These Dancing Robot Fans in the Japanese Baseball League Are Deeply Unsettling

Alright look, if we're going to have no fans, have no fans. If you really want to get creative and do what they did in Korea and put Spongebob and his pals behind the plate, fine.

But the terrifying dancing robots are a bridge too far. This display comes to us courtesy of the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan.

The humanoid bots with the kids' faces are enough to give you the creeps, but then you throw in those Boston Dynamics robot dogs and you have nightmare fuel. I don't know how long it's going to take, but those robots are literally straight out of Black Mirror and they are eventually going to come for us.

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The lone costumed mascot somehow makes this more unsettling to me, as well. Something about one human conductor in a pink bird suit leading the back of robot overlords makes it worse.

If these things can dance in unison as baseball cheerleaders, they can be programmed to become killing machines. All it takes is somebody pissing off the wrong robot programmer and we're screwed.

This kind of half-inning entertainment seems uniquely Japanese, but I would nonetheless like to put out a plea to all 30 clubs in Major League Baseball to please not have terrifying robot cheerleaders in the outfield this upcoming season.