There were some great cyborg characters of the 80s and there were some truly horrible ones since these types of movies unfortunately tend to suffer from a mass of issues that stem from lack of development to unbelievable characters to many other problems that can come along. When thinking to how plausible they are however you can kind of seen how Danijel Striga from ScreenRant has a point; they’re a little easier to take than some of the more out of control science fiction theories. With that being said though the definition between cyborg and android tends to get blurred every now and then even if there’s some very distinct guidelines as to which is which. To some it doesn’t matter since with sites like List Challenges they’re all lumped together in a big hodgepodge of likable characters that people tend to talk about. K. Alexander Smith of Paste makes a very good point that humans have been utilizing cyborgs for quite some time and in all honesty it has more to do with the overall fun that can be had with the idea than the practicality of it or the distinction between cyborgs and androids.
Here are just a few of the more popular cyborgs from the 80s.
5. Paco Queruak
Sometimes you’ve got to visit the bottom of the barrel to find any hidden gems and…well, you still don’t find much but you do find movies that were supposed to be big at one time and just kind of flopped hard. The whole idea of remaking someone in a better way has been a popular idea in movies and TV for a long time, but in the movies it’s been done in a way that is supposed to have more of an edge but usually just comes off as being rather cheesy. This time around isn’t much different but it did offer something kind of interesting back in the day when the great movies were either still on their way or had been around for only a short time.
4. Fender Tremelo
So yes, Fender is a little overdone since he’s that unstoppable force that somehow get stopped dead in his tracks at the end by a couple of serious wounds that should have by all means been kind of minor in his case. He’s the big, bad cyborg that can just walk through people and rip them apart, but apparently he’s not immune to knife attacks or having a hook shoved through his back. Granted, no one could be hung like a slab of meat and be expected to survive unless they were just insanely tough or were a super villain that could shrug off the nastiest of attacks. But after all that buildup it seems that Fender was polished off pretty easily.
3. Robocop
He did manage to help define this decade, and then things kind of went sideways for the whole Robocop series since it seems like his legend grew too fast without anything to really put the brakes on it except the metaphorical cliff the franchise drove off. Back in the 80s though this was one of the absolute best characters since he had corny but memorable one-liners and he was the kind of cop that could walk through a hail of gunfire and just shrug it off while taking out the bad guy and saving the innocents. Of course he was born from an experiment that essentially makes him a piece of property initially so it wasn’t all good times.
2. T-800
The T-800 might be classified as more of an android than a true cyborg but he’s still a certified nightmare since he doesn’t stop and he doesn’t stay down. Out of all the robotic adversaries that have ever come along the terminator was without a doubt one of the most far-fetched and scariest since there was no emotion to this thing and not much that could stand in its path when it had a mission to accomplish. In fact it seems fair to say that if not for the need to keep the movie going and create a bit more intrigue it would have shot Sarah without hesitation and been done with it, and the future would have been that much darker.
1. Darth Vader
So the reason that Darth Vader gets the top spot is easy; he’s the most vicious of the bunch and he helped to take down an entire Order of Force-wielding warriors that he’d belonged to before his descent in darkness. How evil does a person have to be in order to eliminate those that he once called friend or at least ally? Anakin Skywalker was once a force for good and a deadly opponent even on the worst of days. But as Darth Vader he helped to decimate entire civilizations and didn’t even bat an eye. Yeah, he’s one of the ultimate bad guys for certain.
Cyborgs have been a popular movie choice for a while and it’s obvious why, they bring a good deal of morality to their stories that humans like to relate to.
