It’s weird that HERBIE is here

I do not care for HERBIE. And furthermore, I don’t think it makes any sense for him to be in Fantastic Four: First Steps. Let me explain. We have told you about HERBIE before here at Polygon, but let’s recap anyway. The little robot guy, who appears in the trailer for The Fantastic Four: First Steps making cute noises and cooking soup or whatever, first appeared in an animated TV show called The New Fantastic Four. The most important thing to know about HERBIE’s origin is that he was on the show instead of the Human Torch, because of rights issues (there was going to be a Human Torch movie, but that didn’t pan out). This situation arguably set up HERBIE to be hated by people like me. He’s there because we don’t get to have a cooler character there. Not good! Yet you can’t very well put the word “four” in the title of a show and not have four characters on the titular team, so the animators had to come up with something. They came up with a a love-him-or-hate-him robot sidekick who has what I can only describe as Scrappy-Doo energy. The New Fantastic Four first aired in 1978, and it was for children, so its depiction of the Marvel universe was quite a bit more basic and less nuanced than the comic books. Episodes began with an introduction of the three characters you’d recognize, with a narrator describing their powers (“a mighty-muscled powerhouse called The Thing,” and so on). Last and definitely least, the narrator would describe HERBIE simply as “the newest member of the group.” Yes, HERBIE came along on that ill-fated space flight with Sue, Reed, and Ben, but did he get powers as a result of it? No, not really. [Image: https://platform.polygon.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/02/HERBIE.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Unlike in the trailer for First Steps, the original animated HERBIE could also talk. He has a whiny little robot voice. He says things like, “My sensors tell me something is not right,” or, “This does not compute,” all the time. Not a fun guy to be around. Giving HERBIE a series of cute noises instead of a voice in First Steps was probably for the best, although it’s not clear why Ben Grimm can (seemingly) understand him in this trailer. Why does Ben Grimm speak droid? Does everyone in this world speak droid? I should acknowledge that even though HERBIE only existed due to a rights issues workaround and didn’t add much to the team in terms of powers or personality, he did end up in the comic books after The New Fantastic Four introduced him. And he’s not the first comic book character who originated elsewhere first (e.g. Harley Quinn, X-23/Laura Kinney, and many more). There may very well be people who love comic-books HERBIE (I am not one of those people). It’s just hard for me to get past the weirdness of HERBIE’s initial conception. He only existed because the Human Torch wasn’t there. If the Human Torch is there, why would HERBIE need to exist? And, more specifically, in a movie that’s set in the 1960s, why am I being cursed by the inclusion of HERBIE, who didn’t exist until 1978 and even then only existed because we were all being punished by the development of a Human Torch movie that never materialized? I say all of this, and yet, perhaps HERBIE is going to end up being pivotal to this entire movie’s plot — a plot that currently isn’t clear from this initial trailer. Plus he is cute, in part because this version of HERBIE doesn’t talk (which means he can’t say annoying stuff), and that will probably help other people get past whatever issue they might have had with the guy in his original animated form. Not me, though. I can’t forget. Sorry.