The History of Westworld 

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The concept behind the new HBO series about robots and cowboys has been done before... several times.

HBO’s new show Westworld is shaping up to be another in the cable net’s long line of great dramas, though interestingly the Jonathan Nolan/Lisa Joy-produced sci-fi series is not a new concept. In fact, the tale of a theme park populated by robots is just the latest incarnation of an idea that has already been made into two movies and a short-lived TV show over the years. It also bears mentioning that a different -- if hugely popular -- franchise was surely informed by Westworld on some level… Jurassic Park.

So with the new Westworld about to make its debut on HBO, let’s take a look back at the previous versions of this classic sci-fi story. Draw!

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Westworld was originally based on a book, since the story did spring from the mind of popular genre author Michael Crichton. Crichton was a Harvard Medical School grad whose sci-fi novel The Andromeda Strain, about an extra-terrestrial virus that threatens to wipe out mankind, was made into a film in 1971. That best-selling book had really put Crichton on the map, and he soon revealed a keen interest in filmmaking in addition to writing.

With Crichton’s mind-control tale the Terminal Man also in the works as a movie, the writer conceived the idea of Westworld for his feature-directing debut. It’s the story of a futuristic vacation spot where the robot “inhabitants” are nearly identical to the human guests, and where those guests can live out their wildest fantasies as a character in the Old West (or Medieval times or Ancient Rome)… before things go horribly wrong, of course. Interestingly enough, Crichton didn’t think the idea worked as book, however.

“The actual detailing of these three worlds -- and also the kinds of fantasies that people experienced in them -- were movie fantasies, and because they were movie fantasies, they got to be very strange-looking on the written page,” said the late author. “They weren’t things that had literal antecedents, literary antecedents. They were things that had antecedents in John Ford and John Wayne and Errol Flynn -- that sort of thing.”

The resulting film is a delight for fans of early ’70s sci-fi, even if it is so very, very 1970s. Set in the not-too-distant future, the film stars Richard Benjamin and James Brolin (yep, Josh’s dad) as friends who take a vacation to the Delos amusement park, where they get to play cowboy and do all the fun stuff you’d expect from an old Western… at the cost of a thousand dollars a day. That includes saloon brawls, canoodling with the local ladies, and of course gunfights. Specifically, the guys encounter Yul Brynner, who plays the most memorable robot in the film, known only as the Gunslinger. This fantasy setting takes up the first chunk of the movie, but as mom used to say, it’s all fun and games until the robots start killing everyone.

Early digital image processing was used to create the robot POV in Westworld.

Despite the relatively low-budget production, Westworld still works well as a cautionary tale about technology run amuck, a musing on the nature of AI, and a wish-fulfillment yarn -- not only do our stars get to be pretend cowboys, but we also see secondary characters becoming knights and adventurers in the other worlds, while our more base impulses regarding violence and sexual adventuring are deemed totally legit because, well, you’re just dealing with robots after all. In a twist on traditional roles, the square-jawed Brolin is gunned down abruptly before the final showdown, leaving Benjamin’s Everyman as the anti-action hero -- a nebbishy, pornstache-sporting nice guy who finds himself on the run from Brynner’s killer robot. The Gunslinger is in many ways a forerunner to James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, with its single-minded determination, steady but unwavering pace, and glowing eyes, as much as it is an ode to Brynner’s classic Western identity from The Magnificent Seven. The film was also reportedly the first use of digital image processing in a Hollywood movie -- the robot POV was modified to look pixelated.

Read on for more, including the movie sequel Futureworld, the short-lived TV show Beyond Westworld... and the Jurassic Park connection!