Fiction: The Space Guys Adventure, Part 10!

 

Because I run on obsessive compulsive behavior, I decided to try to fill out a full month of blogging to end the year, so naturally, I'm starting with some Space Guys filler. As usual, the table of contents is at the end.

 

The voyage went on. Morale greatly improved as soon as the life support ring reopened, allowing the crew to return to their normal quarters and stored possessions. At six weeks, the Janus reached the first visible benchmark outside the orbit of Mars, the asteroid belt. It took another month to cross it. In that time, they sighted at least a dozen asteroids and two mining ships. There was a running correspondence between Yuri and the crew of a survey craft called Platinum Star. They had a single mishap when a tiny particle hit the windshield of the Pegasus. He went into the depressurized cabin and returned carrying a spiderwebbed pane. He found Moxon loitering in the main corridor. “Let me see that,” he said. Jason held out the pane. “It’s strong, isn’t it?”

“It’s rated to stop a 2 cm cannon shell,” Jason said. “It probably would have.”

“We’ll see,” Moxon said. He took the pane and set it upright. Then he drew his trench knife. With a single, sudden thrust, he drove the narrow blade straight through the pane. He twisted the knife back and forth.

“There’s today’s science lesson,” Moxon said. “Bullets are blunt. So are meteors. But a knife delivers power straight to a point.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Nice trick.”

The trooper smiled. “I’m sorry we haven’t gotten along better,” he said. “Maybe we got off on the wrong foot. But there’s still 18 months ahead. Who knows?” Jason was already withdrawing.

 

Jason watched Alek radiate as soon as she reunited with her robots. She happily introduced him to her workhorse machines, a silver machine she called Scarecrow and a gold one dubbed Patchwork Girl, or Crow and Patch for short. She insisted that they had discrete personalities, for reasons that remained elusive to him. He came closest to believing when he walked in on the pair alone.

The two robots were in the middle of the floor, on top of the hatch for an airlock. They grasped each other with pincers on the end of accordion-like arms as they did a kind of shuffle. What held his gaze was that they moved in a circle unsuited to their gait. He frowned, not at the behavior but a vague sense of order behind it. He narrowly stopped his jaw from dropping as he realized that they were going slowly and clumsily through the steps of a waltz.

“I taught them that a while ago,” Alek said in her plain lecture voice. He no longer started at finding her already at his side. She gestured with her mechanical pencil. “It was a test of their gyrostabilizers, originally. Now they do it when they are online without a task. It happens sometimes, when I give them an exercise without resetting their memory. I am still not sure which one started it. I believe Patch initiates more often than not.”

“Why haven’t you reset?” Jason said, not really questioning. “The manual says to do it every month on the outside.

“It is the only way to test the emergent properties of their AI,” Alek said. “They do improve at their tasks when I let them remember. Besides, would you do it?” Jason looked at the robots again, and shook his head.

 

With the privacy of the lab, Alek began to show new sides of herself, sometimes endearing, sometimes puzzling and occasionally alarming. She did many things to please him, or with the expectation that he would be pleased. Then there were times when he found her weeping in anger or jealousy. In those times, she would play the target shooting game, whooping, screeching or hissing depending on her fortunes. But that could get her wound up over her chief grievance, that she was not an officer. Then, as often as not, she would take control of a robotic arm in her lab that genuinely terrified Jason. “I should have been one of the 12,” she had said on one occasion. “They call me `special technician’ so they do not no have to give me a weapon.”  She proceeded to crush 3 empty rations containers and a damaged fuel pod. Jason had finally called out to Nick Chopper to restrain her. As the robot emerged and turned toward her, Alek looked ready to attack her own machine with the arm. The moment passed, and she powered down the arm. Then she wrapped herself around Jason.

Outside the privacy of the lab, Alek showed Jason the ship and introduced him to the rest of the crew. They spent much of their time in the science module, an ovoid shell 30 meters wide and 40 long that connected the life support ring with the Mission Fuselage. Its official purpose was to observe zero-gravity phenomena and test equipment. In practice, the off-duty crew frolicked back and forth across the enclosed expanse, whether leaping, propelling themselves with fire extinguishers and other improvised propulsion, or simply sliding along the flexible fabric of the inner shell. Alek’s favorite pastime was to give a yodeling call that would echo across the shell, making ripples in the supposedly sound-dampening lining.

He also spent a shift with Alek and old Yuri, long a presence more than a person, in the communications center beneath the ship’s directional communications dish. It proved to be a cabin the size of a storage shed lined with tiny monitors, which Yuri explained was a fraction of what they could receive. “This is the real center of the ship,” he said in his richly timbered voice. “If it went down, we would have no telemetry, no orders, and no movies except what we have on data discs or your record collection. Command on Gaia wouldn’t even know if we were dead or alive. That is why at least one officer is on duty at all times.” He patted the sidearm at his hip.

He pointed to a cartoon Major Maxon trading stylized blows with the monocled villain Heinz Himmelmann and his alien bodyguards. “That is from Houston,” he said. “The spaceport sends out the local station, sometime. The show, I have watched with my grandsons. They say it is a commercial for silly toys. They are not wrong. I like it. It is idealistic.”

“What about the solar interference?” Jason asked. “We can never get a signal off on Mars…”

Alek shook her head at that. “That is not solar,” she said. “Not all of it. It is the high beams from Mons, Port Eris, Columba. They broadcast to Earth, Jupiter too. Nothing you have is powerful enough to get over them. They would not let you have anything that could.” Jason had only nodded. Yuri looked at him thoughtfully.

“You know,” the elder spacer said, “when the Federation and the Union proposed a joint space program, a lot of people said it was the best way to ensure the survival of the human race, in case something went wrong on Gaia. They never quite said what. What do you think? Why would you say you’re out here?”

Jason shook his head. “I don’t know what happened back then,” he said. “But we aren’t anyone’s backup plan. We’re here to find out what’s out here.” That had gotten a smile from Yuri

 

They also paid regular visits to engineering, which to Jason’s discomfort was in the axis of the life support ring. He pointedly did not comment when Anastasia proved to be an equally frequent visitor. The outer chamber was a three-way intersection that was disorienting even for the Martians, where one of the engineers was invariably ensconced either reading or watching the single television screen. Anastasia had been on hand when Jason tried to argue over the safety of a reactor in the middle of the crew’s quarters.

“So, people get the idea that nuclear reactors can turn into an atomic bomb,” Donald said. “That’s like worrying that the engine on your petrol car will burn like a Molotov cocktail. If you want a nuclear explosion, you make a nuclear weapon. If you want nuclear power, you build something not to blow up. It’s really virtually impossible for a reactor to explode.”

“Almost,” David said from the other side of the radiation barrier. “And comparatively speaking, really.”

“Sure,” Donald said. “There’s lots of things in a reactor that can brew up if someone does something stupid. Things like that can all be contained, if you designed it right. If things go as they should, they implode, not explode.” He chuckled. “When I was Dr. Czernabeg’s student, I advised the Sheng on their first fusion reactor. Six weeks in, we got a call from one of their senior officials. It turned out that an electrical fire had burned out the control system. They flew me in to inspect the facility. By then, you could see the smoke from Shanghai. The military had set up a perimeter, but they wouldn’t go anywhere near the building. They honestly thought the fusion reactor could blow up the whole country or even the world, like a star going nova. I told them to give me a suit and a helicopter to drop me in the middle. They did it, because they thought it wouldn’t matter. As soon as I got inside, I saw exactly what I knew had happened: The reactor had melted down, right enough, but it had melted down through the floor. Then the rest of the plant had caved in on top of it. The fire was from their instruments burning.”

Jason frowned. “Didn’t the Federation have a reactor meltdown?”

“That was something different,” Anastasia said. “There was a factory that was making material for nuclear bombs, way too close to a big city. There was an explosion that blew open the containment and released the radioactive material into the atmosphere. There would have been less damage if a nuclear bomb had gone off. That was the real reason we made peace; that, and figuring out just how powerful the Alliance had become.”

That same night, Jason lay with Alek in his bunk, intermittently watching Sparky the squirrel. The adventure showed Sparky, Spunky and Tweel the Martian on Venus. They conveniently wore armored suits to protect them from the heat and pressure, at the cost of correspondingly limited movement. Sparky was currently struggling to pick up a wrench dropped while repairing their spaceship. At first, he simply could not get hold of it with the clumsy gauntlets of the suit. When he did manage to grip it, however, he found that the pressure made it impossible to pick it up. Spunky and Tweel tried to pry it off the ground, but only bent the tool. At first, he didn’t notice the raised voices, from the direction of the cabins across the main corridor where Jackie and Vasily slept, until he recognized Anastasia. He still might have done nothing, if Alek had not stirred. He patted her hand and climbed down, past Jax and Sarip. He had just passed the half-open privacy partition when Jackie crashed through the partition of Vasily’s cabin, kitty corner to theirs.

Jackie might have gone right into his own facing cabin, if he had not hit the frame of its partition. The partition he had just gone through clattered to the floor, derailed and deformed but not penetrated, as Vasily pushed his own way through. The moreno gave no more than a grunt as he assumed a defensive posture, easily drowned out by Anastasia’s shriek. The Federation pilot struck twice with his fists and once with a high kick before Jackie struck a single blow of his own, staggering his foe with a jab to the abdomen. Jason called out a half-articulate warning, before he found himself pushed aside. He glared in anger as Moxon strode past, brandishing his sheathed trench knife as a knuckleduster.

Anastasia came into view, clad in the bottom half of her fatigues and a half-fastened undergarment. When she grabbed for Vasily, he pushed her back and wheeled to face the interloper. Jason felt an irrational satisfaction as Moxon advanced. Let the man of Gaia try to separate two Martians unaided if he chose; let him try to part a lion’s jaws with one hand. Yet, he already had a foreboding sense that Moxon knew exactly what he was doing. In fact, Moxon moved faster than Jason could follow. One moment, Vasily was drawing back  his fist. The next, he was crashing down on top of the broken partition, leaving behind a suspended spray of blood that ended at Moxon’s still-raised fist.

That was when old Yuri emerged from his cabin in the cross corridor. He raised a hand to Vasily, who protested but was not bold enough to raise a fist. The elder pilot gave another warning, then planted a foot on Vasily’s chest. The younger pilot’s face flushed in rage, but he was already put in his place. That was when Anastasia emerged, dressed only in the bottom of her fatigues and her half-fastened upper undergarment. She lashed out with an open hand. Moxon might have blocked the blow, but he might not have bothered. What was clear was that he caught Ana in the breastbone, slamming her up without effort against the corner bulkhead.

Yuri turned his stern gaze to Moxon, then to Anastasia. Moxon, in turn, looked to Vasily. He rose to his feet, lifting the partition. “Go to Dr. Cahill to have your injuries examined,” Moxon said. “Say nothing of what happened. Remain there for the remainder of the cycle.” Vasily ran away with a clatter down the corridor of the ring. The trooper looked to Jackie next. “Mr. Henderson, do you wish to file a charge with the captain?” The moreno returned his stare for a moment, then withdrew to his own bed.

The trooper released Ana. She retreated behind Yuri. “We gave you quarters with the officers and the married crew,” Moxon finished. “Return there; you are confined until I decide if other arrangements are needed.” Yuri silently lifted the fallen partition and shoved it back onto its track. Then he escorted Ana away, one arm around her.

It seemed to Jason that he realized only then that he was poised to lunge. “He’s got no right,” he said. “They aren’t on our side, but they’re ours. We take care of our own, one way or the other.”

Alek took hold of his arm. “Don’t,” she said.

Jax came up more cautiously at his right. “Don’t do it, man,” he said. “You know what they did to us. We don’t know what they did to him…” That was what made him untense and step back. At that very instant, Moxon turned his head just enough to show him a half-smile before he strode away.

Table of Contents

Part 1. The demo!

Part 2. The villain!

Part 3. The world-building!

Part 4. The romance!

Part 5. The killer robot!

Part 6: The shuttle ride!

Part 7: Alternate universe pop culture!

Part 8: The launch!

Part 9: The girl talk!

Handheld Hotspot: Pinball and arcade mini haul

 

It's the middle of my "short" week, and it happens I have a backlog of retro gaming junk. A week ago, I put in an order for two items that definitely run the gamut from old to new, one of which I unpacked and tested while watching Starship Troopers 3. One's a reproduction of the earliest "handheld" based on an arcade game, the other is an example of a new trend I've been actively avoiding. First up, here's a reproduction handheld pinball game.

Our item this time is a Schylling pinball game, of a design I previously sighted in the wild. I doubt very much if the artwork dates earlier than the 2006 copyright date (it seems more like a tribute to the manufacturer's "vintage" tin toys), but everything else is spot-on for games first made in the 1950s. The back is metal, which I confirmed with a magnet, while the front, the "targets" and the channels for the balls are all 1 piece of clear plastic. The goal and only action is to launch the balls one at a time for the highest score, then turn the game upside down to roll the balls back in. There's a tiny plastic plug sort of thing to hold the balls up during reloading, which should also stop them from rolling around during storage or travel. It looks like you could tilt the thing for a better score, but the balls really move too fast and the thing's just too big to make much difference. Here's the outcome of a typical game.

What you'll notice if you look closely is that the highest score is 600 while the lowest is 10 and the next is 200. That makes it difficult to get a good score if more than 1 ball lands in any of the four 10-point spots. The spring mechanism is also unpredictable, which has left me wondering how it really compares to vintage specimens; if other toys are anything to judge by (see the Marx Japanese soldiers), they would have launched the ball with enough force to kill small animals.  For some reason, the feed tends to get stuck with the last ball half in and half out. There's an extra wonky factor in that red robot, which grimaces like a Terminator and has a peg seemingly protruding from its forehead. Finally, I have certain suspicions about the little guy on the right, who looks a lot like a certain droid. Here's a pic with the Truckstop Queen and the Gas Station Duchess (aka Connie) plus the Tomy Centipede knockoff. I said this thing is big...

"You can play with my plunger any time you want..."

Next in line is a Galaxian mini arcade machine, the smallest of at least 2 out there. I could probably have gotten a bigger one for just a little more, but the alternate design I ran across was one of the ones that try to combine a joystick and a D-pad, which just looks clumsy and unintuitive to me. The manufacturer seems to have tried to make up for their good sense by trying to make it a key chain, which just means an awkward and very load clasp bang on the back. Here's the unboxing pics.

For the background, Galaxian is a 1979 arcade game that was followed by its now better-known sequel Galaga. I had played both for NES (or emulators thereof) and personally prefer Galaxian. It's simpler, yet with a fair amount of strategy, particularly since it has the Space Invaders handicap where you can only have one shot on the screen at a time. It turns out the "mini" has the original arcade version, which I admit is quite a bit harder even with the tiny screen and controls factored in. It's particularly difficult to hit the "boss" Galaxians (I'm sure based on the ships from George Pal's 1953 War of the Worlds), which go back and forth along with the escorting ships and then disappear after one or two passes. Initially, my biggest problem was that the screen would flicker or reset randomly, a problem which disappeared entirely when I took a pair of pliers to the ludicrous key chain. Here's a pic of it turned on; note the marquee lights up along with the screen.

The unavoidable fact of this little thing is that it is a model or prop far more than a functioning game. Even as an action figure accessory, it's a little small and definitely oddly proportioned. Here it is with Sidekick Carl to show what I mean.

Then it occurred to me, it was about right for Husky, who's a bit shorter and a lot stouter. Jackpot! And man, he looks terrible.

With that, I'm wrapping this up. These have both been interesting acquisitions, though if it came to it, I'd rather keep the pinball game. The lesson is that nothing is quite the same as holding the real thing, but that's not always reason to keep it. That's all for now, more to come!

Handheld hotspot: No-bit gaming!

 

It's my day off, and I decided it was time to return to handheld games. As it happens, I had just found something that I had in mind when I thought of this feature. Nowadays, it's fashionable to make fun of 1980s LCD games, which I covered last time.  What has long since been forgotten is that those games were the successors and potential competitors to a much older class of handheld mechanical games. I speak of the handheld pinball game, and if Tiger games were the cave man's videogame, these were what you would find in a Paleocene lemur's grip at the bottom of Lake Messel, and I was playing with them well into the age of Game Boy. Here's a pic of the game with the full load racked.

The real backstory here is that in the 1800s and 1900s, the first mechanical pinball machines were developed, based on the game of bagatelle. These rudimentary machines had little in common with later pinball games, as there were no flippers. Around the late 1950s, the lineage split in several directions. In American arcades, they became the modern pinball we know. In Japan, they were upgraded with electronics into the pachinko machine. But in the meantime, the original concept was scaled down into handheld games for children. Here's a pic I found of example I've sighted in the wild previously. There's nothing for scale in this or any other pic I could find, but I can attest it's quite large, with a metal back that gives it extra robustness.

Of course, these things stayed in production long after kids knew anything about the pinball name. I just thought of them as ball-bearing games. Many of them lacked the launcher, which made them closer to "dexterity" puzzles I've covered elsewhere. The one I have the earliest and clearest recollection of is a baseball-themed game, with the baseball part just consisting of a picture of a baseball player. The present specimen must have been picked up later. In fact, when I looked it up, I found out it was made at the mindbogglingly late date of 1987 by Tomy, previously featured for their windup bots. Here's the back of the game, which is just a little smaller than a paperback.

In addition to their windups, Tomy was a prolific producer of pinball games, including the Waterful line. With this game, the main gimmick is that there's a magnet to catch the balls as they launch until they form a line. I found certain other variations, apparently dating back to the late '70s. notably including one made to look like a helicopter rescue. This game desperately updated it into a knockoff of the already venerable arcade game Centipede. The problem is that after about the fourth or fifth ball, the magnet gimmick starts wearing off. Then the balls either bounce off or stick to the ones higher up in one big knot. Here's a typical outcome.

You might think this was the end of the line for Tomy mechanical games. In fact, Tomy was already making LCD games. They also continued to make wind-up handheld games that approximated the tech of electromechanical arcade games, which had survived long enough to be featured in Dawn of the Dead (see video here). Early examples had imitated arcade classics like pace Invaders, while later examples included licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tie-ins. This led to the even more incomprehensible experiment known as Game Buddy. My own recollection from this strange dead end is that I saw a few mechanical handheld games at a discount mall in the mid- to late 1990s, complete with the scrolling background. I had no idea what they were at the time, and I still cannot find any record of who might have made them (I'm sure they were way below Tomy's standards). Now, I regret not buying one just to have an example, but having seen footage of other examples, I can't call it a loss.

That ends this trip down memory lane. For this particular game, I can at least say it's still mildly entertaining, if only to see the carnage when it doesn't work. If there's a lesson, it's that even the "bad" people remember usually isn't the worst. That's all for now, more to come!

Retrobots Revisited: Droids!

 

At this writing, I'm closing on 2 years since I started this blog and about one year since it really got going. I've again been reminded that I have again gone a while without doing much with my robot features. To make up for it, I decided to do an extra post on something I'm surprised I didn't cover a lot sooner, the droids of the original Star Wars Kenner droids. These are the definitive representations of the most iconic and influential pop culture robots in history, and as we will see, the strange thing is that there really weren't that many of them. To start off, here's the tallest and arguably greatest of them all, IG88, with the Voltron mystery red guy and C3PO; he's okay, I guess.

 And here's a pic with the Truckstop Queen and Ken R. Wampa, plus a Rock Lord. Note the rock bot is about the same height; with both at full height, I think IG is still just a little taller.

Now, it's time to back this up. The lineup here represents about 3/4ths of the Kenner "vintage" droids I have. The other two are a worst-possible-condition R2 and an R5D4 I'm sure I have but couldn't find on short notice. The further backstory is that I picked up most of these, including IG, in mid- to late elementary school, well after the end of the Kenner line. I also recall I lost or broke specimens of IG and R5 then bought them again. (The latter was a victim of a carbon freezing accident.) IG was certainly the coolest, notwithstanding the fact that we never saw him in action in the movies. He's tall and streamlined, outside of the unnecessary molded detail. The one problem is that he isn't made the same as other figures. The arms are a bit rubbery, and need to be watched for breakage, while the legs feel slightly and unpleasantly sticky with age. Still, he's easily among the very best of the vintage line, and I'm sure kids put him through a franchise worth of adventures. Next up, C3PO and his weird cousin, the alleged Death Star Droid.

"Trust me, you're lucky you weren't in the cartoon...."

What I remember about these guys is that they were among my later acquisitions. I got C3PO second-hand in maybe 3rd or 4th grade, and didn't get the other guy until as late as high school.  I can further recall seeing the bug-eyed droid in an image in the Star Wars story book, as one of the broken-down droids in the Jawa sandcrawler. That in turn brings up one of the wonkier moments in the "Expanded Universe", when the droid handbook tried to explain the "Death Star droid" name as a "thing" in the Star Wars universe. Per the actual movies, even kids could work out, he was just a droid, and if it showed up in both the junk piles of Tatooine and the corridors of the Death Star, then they were already everywhere. And that brings us to what I suppose was my favorite, the power/ "Gonk" droid, pictured with Threepio and a Tomy bot for feature continuity.

As a kid, I absolutely loved this guy, and I still can't say why. He didn't really do anything in the movies, he looked silly, and the only things the toy added were the clicky gimmick in the legs and the antenna that's always missing. I can further recall deliberately pulling the antenna off mine because it annoyed me in some way, then throwing it away when it turned up in a sweep for loose accessories. To me, that just made him look more like he does in the movies, so I was happy. Here's a couple detail pics.

Finally, we have the medical droids from the Empire wave of the line, 21B and FX. Here they are together.

21B is besides R2 the only droid I'm absolutely sure we got new. I picked up the other droid already missing a couple arms. They were both awesome in my eyes. It's intriguing in hindsight that they made figures this detailed out of robots that were specifically shown as made to help people. (An extra factoid, 21B is the only droid besides Threepio to get any lines in English in the first two movies.) Of course, this went out the window in playtime. FX especially was great as an evil robot/ supercomputer, and it actually made sense for him to sit around while the evil scheme played out. Here's one more pic of him.

The thing about all this is that this brings us not only to the end of my collection but pretty close to the end of the droids in the Kenner line. The only droid I haven't covered released on card in the vintage line is Zuckuss/ 4LOM (I really don't care...), which I know my big brother or I must have had simply because I remember having his triple-barreled gun (which I usually gave to Bossk). The only new droids released for Return of the Jedi or the last-ditch Power of the Force wave were 8D8 and EV-9D9, and then mainly as add-ins for playsets. Throw in the probe droid from the Empire Hoth turret playset (which I was so unaware of I built my own to fill the gap), and you have only a dozen unique droids in the entire vintage line.  It would barely fill one wave of the Transformers or Gobots line, but clearly, they had influence far beyond their numbers.

Then fast-forward to the 1990s, when all things Star Wars were rebooting, and it was so... much... better. R2D2 looked like he did in the movie, 8D8 was findable, and we even got a probe droid. Here's a few pics of just a few I have lying around with vintage figures for comparison.

And one more...

"Did you say something about mini rigs?"

Now, I'm ready to wrap this up. If there's a lesson, it's that things can and do get better, but what came first can still hold its place, especially when you're old enough to remember when it was new. That's all for now, more to come!

Bigger than Godzilla! Robbie the Robot

 

For this weekend, I wanted to get back to a toy blog post, and I decided to bring back a feature I thought I might be done with. The new development is that I finally picked up something I had known about for a while, and like many things I've covered it was all at the local Walmart. I introduce Robbie the Robot, in and out of the box.

By way of introduction, Robbie the Robot was possibly the first non-human "character" in science fiction to take on a life independent of the film he/ it first appeared in. The bot was first created for the 1950s classic Forbidden Planet (which I admit I have still never seen). The suit/ prop was impressive and expensive enough that it was regularly reused in later films and television, including episodes of Twilight Zone and Columbo and (allegedly) the Fred Olen Ray  direct-to-video film Phantom Empire.  The fate of the original bot became something of an existentialist riddle, as several copies emerged based on replicas of varying faithfulness and perhaps on spare or discarded parts created for Forbidden Planet. The "authentic" suit is believed to have been in the hands of a series of collectors since the early 1970s, though it is itself known to have been partially rebuilt at various time.

With the popularity of the character and design, there were inevitably a number of authorized and unauthorized toys and models. I personally have followed these with far more interest than the bot's screen appearances. I covered parts of this search previously in my posts on the Tomy Rascal/ Pocket Bots mini-line. At one time or another, I made further sightings of more direct representations of the character. I particularly recall a beautiful windup bot that popped up here ant there in the 1990s, which I am fairly sure was a now-costly model from Tamiya. The only one I actually bought was a reissue Schylling tin toy "Planet Robot" I've been meaning to get to, which was effectively a knockoff that took on a life of its own. In recent years, the pickings had gotten quite thin, with a tendency toward overpriced "deformed" figurines.

I was still surveying these new and old offerings when the Walmart bought hit the scene, as a partner to the giant Iron Giant. My immediate reaction was that it didn't really suit my interests and tastes, the main reason I didn't buy it much sooner. It also literally magnified certain flaws that were probably there all along, particularly the prominent oversized and overcomplicated circuitry. Still, it was clearly the largest available and also the cheapest, priced like the Iron Giant and the Alien Queen at $20. I finally decided to get it after a merchant selling one of the figurines quoted a price of only a little less for shipping alone. Here's some more pics of what I got for the money.

Obviously, this item is reasonably detailed as well as big, a bit more so than casual inspection in the package would show. In contrast to the Iron Giant, the arms have a good range of motion. The pleasant surprise was the walking motion, which I usually barely pay attention to. The figure is stable, even on just a book (the alternative was the bathroom floor, and I'd rather run a toy on a sidewalk), and the motion is realistic. The head and torso swing back and forth in a pretty good arc. This gets to the one drawback, which is that the toy doesn't have a "default" position. If you push the button to stop it, it usually stops with different parts pointing in in random directions, an issue which will be evident in the photos despite my best efforts, and the stationary figure definitely looks much better with the upper and lower body lined up.

This leaves the question, how big is the damn thing. He's definitely shorter than the Iron Giant, and probably still a bit taller than this feature's benchmark, the generic Godzilla. Here's some reference pics.

All in all, this is a nice addition to the Robbie legacy, and certainly worth the price if you can still get it from Walmart. Unfortunately, it's already getting scalped for much more, which might be enough to tarnish it in the eyes of more seasoned collectors. Still, cool is cool in any decade, and it's safe to say this isn't the last we'll see of Robbie the Robot.

Retrobots Revisited: The other Tomy bot!

Way back when I introduced this feature, I introduced the little windup tentatively known as the Tomy Rascal Robot. In the course of that review, I mentioned there was one more bot that had eluded me. That was the end of the story at that time, and like many things, it went by the wayside for other things. In the course of going through some old pics for the giant Iron Giant post, I realized that I hadn't gotten around to posting an update. Early this year, I finally bought one of these little guys online, whom I dub Robbie. Here's a few pics I took at the time.

For the circumstances leading up to the purchase, the main factor was simply that I finally got a decent number of listings when I went looking. The one I got was specifically sold as not working for a bit less than several others. The arms proved mobile; the right one turns a full 360, while the left one is obstructed by the knob. I was a little optimistic that I might get it working. On examination, I determined that the legs still moved readily enough if pushed, indicating the action wasn't completely jammed. Alas, working from the other end, there was no result at all. The little knob to wind it up didn't even stick or jam, it just turns and turns without any result at all.

As for further research, the main thing I confirmed is that the Rascal Robot, Acrobot and Robbie were sold collectively as Pocket Bots, as documented at The Old Robots. The first two were also sold on card under their names, but Robbie lacks a known official moniker, a further indication he was made last. An extra discovery I made is that certain copies of Robbie have the Boeing logo on the dome. I actually saw a specimen on sale, for not much more or less than others, but didn't try to buy it. As previously documented, the Rascal Robot has been reissued, but Robbie and the Acrobot fell out of production by the mid- to late 1980s.

That's what I have to report, and really wraps up this story. As always, more to follow. While I'm at it, here's a pic to wrap things up.

Retrobots Revisited: Tomy Rascal Robot and others

Because this is going to be a toy blog if it goes anywhere at all, here’s another toy related post. This one got started at the Y*utube channel That Junkman. In the course of unboxing a delivery from a fan, the eponymous Junkman showed a small windup robot included with several vintage Star Wars figures. I and several other commenters immediately recognized it as a moderately famous Tomy windup toy, sold as the Rascal Robot. It just happened I already have several specimens, including one I had played with as a kid at my grandparents’ house. Here are a few more photos of my mini collection:

In my prior research, the featured bot was made and sold in the late 70s and most likely into the early 80s by Tomy, a prolific manufacturer of windup toys and electronics. At least some were sold on action figure-style cards, which bear the name Rascal Robot. The design was clearly modelled on Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, and closely resembled Tomy’s remote control Omnibot. The toy came in a range of colors, mainly in solid silver or gold bodies seen here. Somewhat rarer variants feature decals on the chest and in some cases painted eyes. In more recent years, the design was included in a line of Tomy toys re issued by Z Windups, resulting in the middle specimen featured here. As can be seen, the reissue is substantially larger than the original. The manufacturer also made the extra effort to make the arms spin.


Of course, this was all part of a longer journey for me. I have many memories of seeing or playing with Tomy windups in my childhood, including an unsettling sighting of what I eventually identified as their “Strolling Bowling” game. However, I never seemed to get any of them for myself, and all the windup toys I have that I know I didn’t acquire as a teen or adult are happy meal toys or more obscure brands. As for the “Rascal” bot I played with, it’s the silver one featured here, finally given to me by my grandmother around the time I started college. I loved the little thing, though I found the arms wouldn’t twist more than a few degrees (those of the gold bot a acquired much later twist 360 without difficulty) and I long believed it was entirely broken. In a possible minor “Mandela effect”, I tried winding it up while taking photos for this essay,  and was completely surprised to find it worked.

Along the way, I caught wind of a few more Tomy bots. I purchased one, pictured above with a couple more windups, that I knew had to be a Tomy creation at the long-vanished local comic book store. This one turned out to be known as the Acrobot, and I figured out that the arms were part of an action gimmick: If it is fallen or knocked down, the long arms will push it upright, as long as they are lined up with each other. Later still, I found online photos of a third bot, with an overall shape that suggests a cross between Robbie and the “Lost in Space” robot. Unfortunately, while there are enough recent pictures from collectors to indicate that it was sold in the US, my own intermittent research has failed to locate a specimen for sale, or even a report of one being purchased in ebay or other competitive markets. The only collector to give an account of acquiring one simply states that it was purchased for a few dollars at a local shop.


All in all, I don’t have much to add about these bots. Tomy windups may never have had the prominence of brand name action figures like Star Wars and Transformers, but they were a major part of the toy market for many years. The fact that many people still remember them is all the more impressive given that they were marketed for and to younger kids who had little or no idea who was making them. If you have any around, it will definitely be worth your while to hold onto them. And double check if you have a tall robot with long arms and a bubble on top, because it just might be a collector’s Holy Grail.


Links

That Junkman video featuring Rascal robot (ca 3:30)

Collectors’ Weekly review with pics of the 3rd bot

The Old Robots website, dedicated to 1980s robot toys by Tomy and others