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: Though made for children, Japanese toy robots can catch the eye of even the most discriminating adults. Iconic graphic designer Tom Geismar, whose firm Chermayeff & Geismar has created memorable logos for Mobil, PBS and other U.S.
institutions, has been collecting the shiny bots for decades. The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle will exhibit toys from Geismar's collection in Robots: A Designer's Collection of Miniature Mechanical Marvels through Oct.
26. The vintage robots on display reflect Geismar's trained eye. "I've really restricted myself to ones that appealed to me as interesting, imaginative designs," he says. Left: "I continue to find the straightforward and somewhat naïve appearance of the early toys to be most appealing," Geismar says of this vaguely Victorian robot. Photo: Richard Nichol : Geismar's fascination with robots began in 1970 while he was working on the U.S.
pavilion for the World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. In local stores, he came across zinc die-cast figures like manufacturer Popy's Chogokin King Joe, based on a villain from the Ultra Seven show in the Ultraman series that aired in the late 1960s.
"They were all made of metal and painted terrifically. And they were very imaginative," Geismar says.
In those days, boxes often featured the names and pictures of the toys' designers. "Obviously they put a lot of effort and care into making these intricate things," he says, "but they were just in stores for kids to play with." The holes in each arm fire black, three-fingered claws and yellow missiles.
Photo: Richard Nichol : This DX Tetsujin 28, literally Iron Man No. 28 in English, was based on the 1963 Japanese anime of the same name.
Some of the episodes aired in the United States the next year, under the title Gigantor. "This handsome form is one of my favorites," Geismar says.
"As a designer, I tend to like things that are reasonably simple and clear, straightforward." Like many robots, it comes with a small model human, in this case the boy who controls the flying man by remote control in the cartoon. Photo: Richard Nichol : The Takara company's highly articulated Abitate T-10B, also called Blockhead, is a die-cast mecha based on a character from the 1981 Japanese series Fang of the Sun Dougram that never aired in the States.
The models did reach U.S. shelves, however, and a smaller-scale version of this body armor, the T-10A, came in a box featuring the intriguing slogan, "We never approve your independence from our federation." For Geismar, the most captivating thing about the models is the details, like Blockhead's menacing red hands.
"When you go to a very different culture where you can't even read any of the signs, you see things in a very different way," he says.
"You see it for what it looks like. Only later did I learn that most of the toys were representations of characters in popular Japanese films and television shows." Find great scans of box art for the Sun Dougram series (and many others) at Alen Yen's ToyboxDX. Photo: Richard Nichol : Robot toys hit a peak of mainstream popularity when Hasbro introduced the Transformers, but the roots of those bots lie in designs like Popy's Chogokin DX Sun Vulcan Solar Combination from 1981.
The transforming robot turns into the triangular Cosmo Vulcan jet and the stocky Bull Vulcan tank.
In its humanoid form, the mecha carried a huge sword and shield, and tied into the TV show Solar Squadron Sun Vulcan. Photo: Richard Nichol : Another transformer, Popy's Chogokin Goggle V GB-76, turns into a yellow truck and was later reissued in the Etarnal [sic] Heroes Series.
This bot's tie-in live-action show was part of the great three-decade lineage of Super Sentai TV series.
Check out the Goggle V opening credits and learn from whence the Power Rangers came. A collector of naïve figures from around the world before he came across robots, Geismar compares models like this to folk art.
"In the World's Fair pavilion in Japan, there was a major exhibit of Native American masks, many from the Pacific Northwest.
When we went to install them, the workers already knew them and they really related to them.
They are very similar to a number of Japanese cultures' masks. I think, in a sense, there are masks involved with these robots.
The mask behind a mask, or face within a face." Photo: Richard Nichol : Although they usually take a humanlike form, the Japanese robots can take any shape.
Take, for instance, this Outer Space Spider. "Whether they were men or bugs or flying saucers or whatever they are," Geismar says, "there seemed to be very few creative barriers to the designers doing them." Photo: Richard Nichol : First starring in Forbidden Planet, Robby the Robot went on to appear in everything from a Columbo episode to Earth Girls Are Easy, becoming a popular and endlessly reproduced emblem of robotkind.
Once wound up, this Action Planet Robot version of Robby takes clumsy steps and shoots sparks under the red mouth shield below its head grill. Before the zinc mecha craze began in the 1970s and '80s, Japanese toy robots were simpler.
Made of tin or plastic during the country's post-World War II industrialization, they were also more fragile. Photo: Richard Nichol : Some Japanese toy robots, like this one, remain anonymous. "I would find robots like this in souvenir shops in Times Square," Geismar says.
"Very simple windup or battery-operated mechanical men. They weren't based on stories and didn't have names.
I always liked their sculptural quality." Photo courtesy Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame : The designs of early bots from the 1950s and '60s have been reinterpreted over the years with more sophisticated finishes.
When switched on, this Horikawa Silver Astronaut, probably from the 1980s, walks forward, pausing every few steps to spin its torso with its green canons leveled at all attackers. Photo: Richard Nichol : It wouldn't be a robot collection without Mechagodzilla, the kaiju monster that aliens built to do battle with the real Godzilla in 1974.
Released in 2003, this model comes loaded with features like pop-off knee missiles and an opening mouth and chest hatch. Photo: Richard Nichol : To wring as much profit as possible from their molds, model companies cast the same robots multiple times.
Sometimes, as in the case of this Cosmobot, the molds would change hands and models would come out under other brands with only new names or slight differences of detail to distinguish them. "They'd change the feet or change the color," Geismar says, "or just do anything to say it was a new one.
You clearly recognize over many years the same molds with only slight variations." Thanks to a tread on his back, Cosmobot changes into a tank. Photo: Richard Nichol : The Golden Warrior Gold Lightan makes an unusual transformation: From the form of a classic robot warrior, it folds into a small cigarette lighter.
Released in 1981 (when else?), it naturally had its own anime series. "The funny thing about all these images," Geismar says, "is that when they're photographed like this you have no sense of the scale.
That lighter is not more than 2-and-a-half inches high." In an effort to replicate the larger-than-life roles these toys have played in children's (and adults') minds over the years, the Science Fiction Museum will include giant enlargements as part of the exhibition. Geismar approves.
"They are scaleless in a sense," he says. "You want to make them human-size." Photo courtesy Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame .
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