 not realizing that it was a bad thing to do.
The theme of robots doing our work for us, helping us, and really being an extension of us will never go away. They are always tools for us to get what we want. The fantasy, fun, and fear comes in when we start thinking about robots taking over—that we might one day design them so well by giving them minds of their own that we can’t control them anymore.
That’s why robots, I think, were so popular; there were so many aspects of play to them. They sort of looked like us, but they weren’t us at all. And best of all, we got to control them.
For kids this is especially welcome because they really don’t have much control over their worlds. They have to go to school, they have to eat at a certain time, they’re told to do everything. But if you give a toy to a kid that allows him some modicum of control over his life, guess what? He’s going to love that toy. He’s never going to put that damn thing down. It’s the same reason why kids love bicycles and toy trains. They get to drive.
Collectors Weekly: Toy robots were initially made for export, but did they sell well in Japan?
Pinchot: I think they did. I may be wrong on this, but I believe they were popular because the Japanese liked American values and culture. They were starting to get tuned-in to our culture and, in reflecting that, robots were popular in Japan as well.
The computer killed the idea of the robot because, really, the computer is the robot.
A U.S. company like Marx would design a toy robot, Smoking Spaceman, for instance, which came out in about 1962. Japanese manufacturers produced this toy for Marx, but they liked it so much they made their own version, which they gave a different name, colors, and packaging, but with Japanese text and characters. They took a lot of our designs and produced them for their domestic consumption.
There were not huge numbers of these tin Japanese robots because Japan is a small country compared to the U.S., so the runs of robots for the Japanese market were smaller. Today, those Japanese-issue toys are often more coveted, at least in America.
Collectors Weekly: The first toy robot was Lilliput. When was it made?
Pinchot: I’m thinking it was definitely before the war, as late as 1941 or as early as 1938. There was another one that might have been designed before the war, but released shortly after, called Atomic Robot Man. Both were very, small clockwork windup toys with “pin” feet that make them walk or, more accurately, sort of waddle back and forth.
After the war, the small battery-operated motor was devised, and the Japanese were the first to put them in toys. Most toy makers in other countries were still producing clockwork toys, but the Japanese embraced batteries and small motors. They were the only game in town as far as that was concerned. They innovated that type of toy, and it became very popular. From the early 1950s all the way to the late ’60s, they dominated the market because of this innovation, and because the toys were very inexpensive.
In many ways, the Japanese toys of the 1950s were updates of automatons from the 1920s, which were windup toys. They could walk, but they were also very detailed. Take a mechanical fortune teller, for instance—her eyes would open and close, her head would nod, and her hands would move. The problem was these toys were horrendously expensive.
The Japanese were able to affect that same motion much more cheaply with battery-operated motors. So they were producing something that previously had been very expensive but all of a sudden was very affordable. They were great toys.
By the ’70s, though, plastic was really coming in big time, and China also entered the picture. Chinese toy production eventually toppled Japan as the number-one toy producer.
Collectors Weekly: What sort of things did Japanese tin robots do?
Pinchot: They could walk and you controlled them with a remote control battery box connected to the toy by a wire. If it was a clockwork toy, you would wind it up, turn on its switch, and it would walk. With battery-op robots, they n