Good Old Robot

"That little droid and I have been through a lot together."

A character has an old robot and deliberately keeps it despite new models being around.

It can be done for practical reasons or just to save money. If it's not, it's always a trait of good characters or, when villains do it, a Pet the Dog kind of trait.

This is often An Aesop (and not even a very hidden one) where the dented, Used Future robot will be shown to have a much more developed (and human-like) personality, while the new models will be more capable, shinier and better looking but unfeeling (or less ethical). It can be justified if robots learn humanity from humans over time and thus the old robot is more developed in this way. However, it may just be sentimentality — the character has a relationship with the old robot that a Replacement Goldfish wouldn't fulfill. If the character believes that Androids Are People, Too, the idea of replacing a friend or adopted family member with a newer model would probably be unthinkable.

Alternatively, it could be used to establish a character's Perpetual Poverty, alongside their battered spaceship and antique internal-combustion car. After all, whatever the technology level, you can assume a state-of-the-art robotic assistant would be an expensive investment, so an older model might be all their budget allows.

On a more cynical level, this can be down to Special Effects budget concerns. Animating your Robot Buddy takes a lot of effort, but it's worth it to flesh out (pardon the expression) a main character - but why put the same work into background characters when Ridiculously Human Robots require just a bit of makeup?

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Chobits: Hiroyasu Ueda bought a persocom when he opened his bakery. He fell in love with her, but she then gradually lost all of her memories. He refused to have her repaired in fear that the persocom would completely lose her memories, much less replacing her.
• This comes up in Ghost in the Shell a few times. The first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has an episode revolving around an old model of gynoid which were still popular because they were easy to customize. Another episode has the CEO of a company use what is essentially a box with four legs as his body, as he likes the old-fashioned style. The manga explains the box isn't that old-fashioned; it requires extremely sophisticated simulated sensation of body in order to avoid insanity due to sensory deprivation. The man just likes to advertise that he gave up his body to the company, so to speak; they sell organs donated by people who prefer cybernetics, which are cheaper and faster to get than cloned organs.
• In the His and Her Circumstances play within the manga Steel Snow, the main character keeps 'Antique', an old robot, around because it resembles his first love.
• Medabots: Metabee is an extremely outdated model of Medabot, but it was the only one that Ikki could afford. Fortunately, he soon finds out that Older Is Better is in full play with Metabee, thanks to a special medal Ikki found and used to activate Metabee.

Comic Books

• DC Comics' Star Hawkins — Space Detective! His robot secretary, Ilda, is very much an antique model — Star admittedly can't afford better, but he wouldn't get rid of her even if he could. (Except in Twilight — or "Let's make all our goofy sci-fi characters Darker and Edgier" — where he says he'd have junked her if he'd had a chance. But that wasn't the real Star Hawkins.) An even better example is Stella Sterling in Whatever Happened To... Star Hawkins, who can certainly afford a top-of-the-range robot bodyguard, but prefers Automan, a robot who dates back to the 1960s.

Films — Animated

• This is more or less the premise of The Brave Little Toaster.
• Carl from Meet the Robinsons is the lowest tech thing the family has, apparently built when Lewis was just a kid. His son inherits it.

Films — Live-Action

• The Adventures of Pluto Nash. The title character's bodyguard robot can't run very fast, and his speech is very noticeable Robo Speak, but Pluto keeps him around for sentimental purposes. He's also "incompatible" with Pluto's robot maid. Pluto does get a new one at the end, but only so he can make Bruno his club manager. Bruno also has years of "rill-hopping" experience in him from their smuggling days. Also, compared to the other robots shown, Bruno is a lot smarter. He can even intercept phone calls but can't listen to them himself.
• Old B.O.B. in The Black Hole. V.I.N.Cent, another robot of the same model, even gives a pep talk about how their model hadn't been improved — "You can't improve on perfection, we are the best!"
• In Blade Runner, J.F. Sebastian has a house full of "misfit toys", so to speak.
• This is the plot of Cherry 2000; the male protagonist accidentally breaks his Robot Girl, and her model's out of production. Instead of getting a new model, he hires an Action Girl to take him to the abandoned factory in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, so he can find another Cherry-model to install the backup memory chip into.
• In I, Robot, only the newer models of robot begin attacking humans. The older models actually fight against the new models briefly due to their un-updated programming.
• Pacific Rim has a Humongous Mecha example: the heroes' mech, Gipsy Danger, is less advanced and more worn-out than their rivals' high-tech, next-gen mech, Striker Eureka. . . which incidentally makes it perfect for the mission to destroy the creators of the Kaiju, and also lets it resist the EMP weapon deployed by one of the newest Kaiju, which fully shuts down Striker Eureka.
• In Real Steel, Atom is a previous-generation sparring robot that was stored whole and functional (but uncleaned) in a parts depot. He has different strengths and weaknesses from current top-of-the-line arena fighters, which allows him to survive when facing them. Some of his strengths have nothing to do with being outdated: since he was built as a sparring bot, not a fighter, his body is specifically made to be highly resistant to damage. On the other hand, his physical strength (at least initially) is very low for a robot (also intentional). Basically, he can take a punch but not give one, until Max replaces his arm actuators with stronger ones salvaged from Ambush.
• Star Wars:
  • C-3PO and R2-D2. Both droids are over sixty years old by the Sequel trilogy yet are still in excellent condition even next to the more modern BB-8. They are also the only two characters to appear in all nine films of the Skywalker Saga.
  • Other than C-3PO and R2-D2, there are several examples in the Star Wars universe, such as Wee-Gee, the Katarn family droid in Jedi Knight.
  • Taken even further in the Expanded Universe. Luke is at one point given a shiny new R7 astromech to go with a prototype fighter, but soon goes back to his trusty X-Wing and R2-D2.
  • It goes back to the original Star Wars movie (A New Hope). Before the final attack on the Death Star, an X-Wing mechanic notes to Luke that R2-D2 is looking pretty banged up and asks if he wants a new one. Luke declines.
• Pops from Terminator Genisys can be seen as this from Sarah Connor's viewpoint.

Literature

• Isaac Asimov:
  • "The Bicentennial Man": The Martin family's Robot Maid is owned outright, while United States Robots typically only leases robots. They're offended by the Martin family's decision to keep, and eventually free, their robot. To prevent other robots from turning out like Andrew, they scrap robots after twenty-five years, they start to separate the brain and bodies of robots, and they make robots more narrowly focused instead of the more general intelligence that Andrew qualifies as.
  • "Light Verse": A wealthy Socialite and light-sculpture artist refuses to allow anyone to repair her robots, despite such repairs being free. In her view, robots are people, and "fixing" them would remove the qualities that make them unique.
    "Once a robot is in my house," she said, "and has performed his duties, any minor eccentricities must be borne with. I will not have him manhandled."
• Grumps is exactly this to the Bell family in Helen Fox's children's novel Eager.
• Clifford Simak also likes this trope:
  • Jenkins, in the composite novel City, was kept on as a Webster family heirloom and ends up outliving the entire human race.
  • In the short story "All the Traps of Earth", robot servant Richard Daniel was kept around so long the Barringtons even gave him a last name.
  • In "Cemetary World", Elmer was made in the last days of Earth That Was, and was evacuated with the last humans. He's very good with maintaining and repairing machinery.
• In Zima Blue by Alastair Reynolds, Zima began life as a simple pool cleaning robot which derived 'pleasure' from the color of its pool tiles. The robot's creator made a small fortune selling kits of the design and used the robot as a testbed for new upgrades. When he died, he passed the robot onto his children and so on, and they continued to upgrade the robot. Eventually, it was given its freedom once it became near-human in intelligence. The robot continued to upgrade itself, then used bio-augmentation to become near-human. His old programming remained, and he turned into a Mad Artist that painted entire worlds in "Zima Blue". Eventually, he rebuilds the inventor's pool with recovered tiles, and sheds his augmented mind to live in simple pleasure.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Bollux in The Han Solo Adventures by Brian Daley. Bollux is actually a slight subversion, as his only real use is as a mobile hiding place for a highly advanced hacking/data droid, a Trojan Horse if you will.
  • In Star Wars: The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance, the pirate Jet Nebula has a trusty old droid named Clunker with a broken vocoder. The only way he communicates is via an old military code, consisting of hand signals. Jet prefers it that way and thinks Clunker intentionally broke his vocoder (something about "if you didn't reply to an order, then there's no proof you heard it").
  • The Thrawn Trilogy explains that there are advantages to using old droids that haven't had regular memory wipes, such as the fact that Artoo has worked with Luke's X-Wing computer for so long that they practically have a symbiotic relationship and are much more efficient than the standard. There are also disadvantages - the ship's computer has become so idiosyncratic from this that if another computer needs to scan the ship's data, they need Artoo around to translate.
• In C.L.U.T.Z., a children's book series by Marilyn Z. Wilkes, the titular robot is an older model who gets along better with the young protagonist Rodney. Newer robot models are designed to be efficient, but the older models like C.L.U.T.Z. were programmed to have fun personalities. In the second book C.L.U.T.Z. meets Rodney's grandfather, who remarks delightedly, "A robot with imagination! Just how they used to make them in the old days."

Live-Action TV

• The protagonists of Almost Human. Kennex "accidentally" destroys his police-issued MX android (emotionless and efficient) partner, so the department saddles him with "Dorian", a leftover DRN (discontinued for having overly realistic emotions).
• Andor: In the vein of R2-D2, B2EMO is a decades-old salvage droid owned by the Andor family. He's visibly scuffed and dented, one wheel is a replacement, his battery can barely hold charge any more and he's developed an Electronic Speech Impediment, but the Andors still keep him around for companionship. Showrunner Tony Gilroy has stated in interviews that B2EMO was intended to evoke an Old Dog.
• In Power Rangers S.P.D., the Robot Dog RIC (Robotic Interactive Canine). Run down and broken, with replacement parts long out of production, he was given to making any sound but dog sounds and annoyed the Rangers until he jumped into Mecha-Mooks' fire to save Syd. Though she had been first in line to just recycle him before, now Syd couldn't bear to, and got the tech-savvy Bridge and Boom to work on him. The result is a Do-Anything Robot that even turns into a "K9 Cannon" for a Finishing Move... though a lot of fans preferred RIC the way he'd been before!
• The last part of the Red Dwarf episode "The Last Day" centers on this.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Steel", a down-on-his-luck boxer named Steel Kelly lives in an age when all boxing is done by prizefighting robots. His old Mark 2 boxer-bot Battling Maxo is no match for the new Mark 7s that litter the profession, but darn it, the Mark 3 is his robot. When his robot malfunctions, he enters the ring himself pretending to be a robot. This does not end well for him. This episode was based on a short story by Richard Matheson, which was loosely adapted into Real Steel several decades later.

Video Games

• Anachronox. PAL-18 was originally built as a toy (the series is considered valuable collector's items) but is custom-equipped with hacker software and functional weapons, Mystech capability, self-awareness, and the personality of a bratty eight-year-old — all in all, making him far more useful than anything manufactured recently.
• While it isn't touched on much in the games, the Mega Man series can be seen as an example. In the Classic and X series the heroes have to defeat newer and newer models of robots, knowing that they themselves stay the same.
  • The story of the X series partly revolves around the fact that the only reason X and Zero can save the world is because they are old robots: Reploids are created with a newer manufacturing process (and lack their Restraining Bolts) that make them easier to succumb to The Virus and do evil.
    • It's explicitly stated that Dr. Cain didn't fully understand some of Dr. Light's schematics, which makes all 1st generation reploids less "newer models" and more inferior imitations of X, who is really the latest in a long line of models by a very skilled scientist.
• Joey in Beneath a Steel Sky. Even though he's built from scrap parts found in garbage dumps in the Australian wasteland where Roberts' tribe lives, he manages to interact with, even outsmart, more modern robots/programs. Also, his circuit board seems to be compatible with most robots they encounter (even the latest type of artificial human LINC has created).
  • When we see him building Joey in the intro, Robert mentions his "talents". Considering that he is the son of the man who created possibly the smartest and most dangerous AI in the world, it probably runs in the family.
• Mieu and Wren of Phantasy Star III are introduced saying that they have waited for a millennium to assist the descendants of Orakio in their struggle. Both cyborgs also join Rhys' son and grandson in their journeys.
• In Evolve, Bucket uses a forty-year-old repair drone chassis despite having access to better models. It's for sentimental reasons, as it's the body Cabot gave him when they split off from the Marshals, though that hasn't stopped him from making some modifications.

Western Animation

• In Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, Zachary's Mechanical Horse Brutus is a significantly older model than the other three and isn't as agile or fast as the other three, either. But he is much sturdier and has more power on pushing and pulling loads.
• Cubix: Robots for Everyone: The main robot, Cubix, was a pile of junk that the main human started tinkering with.
• Bender of Futurama is obsolete as of the debut of Robot 1-X in "Obsoletely Fabulous". The episode went through a complicated process of getting Bender and the older robots to accept the 1-X, and then the 1-X inexplicably disappeared and hasn't been seen since.
  • 1-X reappears in the movies, but considering it got sliced in half, it seems unlikely that it'll appear again.
  • Three episodes into the Un-Cancellation (and ten years into the show's timeline), Bender finds Flexo, an identical bending unit, in a hazardous waste bin. As Flexo begins to explain that bending units are now considered dangerously outdated ("We overheat, we're radioactive, we cause erectile dysfu—"), Bender slams the lid back on the bin before an incoming Farnsworth can overhear him. By the finale of the same season, Bender himself admits that his circuitry is "twelve years out of date".
• Happens on an episode of The Jetsons, when Rosie is apparently outclassed by a later model of robot and runs away when she sees a salesman giving them the hard sell.
  • This trope came up fairly often on the series (particularly the '80s revival), as Rosie is considered a long-obsolete robot model by the Jetsons' future's standards.
• Dr. Wakeman of My Life as a Teenage Robot keeps XJs 1-8 around for no other reason than apparent sentimental value. On the other hand, she's pretty insistent that they stay off most of the time.
• Star Wars Rebels: Chopper is a C1 model, which is revealed in season 3 to no longer be manufactured. On top of this, he's somewhat beat-up and has mismatched legs. He's still a valued member of the Ghost crew.
• Larry 3000 in Time Squad is apparently an outdated (and obsolete, as he was made for political purposes that had long since dissolved) Larry model, as other Time Squad officers are shown with bulkier, battle-ready models. Buck prefers not to even have his Larry upgraded, even though whatever company manufactures Larry robots are still making software upgrades for the 3000s.
• Helper from The Venture Bros. is certainly of the money-saving variety. Dr. Venture prefers to repair or reuse his father's old tech than invent his own.
• An episode of The Brak Show centers on Brak's super-robot neighbor Mr. Thundercleese getting taken away by his manufacturer for being obsolete, and Brak's attempts to rescue him. Apart from Brak considering him a good friend, there's also the matter of the large asteroid heading for their town that only Thundercleese can stop (his new "improved" replacement, Palmcleese, is tiny and useless against such a threat).

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