Danger, Will Robinson

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“Danger, Will Robinson!” is a recently-popularized English catch phrase derived from the classic 1960s American television series Lost in Space. The phrase characterizes the relationship between two of its regular characters, the Robot (see characters) and Will Robinson over the course of several episodes of that series. The autonomous (and nameless) robot takes a protective attitude toward Will, and alerts him thus to dangerous situations, expecting Will to take immediate action to protect himself. The robot cannot do everything, even though its sensors are amazingly sensitive:

“Warning! Warning! Alien spacecraft approaching!”

In hacker culture and in English-speaking society generally, this catch phrase currently serves as a facetious method to inform an associate that they are about to make a stupid mistake—that there’s a factor he or she overlooked which ought to be taken into account.

When given in person, the vocal warning is more-often-than-not accompanied by a brief and careful waving of one’s arms left and right and up and down, parodying the body language of the original chrome-plated character.

Despite the popularity of the phrase in everyday culture, it was only said once on the show during episode 11 of season 3 "The Deadliest of Species". The Robot frequently throughout the series gave warnings to Will and the other crew members of the Jupiter 2, in the form of expressions "Warning!" and "Danger!".

Example

From the television series The West Wing, episode 1 of season 4, entitled ‘Twenty Hours in America’:
Kiki: “How many unborn babies did you guys kill today?”
Josh: “Whoa. Hey, danger, Will Robinson.”

External links

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