o people still place a value on robot toys?
Pinchot: Things are so fast forward now. I was in the car the other night with a buddy. My GPS wasn’t working. He said, “Well, let me get on my phone.” I said, “What? You have GPS on your phone?” Obviously, I’m kind of a techno dud, behind the times. It took me forever to get a cell phone. Same with the computer; I didn’t get one until ’98.
One of the reasons why collectibles are so hot is a reaction to future shock. It scares me. It gets me a little apprehensive thinking that technology has run away from us, and, as a result, we get terrible things like the oil spill in the Gulf. These sorts of events are the byproducts and downsides of modern technology. What vintage toy robots and space toys do is remind us there was a much simpler time when things weren’t quite so advanced and quite so scary.
Look at the progress of the last hundred years: Up until then, for the 2,000 years preceding them, things were pretty much the same. In the last hundred years, though, we got electric wristwatches and clocks, fossil fuel and cars, rockets going into space. All of these things came about in the last hundred years. That’s a lot of progress in a very short period of time.
Now people are talking about cryogenics—freezing people and bringing them back to life once there’s a cure for their disease—and about irradiating and “engineering” food. Those things scare me, but they’re also interesting, pushing things forward.
Any kind of vintage collectible reminds us of a simpler time, when things were a little bit easier to digest. Now things are so complicated and so far advanced that it’s a little bit unnerving. Just when you start to get a handle on computers, there’s a Kindle or an iPad. I can barely keep up on technology; it’s fast-forward all the time. But when I look at a vintage toy robot, I think, “it’s so simple,” and it calms me down.
(All photographs courtesy Justin Pinchot)