http://www.uploadyourimages.com/img/484224pdvd_000.jpg
I saw a short clip of what looked a real old tymey movie ( RUR? )on a horrid multi-episode documentary on SF themes.
What's the story? Year of release, etc.
IMDB seems to only have info on an early TV production.

R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) was a play by Karel Capek, written in 1920, and the work that invented the word "robot", from the Czechoslovakian word "robota", meaning 'servitude' or 'forced labor'. There was most likely never a filmed version of it aside from that tv production - in fact, I'd never heard of the tv production! There was a stage production in New York.

The story is of mass-produced robotic servants who are so efficient as armies that they destroy the whole of th human race save those that produce them - and those few are kept alive only for the sake of solving the problem of procreation.

1936: About 200 hundred television sets are in use world-wide. The introduction of coaxial cable, which is a pure copper or copper-coated wire surrounded by insulation and an aluminum covering. These cables were and are used to transmit television, telephone and data signals. The 1st "experimental" coaxial cable lines were laid by AT&T between New York and Philadelphia in 1936. The first “regular” installation connected Minneapolis and Stevens Point, WI in 1941. The original L1 coaxial-cable system could carry 480 telephone conversations or one television program. By the 1970's, L5 systems could carry 132,000 calls or more than 200 television programs.

1937: CBS begins TV development. The BBC begins high definition broadcasts in London. Brothers and Stanford researchers Russell and Sigurd Varian introduced the Klystron in. A Klystron is a high-frequency amplifier for generating microwaves. It is considered the technology that makes UHF-TV possible because it gives the ability to generate the high power required in this spectrum.



http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_television_timeline.htm



And the IMDb listing for the television production of R.U.R. has it listed as having aired in 1938! Wow, early tv. It's amazing there are still clips of it!

chiangkaishecky - is that a screencap from an actual moving image or is it from a still? Because if it's from a moving image of a 1938 TV broadcast, then the image is strikingly crisp (even given the screencap compression posted here) for what would have had to have been a kinescope - unless R.U.R. was shot on film - and broadcast as a sort of reverse kinescope. Fascinating any way you look at it!

- is that a screencap from an actual moving image or is it from a still?
Moving image.
The documentary series is called "Creature Features" and aired on Space (Canada's SF channel).
I think it's a French-British coproduction.
The episode, IIRC, was called "The Machines".
It showed the famous clip of Chaplin getting passed through the gears in "Modern Times"(?) and segues to about 30 seconds of this unknown movie ... the robots all have R U R on 'em.
I looked at the end credits where courtesy to the various studios and the titles of the movies from which clips were lifted are given but there's no mention of "RUR".
There's mention of a couple of archival companies(?).

Anyhow, the robots are so charmingly old school and boxey I thought I might mock one up ... someday.