests to see "Rocket Number Nine" (the ship-mounted camera that supposedly allows the crew to see the ship's exterior and anything in its vicinity), it is Cambot who provides the image.

Cambot is only seen during the "Robot Roll Call" portion of the opening credits, often with his name reversed, presumably to imply he is shooting his own image in a mirror. His appearance was changed with almost every reshooting of the opening credits, most likely since there was little need to keep the puppet around once his one appearance had been shot. While originally being shown as a seperate robot operating a camera during the original KTMA season, Cambot would later be changed to a robot with a built in camera during the show's official run. Season 1 Cambot only vaguely resembled a camera, having been built from the KTMA season's Gypsy puppet. When the opening was reshot for Season 2, Cambot was redesigned to look much more like a videocamera. In a drawing fellow 'bot Gypsy once presented of the Satellite of Love crew, her "ideal family", Cambot's body was shown as long and snakelike, not unlike Gypsy's (see episode #507, "I Accuse My Parents"). Midway through the fifth season of the series the opening was once again reshot and Cambot was again redesigned, this time given a more compact shape, becoming a round hovering ball with a camera lense for an eye. He would keep this form for the remainder of the series.

From time to time, the characters on the show interact with Cambot in a Brechtian fashion. Cambot is apparently the conduit whereby the SOL crew and Deep 13's denizens communicate via a forward viewscreen (not unlike those of various "Star Trek" starships) that the characters look at (when they are in fact "looking into" the living rooms of the viewers); this screen should not be confused with the Hex-Field (stage right), which usually only receives transmissions from non-Deep 13 sources.

Cambot apparently watches all of the movies while recording the guys watching the movies. Although a number of episodes depict Joel/Mike, Crow T. Robot, and Tom Servo reacting as if traumatized by a particularly bad movie, Cambot suffered a severe reaction only once, weeping when several security cameras were systematically destroyed by the hero in Danger!! Death Ray (episode #620). (This was signified by a watery effect over the screen image.) Another rare case of Cambot interacting during a movie segment came in episode #202 (Sidehackers), when Cambot added an ESPN-like mock scorecard on one side of the screen during one of the movie's race scenes.

When the Satellite of Love crashed on Earth in the show's final episode, Cambot's fate was left unrevealed. Like Gypsy, he was not present in the apartment that Mike shared with Servo and Crow, although the guys exposited that Gypsy had become a wealthy corporate tycoon. The Cambot character was also excluded in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie.