It's so easy to get caught up in Boxman as just the single-minded villain trying to destroy the Plaza.
So, this sign is a little hint at what Venomous adds to the existing product line. If a villain orders a bot, they can get either a run-of-the-mill Darrell or a Darrell with tentacle arms!
I would love to see other villains with a Darrell or some kind of Boxbot in tow. It'd be interesting to find out just how individualized the Bots can get outside of Boxmore or if those versions are just mindless robots that only follow orders. Maybe there's a prime Darrell that serves as Cosma's no. 2 around her army of Darrells or any number of possibilities or variations. When I call a Darrell the 'prime' body, it's whatever Darrell has narrative focus. The only viewer tip-off that this is Darrell in a different body from the previous scene or episode are scenes following the furnace or Boxman getting pedantic and referring to Bots with a specific serial number vs just their name.
At Boxmore itself, the Bots are usually a hivemind split across several bodies or copies if there are multiples running around. Even if there's two Ernestos interacting, they're both usually the same entity by general in-show logic. Whatever experiences any one Bot has generally carry over. This is established in the opening of the episode "You're in Control." Darrell is having difficulty shifting focus between the game he's playing with Shannon and Raymond and the countless other Darrells loading and hauling equipment around Boxmore.
Despite the hivemind, there are two cases where Darrell and Jethro respectively showcase some degree of individuality between copies. In Darrell's case, after he takes over Boxmore, Lord Cowboy Darrell is the supreme Darrell. He has control over his copies, but refers to them as lesser Darrells and directs them to attend to menial labor. There's a hierarchical structure: The one in the cowboy hat is the boss and calls all the shots.
In stark contrast, Jethro is already set at the bottom of the totem pole among the other Bots in general. He's underestimated. The only thing he can do is 'move forward.' In the episode "I Am Jethro," a mishap on the assembly line gives one Jethro a few extra glorbs. It supercharges him to the degree he grows arms, legs, and develops the ability to speak full coherent thoughts instead of just repeating his one Pokemon-esque catchphrase. As soon as Boxman discovers this anomalous Jethro, he promotes him, setting him on the same existential level as Shannon, Raymond, or Darrell. If Lord Cowboy Darrell's relationship to his copies is any frame of reference, Boxman picks the 'smartest' model out of a group of bots to play the manager for their copies.
Jethro's promotion outlines how this already problematic approach carved intense prejudice and resentment towards him as something inferior to a Darrell copy. If a Darrell copy is a rat, then Jethro is a cockroach. When Boxman exercises rule through fear and an authoritarian hold, it tracks that the Bots would enforce similar structures among each other. Othering Jethro feels more natural than trying to communicate with or lift him up. It's a grab at trying to retain some sense of power and control in an environment where they don't have either. They've been broken down enough that it's difficult to come up with other solutions or possibilities outside of an abusive power structure.
Jethro is a further anomaly in that the minute he meets his own copies, he addresses them as his brothers and his equals. He doesn't accept Boxman's survival of the fittest rhetoric. The entire episode is a pro-union allegory. As Jethro searches for life purpose or meaning outside of what a Jethro is supposed to be, everything he tries is set as helping someone else, getting recognized for his work and efforts, being seen as a full, autonomous being. Feeling empowered, he brings this sense of newfound confidence and camaraderie to his brothers.
He starts a union and pushes for better conditions and opportunities for all Jethros. Of course Boxman is staunchly anti-union. When Boxman tries to root him out as the unwanted firestarter, the other Jethros help hide him. This outlines and emphasizes that the others are just as smart and aware as this Jethro is. The only real difference is that the firestarter can more eloquently and directly express himself. Regardless, they're stronger as a unit than as scattered individual bots. It's going to take everyone, whatever their abilities and skills may be, and solidarity to successfully unionize and change how Boxmore operates.
Coming back to the idea that the Boxbots are a hivemind, they still operate as one active character the majority of the time. And while there's a core personality or memory, there's also some cases where the Boxbots...forget certain things. Sometimes when they move bodies, that update resets them to a previous version or iteration before certain events played out or changes occurred. In the episode "Rad Loves Robots," Shannon gets hit by lightning and it dramatically changes her programming. Supposedly, her pink core enables her to feel warm, fuzzy feelings and romantic love where she couldn't before. The Boxbots are already capable of a full spectrum of emotions and awareness, including how much they earnestly love dear old Dad. The Bots themselves decided that familial love and loyalty fit the parameters of staying acceptably evil. Romantic love doesn't.
Shannon's crush leads to her expressing empathy and care for someone that isn't Dad or another Boxbot. These feelings could push her towards being more kind, considerate, and other values that are gross, icky, and for heroes only. Darrell and Raymond try to hide Shannon's newfound feelings from Boxman, choosing tough love and resolving the problem themselves. It speaks volumes that there are certain circumstances where going to Dad is absolutely unacceptable. They all want to be his favorite, but refuse to do anything that'd lead to their brothers and sisters getting permanently discontinued or scrapped.
The romance itself is played as a Shakespearean tragedy, including flowery language and curtains. Despite how quickly and passionately it starts up, Rad and Shannon developed earnest feelings and interest. They were ready to challenge and defy everything and everybody. It tracks that K.O. and Enid came around but Darrell and Raymond didn't. The sting of Shannon choosing to reset and 'delete' her feelings lands. I think the team did a solid job making a bite-sized, condensed version of why something like Shakespeare continues to resonate.
It's not about the 'what if' of whether she hadn't gone through with it, but the why she did it. It was easier to believe that even Rad surrendered to the insurmountable good vs evil fight and what stood in their way rather than just how alone the two of them would really be. She chose the status quo because the other route felt so unbearably solitary. Lonely. Star-crossed lover stories aren't just about the power of love or two people beating the odds. It's finding and gaining support. It's the effort, hope, and belief of a community that things can change and they can all make that change happen.
If lovestruck Shannon deleting herself wasn't enough, Darrell, Shannon, and Raymond get dangerously close to striking up a friendship with all of the Bodegamen in "Beach Episode." The Box bots team up with Rad, K.O., and Enid to confront an anthropomorphic wave creature in a fantastical genre parody. Raymond begrudgingly admits he admires K.O.'s ability to understand the ocean. Then the Bots...rust away because of getting hit and eaten up by too much sea salt. Apparently, this event sits on par with a Bot punching the reset button since it's never revisited again. It's pretty much the Bots experiencing a PG-rated on-screen death. Honestly, the weight in this episode hits because the Bots are recurring characters. I still consider Beep Boop from Wander Over Yonder the most tragic robot death I've seen in a general audiences cartoon though.
Looking at everything here, Boxman built sci-fi robots with intelligence, sentience, awareness, and emotional capacity on par with humans and anthros. They have some human features, such as Shannon's human feet or Darrell's exposed brain in a jar. These are treated as design choices rather than organic elements though. The exceptions are whatever biological, organic elements that Venomous incorporates later on. It's an odd character design decision to call them robots instead of androids or synthetic, but they're robots. They have to be robots for the smelting furnace to match this series' light, airy tone on everything including dark humor. Also, Boxman makes active comments that he has 'fleshy' parts. If the Bots were also cyborgs, it'd be brought up or shown.
A lot of robot stories employ or borrow from Isaac Asimov's rules of robotics. There's some cap or limit to what a bot can do or worries around how they might interact with or threaten humans. Rather than concerns about how a robot could outpace or overwhelm humanity, most of the stories focusing on the Box bots act as a vignette about generational trauma or allegories about the abusive workplace or problems with specific parts and pieces of corporatism.
The unintentional exception is "Plaza Film Festival." I saw the post making rounds about how the Boxbots' algorithmically generated audience pleasing mash-up predicted how AI image generators are used now. Well, technically, the largest issue with generative AI is the corporate push to replace humanity in every possible sector with AI. It's not hard to find dehumanizing language or examples, from shock value ads to CEO Sam Altman's comments on human vs AI resource consumption.
"Plaza Film Festival" is commenting on the immediate impact on popular art. Plagiarism and art theft aside with AI, when someone relies on just an image or video generator, it removes the rough, jagged, awkward edges of early drafts and first attempts. The awkward, ugly phase is necessary. Without the planning phases or intent, an art piece loses what leads to someone gaining experience, insight, ideas on how to improve or better their craft. Even if someone's art is unpolished or amateur, not everything needs to be professional. No matter what kind of art it is, there's a stronger sense of ownership and intent when it was their hands and their thoughts that made the thing.
The Boxbots have an overarching story about their search for praise and acceptance, whether it's trying to impress Boxman or win some contest at the Plaza. "Plazalympics" was an organics vs Bots contest where Raymond's overconfidence led to them losing against K.O.'s team. Here, the Boxbots rehashed popular imagery, tropes, and beats without recognizing or acknowledging the creativity, craft, and care that made those scenes work as well as they did in the first place. They want short cuts and instant gratification. And it's a reflection of Boxman's worse tendencies. He likes to wax poetic about the slow back and forth or enjoying the challenge of a classic good vs evil scrap. But he has to be reminded about the heart, work, and effort that gives meaning to everything.
Did Boxman figure out how to build a self-aware Bot but not how to curb or restrict how far those capabilities could go? Do these Bots have the Laws of Robotics in mind or is it that the Bots have a stronger moral and ethics code than Boxman? I'm leaning towards the Bots aren't as evil as dear old Dad. Boxman stumbled across how to invent a sapient being, takes the sapience as default, and uses manipulation and fear to control his minions rather than some built-in failsafe. Honestly, Boxman's role as Dad works better because he doesn't have a kill switch on the Bots' free will.
In a nutshell, the Box bots are a classic sci-fi staple that shows that robots are still a fantastic allegory for stories about the human condition. And this is talking about the Bots collectively! There's plenty to say about each of them as their own characters. At least Darrell or Raymond.
Everybody else is getting a shorter blurb when I get to those character analyses.
