and see all the items in my house, that’s the one thing they would gravitate toward. On my first date with my fiancée, she came over earlier than I expected. I still had to take a shower. I had a bunch of robots and a little neon clock on my desk. When I came out of the shower, she had positioned all the robots as if they were praying to the neon clock.
That’s when I fell in love with her. I was like, “Okay. That’s my kind of girl.” She didn’t really know anything about robots, but there she was, playing with them, enjoying them, and asking me all sorts of questions. She got them right away.
Collectors Weekly: You actually play with your robots?
Pinchot: Absolutely! I love to demonstrate them for my friends and visitors. My general attitude about collectibles and antiques is that if I can’t play with it or use it, then I don’t really want to have it. If I have to put it in a case or lock it away or not get enjoyment out of it, I don’t want it. I put batteries in them every couple of months and run them and play with them.
I take care of them, I keep them clean. I don’t let fingerprints build up on them because the acid in finger oils will etch them. So I don’t let them get degraded, but at the same time I definitely play with and enjoy them. That’s what they’re for.
If I have friends come over with their kid, I won’t necessarily let the kid play with a valuable vintage toy robot, but I’ll play with it with him, and show him how it works.
I used to keep a stock of reproduction robots that were cheap that I could give to child visitors. If a friend came over with his son, we’d play with the robots for a while, then I could hand him one to take home. It’s sometimes hard to relate to a 5-year-old, but if you’re playing with robots, all of a sudden you’re both in the same world.
Collectors Weekly: Are vintage toy robots a hot commodity now?
Pinchot: They have been since 1996, when a guy named Matt Wyse auctioned off his collection of robots at Sotheby’s. It was the first time any major auction house had really handled toys robots. Sotheby’s is a very prestigious auction house. When they decided to handle tin-litho toys in 1996, it gave those toys a huge amount of credibility. They became very hot very quickly after that. Luckily, I had already bought quite a few of them, so I was kind of ahead of the curve. I was able to build a reasonably good collection before they got too expensive.
In the last two years, we’ve had several major collections get dumped on the markets via auction, and so the market is quite saturated right now. It’s a great time to buy if you’re just starting to collect because there are a lot of them on the market—the prices are down because of the economy and the glut of availability. They’re in a low cycle, but I have a feeling they’re going to be popping again in the next couple of years.
Collectors Weekly: One of these robots went for $42,000, right?
Pinchot: Yes, Machine Man, a variation of the one of the Gang of Five robots, which are each about 18 inches tall. They’re huge, skirted (as opposed to separated legs) tin-lithographed robots. One has a target on its chest, and when you shoot a dart at it, it turns and moves away. Another only has bump-and-go action and a lighted face. One of them makes a train noise, and then there is the aforementioned Radicon Robot, which was not the first in that series but was one of the earliest wireless remote-controlled toys.
Vintage toy robots remind us of a simpler time when things weren’t quite so advanced and scary.
That group of robots was at the top of the collecting game for the longest time. When Machine Man showed up at Sotheby’s in 1996, it was a variation no one really knew existed. The Gang were the “Gang of Four” prior to this time, then all of a sudden there was a fifth member added. Since then, others have turned up that have sold for even more money.
Now people are realizing that the Gang of Five robots are not as rare as originally thought—several more have turned up. In regards to the value and the collectability of Machine Man, while it’s still a 