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This week on the Frotcast, we bring on WarmingGlow’s Matt Ufford, who’s still raising money for this year’s Fight Gone Bad, to support the families of killed and wounded special ops soldiers. We cover a lot of topics including:

• This guy who Bret, Ben, and I went to college with who arrested this week for murdering his business partner, who’d friended me on Facebook less than two weeks ago. (Inside baseball, I know, but f*cking creepy).

• Brendan and Matt share their stories of being in NYC for Hurricane Irene (long story short, Whole Foods was a madhouse)

• ICP’s collaboration with Jack White on the Mozart ass-licking song.

• A TERRIFYING clip of what happens when two chat bots try to talk to each other (clip below)

• We talk TV. Matt and I play point-counterpoint over Aubrey Plaza (or more accurately, April on Parks & Rec), Breaking Bad, Jersey Shore, etc.

• We discuss George Lucas and Star Wars blah blah blah.

Listen, Frot, Enjoy. If you like it, hey, write us a review on iTunes. Couldn’t hurt, right?

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In Real Steel, from the director of Night at the Museum, Hugh Jackman trains robots to box, which is one of the more ridiculous premises I’ve ever heard.  But once I found out Kevin Durand was in it, my skepticism melted away like an icicle in my butt.  Anyway, this one’s about a robot who Hugh Jackman finds in a trash heap that always seems to win.  It’s basically the Seabiscuit of robot boxing movies.  Haha, I just typed that.  And then at the 1:07 mark, the robot punches the other robot in the crotch.  (*rings oversized bell*) NUT SHOT IN THE TRAILER!!! NUT SHOT IN THE TRAILER!!! (*runs around room with arms above head*)

Oh, and then Hugh Jackman shouts, “BRING IT!”

Silly Human. It. Has already been. Broughten. Bleep borp.

"Bleep bop boop (*fart*)"

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"That's good, now lower..."

In an early test of what scientists hope could one day cure the scourge of child actors, an android made its stage acting debut last week in Tokyo.  Created by designers at Osaka University, the bot carried a $1.2 million price tag (just over half of Nic Cage’s budget for cobra venom).  But knowing Japan, they should be able to recoup most of that by selling its used panties.

Geminoid F – a robot designed to look and act like a human – played alongside a human actress, American Bryerly Long [did she move there to torture the Japanese by making them pronounce that name? -Ed].  Long plays a girl suffering from a fatal illness whose parents hire an android carer and then abandon her. The android, made to resemble a part-Russian, part-Japanese woman with long hair parted in the middle, recites poetry to her.

Her voice and gestures were created by an actress in a soundproof chamber behind the stage whose head and body movements were detected by a camera and replicated by the android. Microphones were used for her voice.

Wait, so the android plays an android, and it’s more like an animatronic avatar than a robot with full artificial intelligence?  Dammit, we’re never going to replace human actors at this rate.

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This is the first picture of Hugh Jackman on the set of Real Steel, from Night at the Museum director Shawn Levy and producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis.  The plot, as previously reported:

A Rocky-esque tale of a fighter who has to reinvent himself when human boxing becomes obsolete, replaced by 2000 pound human-like robots. Jackman plays the ex-fighter, who becomes a Robot Boxing promoter, but whose chances of success are hampered by his access to sub-standard robot parts. That is until he discovers a discarded robot that always seems to win. The ex-fighter has also discovered he’s the father of a 13-year old son, and they bond as the robot brawls its way toward the top.

That robot’s name?  Seabiscuit.  Anyway, USA Today, who published the publicity still, report that the scenes between robots and humans will be filmed using life-sized animatronics (not CGI), and that the fight scenes will be performance capture.  They also report (no joke) that they’ve hired Sugar Ray Leonard as an adviser.  (“So tell us, Sugar, in your expert opinion, how many ‘bots could a robot box if a robot could box bots?”)

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Commercial director Carl Rinsch, who was at various points attached to direct an Alien prequel and a Keanu Reeves samurai flick, directed the short you see above, The Gift, which is set in Moscow, and deals with robots and a mysterious box possibly filled with miniature unicorns, which is how I imagine Diora Baird‘s vagina feels.

On Wednesday, the day the short came out, a bidding war broke out between several studios — longtime rivals Warner Bros. and Fox are in the mix, according to sources — who see feature potential in the short. Some speculate the project will end up at Fox, because Rinsch is part of the stable of RSA, Ridley Scott’s commercial house that produced the short, and Scott’s longtime association with Fox. [THR]

Normally, I’d probably rip them for being wowed by another largely plotless short filled with robots, but this one actually looks kind of cool.  There is perhaps feature potential. Instead, all I’ll say is that they better come through on their promise of mini unicorns and not have the box filled with Marcellus Wallace’s soul or some unseen metaphysical bullsh*t  like that, because if I waste another 12 bucks on another unicorn-free piece of crap, someone’s getting stabbed in the heart with my pixie wand, so help me.