Lately, I've begun to notice a trope of robots and powered armor getting around on a single wheel at the end of a single leg below the body (or between two legs like a BC wheel).
It started with Caustic, an original character by CheesySpectre on the FamiTracker.org Discord server. I enlarged his uncolored sketch that he posted to the server's
#workshop channel and inked and painted it in GIMP. He told me I didn't guess the colors right, but whatever.
Attachment:
caustic_painted.png [ 66.95 KiB | Viewed 2366 times ]
Today, while testing
Action 53 volume 4, I saw the main character of
Robo-Ninja Climb with the same body shape. I thought about it and remembered Fenton Crackshell of
DuckTales and
Darkwing Duck, a savant bean counter who goes by
Gizmoduck when wearing Gizmosuit powered armor made by Gyro Gearloose.
When I tried seeing if anyone else had collected other examples, I discovered that TV Tropes had become a metered pay site,[1] and All The Tropes doesn't yet have a corresponding page. But it gave up trying to paywall me when I completely disabled JavaScript for that domain.
I found more:
- Roadkill Rodney with the electroshock whip in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game
- WA-7 in Attack of the Clones
- Officer Shrift in the animated version of The Phantom Tollbooth
- Gilliam Knight in Mega Man 7
- Solenoid robots in Roger Ramjet
- Maestro Trombot in JumpStart Adventures 3rd Grade: Mystery Mountain
- Claptrap in Borderlands
- Mettaton in Undertale
- Medic Robot in Team Fortress 2
- PDQ-88b securitron in Fallout: New Vegas
Occasionally, it's a ball:
- Robots in Ball Breakers
- M-O in WALL-E
Given the popularity of
Undertale and
TF2 in the meme subculture, as well as
Undertale in the chiptune subculture, I'm suspecting Mettaton or the Medic Robot may have popularized this form.
To focus the discussion, I'm referring to a body type with one wheel, center of mass above the wheel, and not a vehicle ridden by someone able to walk. Thus these are not examples: Rosie, the XB-500 housekeeping robot in
The Jetsons, who gets around on a foot with three wheels; characters who move by spin-dashing, such as the Terra-Fermians in
DuckTales; characters with the wheel mostly embedded in the body, such as Wheelie in
Kirby, Roader and Kerberos in
Mega Man, and Motobug in
Sonic; and characters that ride a clearly separate pedaled or motorized unicycle.
Am I missing any?
[1] TV Tropes makes only five page views per month available to users who decline to run third-party tracking scripts. A user of Disconnect extension or Firefox's built-in tracking protection who visits any HTML document on TVTropes.org will see the Google Funding Choices notice that only five page views are allowed per month. This resembles the metered paywall behavior that NYTimes and several other major newspapers' websites have adopted lately.
I don't consider disabling script or disabling third-party analytics script in particular to amount to "theft" of ad revenue because a big enough site could serve its own ads like Daring Fireball or any print newspaper does. If you want to discuss this footnote, I'd be glad to do so in a separate topic.
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