Technology has come a long way from the dark days of the 1980′s when fingerless gloves and slap bracelets weren’t considered hideous forms of fashion expression and dumping your child’s entire college savings into Pogs were a sound investment that’s sure to pay off in the long run. Not only were the robots of the past primitive in terms of their technology and function, but they lacked a serious quality that practically makes them as obsolete as the horse and buggy: a lack of a personality that didn’t want to make humans grab something heavy and smash them until their own motherboards couldn’t recognize them.

Science fiction has given us a load of awesome robots: Optimus Prime, R2D2, the Terminator. Unfortunately, all of these are – for now, at least – fictional. Today, however, the science fiction author’s eternal dream of highly sophisticated robots becoming commonplace is fast getting closer to fact than fiction. How long will it be until seeing a robot walking down the street won’t be worth a second glance? According to the work of the makers of some of the mechanical marvels below, not very long at all…

To coincide with the release of the third installment of Michael Bay’s robots-hitting-each-other franchise, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” I have compiled a list of the best robotic characters ever to clink and clang on the silver screen. Some we care for, some we love, some we wish would glitch and malfunction, and some we enjoy watching bash each other to scraps, but the electrically-charged hunks of metal listed below have all developed into iconic pieces of moviedom over the years. Without further ado, here are my top ten robots from the world of cinema. Oh, and no, I’m not going to include Johnny fucking Five in this list; Christ, that pile of scraps is annoying.

These tiny robots, created by Jenn and Tony Bot, may look edible, but believe you me, they are not. I found that out the hard way.

Using storage doors as inspiration, the Slovakian photographer Branislav Kropilak has made a series of pictures that he calls “Depots”. It’s basically photographs of different doors that lead to several storages or depots, but the trick is that they all look like robot heads.