 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 not only walked forward but backward as well, and in some cases they had a whole host of other functions; maybe a spinning wheel in its head, or ears that moved, or lighted eyes—add lights to anything and kids go crazy.
It was a bit of technology that kids could actually play with and relate to. Prior to that, technology was exclusive to adults with their new fangled washing machines, cars, and freezers. Actually, the very first wireless remote-control toy was a Japanese robot called Radicon Robot. So here you had a pretty big advancement in technology, and it was for a kids’ toy. That’s amazing.
Collectors Weekly: In America, Ideal came out with Robert the Robot in 1954. Was that also a remote-control robot?
Pinchot: Yes, but it was simple and was operated by a hand crank. The toy took batteries, but only to make the eyes light up; the walking and talking action were generated by a hand-cranked wired remote. A lot of different Japanese robots came out after Robert and they improved upon the idea a hundred fold. For example, Masudaya had the Gang of Five, which were large, tin lithographed, skirted robots just like Robert, except they were all tin and fully battery-operated.
Robert was cool, but he was somewhat crude compared to what you had in the Japanese robots. They were much more advanced and much more interesting for kids. If you asked a kid to choose between a plastic Robert the Robot and a tin, lithographed, brightly colored, eyes-lighting, noise-making, bump-and-go action Japanese robot, the Japanese tin robot wins every time.
Collectors Weekly: So when American companies manufactured their own toys they made them out of plastic, but the tin robots they sold as their own products were actually made in Japan?
Pinchot: Yes, that’s exactly right. For instance, Macy’s sold several different varieties of toys, some made of plastic by U.S. manufacturers and others made of tin from Japan. The tin Japanese-made toys were much more popular. But the Americans realized early on that they couldn’t compete with the ti