clanker n.

Fritz Lang’s 1926 film Metropolis featured a female robot who was the first of a distinguished cinematic line—a line which eventually included such brainy clankers as the robot from another planet in The Day the Earth Stood Still and the swivel-headed Robby in MGM’s Forbidden Planet.

The clankers don’t use guns. They just drift in, sneaking, or charge in a wave, and get at us hand-to-hand, if they can. Last wave we lost six men.

Nearly half the movies in this section had robots from other planets in them…. They were all gigantic clankers.

I restrain the impulse to throw the straps off, punch his grinning dummy in the face and walk out of that dump forever. He waits, while I stew inside my own head, and finally I burst out: ‘Listen to them! Sigfrid, you crazy old clanker, I do nothing but listen to them. I want them to say they love me. I even want them to say they hate me, anything, just so they say it to me, from them, out of the heart. I’m so busy listening to the heart that I don’t even hear when somebody asks me to pass the salt.’

The phonebot was not the arm-waving clanker that Denny, in his ignorance, had imagined. It was, rather, a flat metal box that plugged right into the wall phone-socket.

Die, evil robots, die! Corpulent clankers are just one of the many, many types of strange enemies in the depths of Jim's mind.

Clankers! Fall back, there’re too many of them. [Ibid.] Great shot, sir! That’s givin’ it to the clankers.

Du was programmed like an old clanker robot, sir.