When it Came to B-Movies MGM Usually Didn't Have a Clue. Here is Another Example of the Haughty Studio Cashing in On the Popularity of Robby the Robot and Abandoning or Not Caring About Any of It.This is an Unintentionally Disturbing "Kid's" Movie Where the Child is Literally Beaten by His Father, Threatened to be Beaten by His Father Even More, Spanked by His Mother, and Threatened by the Supercomputer to be Put to Death "Slowly". This is All Qute Cringe-Worthy.The Movie Also Shifts Tone Half Way Through from a Light-Hearted "Having fun with my pal Robot" Story to a Kidnapping, Ultra Smart Computer Doing Brain Implants and Aspiring to Take Over the World.Robby the Robot, Halfway Through the Thing Turns from Friend to Foe and it is Imaginable that Kids who Saw This in the Fifties Went from Amused to Terrified as it Unfolded. It is Worth a Watch Just Because it is So Bizarre as it Turns Every Which Way and the Disjointment is "Ed Wood" Like the Way it is Handled. The Look of the Film is Shiny and Some of the Supercomputer Sets are Fifties Nifty. Overall, it is a Very Odd Movie and its Strangeness and the Bizarre Behavior by the Parents is Part of its Retro Appeal, and That was Certainly Not its Intention.

They say - "Children should be seen, but not heard." Well - In The Invisible Boy it seems to be the other way around - "Children are heard, but not seen." From my perspective - When it comes to the likes of children (in this case movie-children), I sure wish to hell that it could be both ways, meaning - Children should "not" be seen, and "not" heard, both, at the same time. Yeah. Now, wouldn't that be just ideal?Set in California (in and around the Stoneman Institute of Mathematics), The Invisible Boy's sucky, little, Sci-Fi story (from 1957) deals with the attempted "World Take Over" by a massive, supremely arrogant, "thinking" Computer that's obviously gotten way-way too big for its britches.In this flick's story the institute's top mathematician's son, 10 year-old Timmy, is, in a sense, kidnapped by this "brainy" computer. For this computer to pull off its hare-brain scheme to rule the world it immediately renders Timmy invisible by re-adjusting his index-of-refraction. (Yes. It's really that simple to do when you're a big, frickin', hot-shot computer) The computer, of course, can speak and it refuses to re-animate the boy until its "high'n'mighty" demands for human co-operation (in its quest to rule the world) are met to its pompous satisfaction.Personally, I hate "smart" computer movies such as The Invisible Boy. I mean, this particular movie was clearly intended for people (children, I guess) who just don't bother to think things through, or to think sensibly about things, at all.Robby the Robot (the hero from Forbidden Planet) was given a pivotal role in this flick.Unfortunately, this time Robby the Robot was bad. I thought that doing this to Robby really sucked. Robby the Robot was a cool robot-dude and he surely deserved to be on the hero's side of things in this flick, too.

A ten-year-old boy (Richard Eyer) and Robby the Robot team up to prevent a Super Computer from controlling the Earth from a satellite.I just wanted to call attention to the Les Baxter score. Not saying it is remarkable, but Baxter did some great work back in the day and I feel he should be recognized for his contributions.What I love about these old science fiction films is the nonsense put in them that seems silly by today's standards. Somehow they managed to build a computer that holds all the world's knowledge... before they figured out how to launch a satellite into space. Pretty strange.If only they had made more movies with Robby the Robot... Robby in the future could have found the Robby of the past!

This film is much better and much more interesting than the title would suggest, although the title does serve to underscore one of the rather subversive themes in this picture.To be sure, this is a B/W 1957 low budget scifi film, and shares the common traits of its peer group. And if those factors are negative in your aesthetic sense, you must also know much of the film occurs from the point of a view of a pre-adolescent 1957 boy.Yet amazingly, this is an imaginative and thoughtful genuine scifi script, with a pedigree from Cyril Hume, who wrote the classic 'Forbidden Planet.' The central science fiction theme is an artificial intelligence that goes rogue, and this is one of the earliest scifi films to approach this idea.There is also a strong sub-textual message that our eponymous hero is largely ignored by his self-absorbed parents, hence he is invisible in more ways than one. In an America freshly-painted with the myth of the nuclear family and parental supremacy, this film could be seen as a coded message of dissent.Most fantasy and scifi films of this period with child protagonists tend to be thoroughly juvenile in every respect. Whereas 'Invisible Boy', along with the classic 'Invaders From Mars', successfully inserts a kid into a genuinely interesting and perilous story that can be enjoyed by both young and old. Twenty-five years before Stephen Spielberg made 'ET'.Special note to fans of 'Forbidden Planet': Screenwriter Hume also successfully tied this film to Forbidden Planet in a very clever way.