These are the science-fiction universes where you can transfer your consciousness into a robot body permanently, and wave goodbye to those annoying bones and excretory organs forever. And tomorrow, we'll have a list of the ten best robot bodies you can plug your brain into, and control temporarily.

Note: To some extent, there's some overlap here with the list we did a while ago of people who died and went to cyber-heaven. So we left out a few examples from the earlier list, like Dr. Ira Graves and Juliana Soong in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Mindscan, by Robert J. Sawyer
Wealthy Jake Sullivan is dying of a rare medical condition, so he pays the Immortex corporation to scan his brain and load him into a new, immortal robot body. There, he meets a children's author, Karen, who's also gotten a robot body so she can keep her copyrights for centuries. They fall in love — but Jake's original meat body, who's still not dead yet, decides to sue to get his personhood back from the robot duplicate. And after Kate's meat body dies, her son sues to get control over her estate.

Robotrix

In this bizarre, messed-up Hong Kong movie, an evil super-rich business man loads his brain into a robot body. And a sexy crime-fighting babe gets killed trying to stop him — so two female scientists, in shiny fetishy labcoats, put her naked body on a table with an also-naked robot body, and then transfer her consciousness into the robot. So she can go out there and kick some robo-butt. (We have a couple more clips from Robotrix here.)

8th Man aka 8-Man:

In this early Japanese anime series, Special Agent Brady gets killed, but downloads his brain into a robot body and becomes the 8th Man, a robot superhero who has superior speed, strength and reflexes, and he can change his appearance at will. His alter ego is Tobor, a private detective. Watch him deal with a Godzilla-esque robot from outer space, in this awesome clip.

Stargate: SG-1, "Tin Man"
The SG-1 crew winds up on a planet where a man named Harlen copies their consciousnesses into robot bodies. In an interesting twist on the usual "minds transferred into robot bodies" concept, it turns out that the crew's original bodies are intact, and they're eventually free to go. The robot duplicates meet their original selves, and the robots are a bit jealous of the "real" crew, who get to go home. Witness this exchange between robot Jack O'Neil and the "real" Jack:

ROBOT JACK: Somebody stole my life. That's what happened.

O'NEILL: You talking about my life?

ROBOT JACK: Hey, I've got every right to it that you do. I was kind of hoping I could figure out away to undo all this, get myself back into my body, where I belong.

O'NEILL: Well it's occupied, thank you.

The "Ware" series by Rudy Rucker
Cobb Anderson is an aging computer scientist who's best known for committing treason — he gave the robots free will and liberated them from the restrictive laws of robotics. Now the robots, who are living on the Moon, have come up with a scheme for Cobb to live forever — they've created a perfect robot duplicate of his body, and they want to digitize his consciousness and load it into the new shell. The only catch: to scan Cobb's brain and duplicate it, they have to slice it up, thus destroying it in the process.

Sliders, "State Of The Art"

The dimensional travelvers visit a world where robots have taken over — and the robots' creator, James Aldohn, has found a process to transfer a human consciousness into a robot body. The only downside: it's an untested procedure, and he needs to use the visitors as guinea pigs. Weirdly, the scene where Katherine McClellan's robot body gets switched on has inspired some really odd slow-mo Youtube fetish vids.

The Outer Limits, "The Brain Of Colonel Barham"

Colonel Barham, a dying astronaut, volunteers to have his brain loaded into a robot body so he can go to Mars before the Soviets — although, in this case, it looks like they keep part of the meat brain alive, so it's an edge case. In any case, the arrogant Col. Barham goes nuts once he's in a robot body, and he starts trying to kill anyone who messes with him. Somehow, his robot body has the ability to control people's minds and turn them into zombies.

Caprica

We couldn't leave this Battlestar Galactica prequel out — that plucky Zoe Graystone gets killed in a terrorist bombing, but luckily she's figured out a way to back up her brain electronically first, because the human mind only takes up about 300 MB of disk space.

Skinned by Robin Wasserman

Lia Kahn is rich, young and beautiful — unfortunately she's also fatally injured in a car accident. So her dad pays for her consciousness to be transferred into a new robot body. She no longer eats or has any sense of smell, and she doesn't feel touch the same way she used to. Is she still the same person she used to be? Even she isn't sure, and her old "popular kids" clique at high school isn't sure whether to accept her either. Think you had a hard time fitting in in high school? Imagine doing it with a robot body, in a culture that's uncomfortable with uploaded humans. (Read an interview with the author here.) Another novel with a similar theme is Nightmare In Silicon by Colette Phair.

Star Trek: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

Captain Kirk's mind gets copied perfectly into an android body, except that he's obsessed with being sick of Spock's half-breed interference, because that's what Kirk was muttering to himself when his mind got scanned. I love the spinning table with the two naked Shatners on it (at around 5:20 in this video.) Of course, they don't destroy Kirk's original fleshy body, probably just because they don't get around to it.

Runners up:

The Red Skull And Zola both transfer their brains into robot bodies in Captain America Reborn

The Creation Of The Humanoids

Osama Tezuka (creator of Astro Boy) writes a story of a dying person whose consciousness gets transferred into a robot body in the Phoenix series.

Fragile Machine

Starr Saxon, aka Machinesmith, becomes a gay robotic supervillain in issues of Daredevil and the Fantastic Four. (See top image.)

Ghost In The Shell: Innocence shows a world where cyborgs have abandoned their last bits of humanity and have become fully robotic.

Battle Angel Alita also includes some of the best cybernetic bodies — thanks to Cash907Censored for suggesting it.

In Dragonball Z movie 2, Dr. Willow dies, but he downloads his brain into a robot body.

The story "The Robot Who Came To Dinner" by Ron Goulart features a detective who's downloaded his brain into a robot body.

Jens in Galidor: Defenders Of The Outer Dimension

Doozy Bots

Note: I mention kung fu above, but I'm also going to touch on other martial arts in this post. I hope that's OK.

Totally random factoid: as a young reporter, I wrote a story about Sir Run Run Shaw, the legendary Hong Kong movie producer responsible for Five Fingers Of Death, and actually met him and shook his hand. I am still excited.

1960s.

Bruce Lee co-stars in The Green Hornet, a scifi-ish Shadow ripoff about a newspaper publisher and his Asian valet, who team up to fight crime as the Green Hornet and Kato.

The Legion Of Superheroes introduces Karate Kid, whose superpower should be pretty obvious, in Adventure Comics #346, published in 1966. Karate Kid is the son of Black Dragon, a 30th century Japanese supervillain, who gets defeated by Japan's main superhero Sensei, who raises him to be a good guy and appreciate painting and sculpture. And he's been playing a major starring role in the recent Legion cartoon, as well as Brad Meltzer's revival of the Justice League comic. In his first appearance, Karate Kid was one of four teen heroes who applied to join the Legion — but one of them was secretly a villanous infiltrator. (Shockingly, it was the one named "Nemesis Kid.") (And check out this fantastic Legion cover gallery.)

1970s.

Sonny Chiba starred in a number of classic science fiction films, including Message From Space, a Star Wars-inspired film about the peaceful planet Jillucia under threat from the evil space Emperor. Sonny Chiba has to rescue a set of "holy seeds" that can save the planet somehow.

A volcano opens up and the evil Princess Dragon Mom emerges, in Hong Kong's Infra Man (1976). A scientist named Rayma volunteers to be implanted with electronics so he can become the unstoppable martial arts fighting machine Infra Man. Besides super strength and amazing martial arts skill, he also gains X-ray vision, plus ray beams and rockets coming out of his body. We have the original trailer above.

Doctor Who suddenly starts featuring a lot of martial arts, with Jon Pertwee's version of the Doctor claiming to be an expert in "Venusian Aikido" and "Venusian Karate." (Supposedly the producers preferred aikido because it's mostly a defensive art, and fit in with their vision of the Doctor as a pacifist.) Here's someone's compilation of the Doctor's greatest smackdowns:

1980s.

In 1983, director Kirk Wong puts out Flash-Future Kung Fu, a mash-up of Blade Runner and old-school martial arts melodrama. In a grungy neon-lit future, Eddy Ko, the star pupil of a martial arts school, secretly takes part in underground "black boxing" bouts. And a group of Neo-Nazi punks wants to take care of Ko and his friends using an army of mind-controlled zombies.

Just a year after Robocop hits in the U.S., Hong Kong puts out Roboforce, a comedy version featuring a robot dominatrix who shoots missiles out of her arm.

Japan creates the Super Sentai Series, about a team of super-soldiers in color-coded outfits who use martial arts and super-advanced weapons to fight monsters. They also join their robotic vehicles together to form a giant robot to fight giant monsters. In the 1990s, the Super Sentai Series got redubbed in English and mixed in with new footage of American actors, to create the Power Rangers series. The most awesome version of Power Rangers is Power Rangers In Space, in which they have to fight a villainess with the amazing name of Divatox.

1990s.

Hong Kong puts out a few awesome science fiction films, chief among them Tsui Hark's Wicked City, which features Yuen Wo-Ping in a supporting role. It's been a while since I've seen this film, but I don't remember it having much martial arts, despite Yuen's involvement. Hark also produced Black Mask, starring Jet Li as a super-soldier engineered not to feel any pain, who goes AWOL and tries to lead a quiet life as a librarian — until his old squad starts killing innocent people. And then he dons the eponymous black mask to bring down his former comrades. Hark also directed a sequel, Black Mask II. Here's the masked Jet Li kicking a guy about 20 times, and then dealing with rollerskating machine-gun thugs, using only a couple of compact disks (Kenny G is deadly!) And meanwhile, some crazy dominatrix turns out to have a razor blade in her mouth, which might make this scene not entirely work safe. And then there's Robotrix.

Plus, director Nam Lai Choi put out one of the strangest martial arts movies of all time — The Cat (Lao Mao), about an alien entity that goes around possessing people and creatures. The movie's setpiece, a giant martial arts smackdown between a dog and an alien-possessed cat, uses all of the cliches of martial arts movies, including the slow-mo wire work and the instant replay. (But no naming of the moves as you're doing them, sadly.) Here's a clip:

Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Van Damme puts out two of the greatest science fiction movies of all time: Universal Soldier and Timecop. He's an unstoppable cyber-zombie, or he's a windmill-kicking law-enforcement master from the distant year 2004. He kicks you so hard, your arm shatters. There's also 1995's Virtual Combat, in which a virtual character from a fighting video game somehow gets into the real world and kicks people in the head. A lot. Oh, and Milla Jovovich first starts smacking weird creatures around in 1997's The Fifth Element.

1999-today:

Yuen Wo-Ping arranges the fight sequences for The Matrix, the movie which proves virtual worlds feature more awesome flying head-kicks than real ones. The wire work is gorgeous, plus it's put together with a new "bullet time" special effect that makes all of the soaring and kicking look even more impressive.

The Matrix trilogy gives rise to a ton of kicking, smacking, chopping imitators, including Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium and Ultraviolet, which introduce the new and amazing martial art of gun-kata. Now at last people can use guns to create a graceful battle tableau, instead of having to fight with fists or feet. Plus the Resident Evil movies and a host of other video-gamey films.

Jet Li also stars in the mega-awesome The One, in which alternate universes are real, and you can gain awesome superpowers by killing all of your alternate selves. There are only two Jet Lis left, and only one of them has cool hair. Which one will smack the other one into oblivion and become a dimension spanning god? And then of course there's Jackie Chan's The Tuxedo, where a super-suit gives him amazing martial arts skills... and the ability to channel James Brown.

The American fighting robot, who comes standard with poodle wig and boob window, manages to take out the German fighting robot we saw in that first clip. But then he goes berzerk and starts trashing the whole crowd. So the superior Hong Kong bot steps in to save the day with some robot-on-robot bondage action:
In Robotrix, a woman gets shot, and apparently killed. But then two hot women scientists in super-shiny satin lab coats transfer the dead woman's brain into a robot body. For some reason, this has to take place while both the woman and her robot counterpart are naked. (But once the process is complete, the hawt robot gets covered immediately with a shimmery green see-thru gown. It's because of science.) The Sheik who wants to start his own Robot Legion has his son kidnapped, so the dead-woman-in-a-sexy-robot-body has to go track him down before it's too late.

• Metropolis cost over 7 million Reichmarks to film in 1927, which is about the equivalent of $200 million today. That makes it one of the most expensive silent movies to date.
• Originally clocking in at over 153 minutes long, most subsequent edits were only 90 minutes in length. The cut footage is believed to have been lost forever.
• Brigette Helm plays both Maria and a robotrix in the film, even though as the robot you never see her face. Director Lang wanted her to play both parts so audiences would sense a connection between the two characters.
• That Robotrix costume was so uncomfortable that it left Helm covered in cuts and bruises after filming. Where's SAG when you need it?
• Film scholars can't agree on what speed Metropolis is meant to be shown. Silent films were hand-cranked at the time, and tended to be between 16 and 20 frames per second. Showings of the film have ranged from 18 fps to 24 fps, resulting in both slowed-down and speeded-up movement.
• In 1984, music composer Giorgio Moroder made a version of the film replacing the soundtrack with modern rock, featuring Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Loverboy, and Freddie Mercury. Sadly, this Metropolis Meets The Early 80s edition hasn't been released on DVD.
• DC Comics released Superman's Metropolis in 1996, based on the film and featuring Lois as "Futura" (the original name for the robot in Lang's script).
• Osamu Tezuka, creator of Astro Boy, saw a poster for the film and created his own manga called Metropolis. He never actually saw the movie, but his version shares similar themes with the original. An animated version of Tezuka's manga came out in 2001.
• There have been numerous re-releases of the film over the years, some shortened to an hour. In 2002 a digitally restored version was released on DVD that was 123 minutes.