I received a special request for this very interesting tale, it provides a lot of food for thought! Let’s begin with Irona cleaning up the Rich mansion for a special visitor, and thank goodness because the mansion is always such a pigsty. 🙂
Oh my, so much to discuss! This is one of those issues with a very terrifying cover, The Goodbye Man kidnaps Richie! But, then he turns out to be just a goofy, non-scary robot.
And the Riches are strangely accessible; just clank your way onto the estate and they leave you and an unguarded Richie all alone. And you can just pick up any pay phone and call Richard Rich who will pick up the phone himself! I may call Richard Branson right now and see if this whole easy dialing up of rich people is true.
A time machine? Of course I have one! Who doesn’t?
And now to the really thought provoking stuff. How are these underground people conceived? Is it like Brave New World and they’re all made in factories? If yes, for what purpose? If I’m a robot, why would I keep making new humans in a lab that I have to take care of? Why not let them just die off?
What TV shows are they watching? Are there some humans that get to leave their little rabbit hole houses, have proper jobs and act? Or do they just watch old series from 500 years prior? Or perhaps they watch robot acted/directed/produced shows about people sitting around in underground rooms eating Soylent Green.
Why do they need pills to help them sleep? They have nowhere to be, surely their bodies would just sleep when they need to.
And, yes, let’s let this random human tell us that we need to take control of our world. When we have absolutely no skills and no knowledge on how to do anything! We haven’t even had to work with another human or speak to another human in our lives! What could go wrong with creating a new society? I have a feeling these people will all starve to death in a matter of hours. Or annoy each other in a matter of minutes and violence will ensue.
In good news, Richie escapes and heads for home! What did you think of this craaaazy story?
RichieRichcomicsfanclub 
I’m thinking not so much Brave New World as an even older story, E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”. Full text available on line free from several sources, and there is an excellent B&W TV adaptation by the BBC. It was an episode of “Out of the Unknown” (season 2, episode 1, 1966).
Wow! I just read the summary of The Machine Stops. You’re right! Same storyline! Thanks for commenting!
Thank you so much for finding this story, this is Daniel! ☺
Happy to help!
How do you find these gems Gloria?
When I first started my blog I read about 100 Richie’s (some digests) and wrote down all the stories so those I remember and can look up easily. If it’s not in those, I do an Internet search and click around until I figure out the title and issue. If I’m stumped, I check Mark Arnold’s Harvey Companion book as he has a lot of stories summarized in there and if I have no idea, I go into the Yahoo Richie Rich vault group and ask the Richie geniuses! And once I know the story and issue, I go through my collection and find it and scan it in. If I don’t have it, I ask a Richie friend to scan it or I order it off of eBay and scan. And those are all my secrets!
I love these Richie Rich stories, do you have the Richie and Casper story from issue #4 where the mad scientist uses buttons to try and rule the world???
I remember that one! I know I have it somewhere, I will find it and post it soon. 🙂
Do you have the story about how Richie and Casper first met?
Hmmm..I don’t think so, but I can look!
When the underground people said that letting the robots take over seemed like a good idea at the time, I think that what they meant was they had no other choice. The robots had them outnumbered, outgunned, and over powered. There was no way for the humans to stop them and if they didn’t surrender, the robots would’ve wiped them out.