n and the batteries. We would produce something in plastic, and you would see it a year or two later in tin lithograph and battery-operated.
Obviously we had access to tin, but the process and labor were too expensive. We simply couldn’t produce battery-operated tin robots for the same price that they could. What the Japanese could retail for $6 here—a really big, impressive robot—would have cost $15-$20 for us to produce. It was easier for U.S. companies to buy from Japan, mark them up, and sell at a profit.
So you had companies like Marx and Cragstan, which was an American company that sold only Japanese stuff, commissioning the Japanese to manufacture U.S. designs. They’d send plans to Japan, have the product made there, and then ship it back. And as we were talking about earlier, sometimes the Japanese went, “Wow, we like that design,” and then they’d produce it for themselves under a different name with Japanese packaging.
What’s funny is that when I was a kid in the late ’60s and early ’70s, nobody wanted the Japanese tin toys anymore. They didn’t like them at all. I thought they were kind of cheesy. I was like, “They break easily. They rust. They’re easy to stomp on.” Even when I started collecting toys, I didn’t want tin litho. I thought it was junk. I wanted Art Deco pressed-steel toys that were American made.
Then, suddenly, there was this big sea change for me, a big paradigm shift. I was like, “Wow, I’ve got to have that.” It wasn’t a cheap toy to me anymore. I got the design, I got the whole impact of it. I understood the value of the design, the rarity, the uniqueness. But I had to evolve into that as a collector. Today, cast-iron and pressed-steel toys are nowhere near as valuable and collectible as battery tin litho toys; a complete reversal from the 1970s and ’80s.
Collectors Weekly: When did you get into collecting tin-lithographed toy robots?
Pinchot: Around 1991, when I was 28 and selling antiques at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, someone brought over a robot to show me. I just lost my mind. It was so cute and so unusual. I had never seen anything like it. I didn’t even know they existed. I put the word out that I was looking for robots and started collecting voraciously.
If you give a kid a toy that allows him some control over his life, he’s never going to put the thing down.
My family’s always been into collecting. I had Hot Wheels from when I was a kid, so I started collecting those. I have vintage Art Deco microphones and Catalin radios and balloon-tire bicycles. I’ve collected so many things, but robots really took over. I was just nutty for them. I don’t know what clicked in me that made me crazy for them; maybe that they were automatons and were so cute.
It was pretty neat, the reaction that people had to them without really having any notion of what they were. Everybody just seems to respond to them for some reason. They’re so fun and unusual, and they’re so representative of an era. There have been incarnations of robots over and over again, in movies with R2-D2 from “Star Wars,” and so on.
Collectors Weekly: What is the typical reaction of non-collectors when they first see them?
Pinchot: Usually it’s just wonder. People say, “What is this?” Now that there’s sort of a general understanding of them, it’s not quite the same because people have seen them in commercials and elsewhere recently. But initially, back in the ’90s and early 2000s, most people really didn’t quite know what they were. They would want to play with them and see them work.
I have a battery-operated robot called X-70, but the collector name is “Tulip Head” because he’s got a big bullet-shaped head. He walks and then he stops, and his head opens like flower petals to reveal a rotating camera inside. Then it closes again, and he starts to walk. It’s fascinating to watch. I turn that robot on and people just lose their minds. Even if they don’t know anything about toys or robots, they’re fascinated. They can’t help but watch it because it’s so charming.
Every girl that I showed the robots to loved them. When they would come over 