 point where they can have emotions, or where they can make decisions that we didn’t tell them to make?
When I was a kid, I thought Japanese tin toys were kind of cheesy.
That fear surrounds all technology is embodied by toy robots because they’re designed to encourage fantasy. It’s easy to fantasize that a robot’s going to take over, take your money, or somehow direct your life in the wrong direction.
When I was a kid, I feared robots. Toy companies deliberately made them big to amplify that fear factor. It’s the same thrill that makes kids run to horror films. We know the fear factor is not real, but it’s fun to pretend. Part of the allure of robots, for sure, is that they resemble us, but they’re not us. We created them, but there’s always the possibility that something can go horribly wrong.
Collectors Weekly: How were robots viewed in Japan?
Pinchot: Well, the real rise in modern-day toy robots stems from the postwar Japanese robots. Japan was rebuilding, with U.S. encouragement. There had been a well-established tin toy business in Japan prior to the war, so it was pretty easy for them to pick back up and continue to produce toys.
The atom bomb had a major impact on the marketing and packaging of postwar Japanese robots. It was the story of a giant, technologically advanced superpower, crushing another superpower. That whole theme got translated into space toys and robots. If you look at some of the early robot boxes, you will see robots stomping through cityscapes, causing destruction as they go—that was a metaphor for what had happened with the bombs.
I can’t speak for how robots were viewed in Japan, but they certainly seemed to latch onto whatever the U.S. market found fascinating. The U.S. perception of robots came before the war, in the 1930s, when Jules Verne novels and Buck Rogers serials were popular. It was the decade of Art Deco and Cubist geometry, which was infiltrating design at that time and also influenced how we imagined robots.
The idea of automatons doing our work for us was big in the ’30s, and the Karel Capek’s play “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” or “R.U.R.,” had put the term “robots” in the public consciousness. By the late ’30s, it had all started to manifest itself.
Collectors Weekly: How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki affect Japan’s take on technology and the products it made?
Pinchot: I think they realized they needed to catch up technology-wise, but really they were just trying to rebuild. They were thinking in terms of survival, but the overall influence on technology is what prompted them to design and build toy robots.
After the war, most toy makers were producing clockwork toys, but the Japanese embraced batteries and motors.
The timing was right. All through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s you had cowboy heroes, like Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy. That era was ending because the Western frontier, with its cowboy-themed shows and toys, had been done to death. Toy makers said, “Well, what’s next? We’re going to into space!”
Japanese tin-toy makers picked up on that immediately. Space and robot toys were indicative of the times, where all of a sudden we lived in a world with atomic bombs and rockets. It was part of a great trend that included the automation of everything from sewing and washing machines, to cars with automatic rather than manual transmissions. It was natural to see the next frontier as a place filled with beings that would do the work of humans, and also help humankind to become more technologically advanced.
Collectors Weekly: Why is it that robots are so connected to space exploration in people’s minds?
Pinchot: A lot of our leading thinkers who were dealing with the prospect of real space travel were trying to figure out how we’d be able to do things remotely. Robots fit very neatly into that for a lot of reasons. For one, they don’t need to breathe.
Toy makers didn’t always take this into consideration. For example, There are several different incarnations of a toy robot called “Easel-Back Robot.” Its name was really just “Robot” on the box, but people call them “Easel-Back” bec