Bender: Heche en Mexico, Bender Bending Rodríguez is a cigar-smoking, heavy-drinking creation of Mom's Robot Factory. Catch him in the show Futurama.
Cylon: Cybernetic Lifeform Nodes, the antagonists in the two Battlestar Galactica TV shows. Originally metal in the 1978-1979 series, later they were indistinguishable from humans in the 2004 reboot.
Dewey: In the 1972 movie "Silent Running," there are three maintenance drones who care for the plants in the domes of a giant spaceship named Valley Forge. These three service robots are named after Donald Duck's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. No spoilers, but guess which one of the three survives the events of the movie.
Elektro: The first celebrity robot, introduced at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, it was seven feet tall, able to move its head and arms, and could tell jokes (using a built-in record player that held 700 words), smoke cigarettes (like Bender!), and won contests against humans to blow up balloons.
Fribo: A new product under development by Korean roboticists, it's designed to help young people who live alone be more connected to their friends. Fribo listens to noises in your house (like a vacuum cleaner), then tells other Fribo units owned by your friends that it heard a vacuum cleaner. Those other Fribo units say something like, "A friend of yours sure likes to clean!" And then a friend of yours would in theory call you up to say, "Hey, good job keeping your place clean." And that would make you feel connected and less lonely. It all seems terribly sad.
Gort: An eight foot tall robot from the 1951 movie "The Day The Earth Stood Still." Gort can fire a very destructive beam from its visor. Its role is as peacekeeper accompanying the alien Klaatu, who is on a mission to get Earth to disarm its nuclear weapons. The line "Klaatu barada nikto" is spoken to Gort to get it to not destroy the planet. Those words might come in handy if you're trying to cast a spell to banish demons in Evil Dead.
Hal: From the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," Hal is the nickname for the homicidal HAL 9000 computer that controls the Discovery One spaceship and is afraid that it can't open the pod bay doors, Dave.
Iron Giant: From the 1999 animated movie of the same name set in 1957, the Iron Giant is a 50-foot robot that eats metal and electricity and reacts defensively to destroy anything it perceives as a weapon. Voiced by Vin Diesel before he stretched his acting chops as Groot.
Johnny 5: From the 1986 movie "Short Circuit," Number 5 is a military robot that becomes sentient when it is struck by lightning, and escapes to learn about humanity. By the end of the movie, after tricking Ally Sheedy into falling for Steve Guttenberg, it renames itself Johnny 5.
Kinoshita: Robert Kinoshita was an artist and designer, 1914-2014, best known for creating three famous robots on screen: Tobor from the 1954 movie "Tobor the Great," Robby the Robot from the 1956 movie "Forbidden Planet," and the dully-named robot "Robot" from the 1960's TV series "Lost in Space."
Leon: A Nexus-6 replicant from the 1982 movie "Blade Runner," first seen being given the Voight-Kampff test designed to tell humans apart from androids. He was more precisely called Leon Kowalski (played by the late actor Brion James). He's never seen a turtle, but he understands what you mean.
(One could argue that a lot of these robots are inherently commercial and that their use as street names is a bit commodifying. But robots in and of themselves are literal commodities. By taking these entities out of context and assessing their meaning beyond pure pop culture, we can conceptualize them as milestones in technological development, or markers of what it means to be human or inhuman, and we can decommodify them.)
