Mr. Robot

Bandai Namco Holdings built a "Gundam Pavilion" at the 2025 World Expo in Osaka including a 17-meter-tall statue of a robot. Gundam is the massively popular Japanese military-fiction media franchise in which Gundams (We know them better as "mecha.”) are large, bipedal, humanoid vehicles controlled from a cockpit by a human pilot. The company plans to use the Gundam Pavilion to hold a "grand demonstration experiment" in order to “solve the problems of the future society” based on Mobile Suit Gundam (mecha, again), whose tech technology is derived from actual science.

Gundam may be the biggest robot ever displayed at an expo but it’s far from the first. Nearly 150 robots wheeled around the grounds at Expo 2020 in Dubai, and Walt Disney flirted with the uncanny valley of humanoid robots with his Audio-Animatronics in General Electric’s “Carousel of Progress” at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. My personal favorite, though, was Westinghouse Corp.’s Elektro the Moto- Man. At the NY World’s Fair of 1939, the seven-foot-tall, 300-pound, automaton smoked like the Marlboro Man and blew up balloons. His go-to line was, “My brain is bigger than yours.”