![]() Toy makers said, “Well, what’s next? We’re going to into space!” That era was ending because the Western frontier, with its cowboy-themed shows and toys, had been done to death. All through the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s you had cowboy heroes, like Tom Mix and Hopalong Cassidy. They were thinking in terms of survival, but the overall influence on technology is what prompted them to design and build toy robots.Īfter the war, most toy makers were producing clockwork toys, but the Japanese embraced batteries and motors. Pinchot: I think they realized they needed to catch up technology-wise, but really they were just trying to rebuild. Collectors Weekly: How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki affect Japan’s take on technology and the products it made? By the late ’30s, it had all started to manifest itself. 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. It was the decade of Art Deco and Cubist geometry, which was infiltrating design at that time and also influenced how we imagined robots. perception of robots came before the war, in the 1930s, when Jules Verne novels and Buck Rogers serials were popular. I can’t speak for how robots were viewed in Japan, but they certainly seemed to latch onto whatever the U.S. 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. That whole theme got translated into space toys and robots. It was the story of a giant, technologically advanced superpower, crushing another superpower. The atom bomb had a major impact on the marketing and packaging of postwar Japanese robots. 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. Pinchot: Well, the real rise in modern-day toy robots stems from the postwar Japanese robots. Collectors Weekly: How were robots viewed in Japan?Ītomic Robot Man might have been designed before World War II, but it was released shortly thereafter. We created them, but there’s always the possibility that something can go horribly wrong. Part of the allure of robots, for sure, is that they resemble us, but they’re not us. We know the fear factor is not real, but it’s fun to pretend. It’s the same thrill that makes kids run to horror films. Toy companies deliberately made them big to amplify that fear factor. 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. That fear surrounds all technology is embodied by toy robots because they’re designed to encourage fantasy. When I was a kid, I thought Japanese tin toys were kind of cheesy. Are computers ever going to get to the point where they can have emotions, or where they can make decisions that we didn’t tell them to make? It’s still pervasive today with computers. A big theme in early science fiction was that the robots we created would run amok. Pinchot: The worry was always that the robot would gain too much intelligence and decide what it wanted to do on its own. Collectors Weekly: Why were people in the West fearful of robots? That’s when real robotics came into play. ![]() Later, of course, we realized, that we needed robots to build cars and help us get into space. The idea was that if we had things like robots to make life easier, we’d be able to be more productive, make more money, and be more prosperous. Everyone would have a personal robot, like Rosie the robot on “The Jetsons,” who would do your chores for you. They were going to be the next big thing. Robots fit into that drive for convenience. Prior to that, you had to wind your watch every day, and if you forgot, your watch wound down and stopped and you didn’t know what time it was. I mean, we were coming out of an era when you scrubbed your clothes on a washboard and cooled your icebox with a big block of ice.Įven the first electric wristwatch, introduced around 1957, was a marvelous innovation. In the ’40s and ’50s, the frontier was technology, with a particular focus on “What’s going to make our lives easier?” For the very first time, you had cars with automatic-transmissions, automatic washing machines, and perpetually cooling refrigerators. toy maker Marx.Įveryone is always looking for the next big thing. The Smoking Spaceman was made in Japan in 1962 for U.S.
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