Tomy Japan 100th Anniversary, manufacturers of the first tin skirted robot

[plasticaugie]

If you take a 5000' view you can see it, they have the same creator. The first robot I was given as a kid was the small pedestal type Karate Robot. When ebay was new I would search for this robot and could never find one. I had found the larger ones but I remembered that it didn't have independent legs. The first trip I made to Joe's museum was to see if he had one and he didn't. At the Griff auction I even asked Ozzie about it (at a coffee shop with Perry), he told me that robots like that usually weren't saved, lol. I even called up Comettoys, no luck. Then one day on ebay, there it was, the blue one just like I had. I put a ridiculous amount to secure the auction and went back to Joe's museum to talk about it. I was sure it was made by Tomy even tough it was made in Hong Kong, Joe didn't think so. Years later on Alphadrome the patent was posted as being a Tomy product. Sometime this week I will try to find a picture of my original Karate robot and post it, it's in an album tucked away somewhere.

[plasticaugie]

Just to be clear, in Japanese, 富山 is read as Tomiyama or Toyama. 

 

Brian, where are you?

 

One more, I'm calling it a night.

[plasticaugie]

Just wondering why the archived threads don't show up in the search results? This makes is necessary to use google or another search engine to find older posts, which opens another can of worms about the "dead internet theory". A lot of the history and research that was available on this site seems to be lost. A search of Bunkum or Techo Fantasies brings up a few results. I also don't see a way to leave a clickable link to archived posts. I have been searching for a thread where Joe K. is talking about Techno Fantasies from 2005, but I can't find it today.

 

These are pretty interesting, a few guys over the years cite the Bunkum book and state Directional was a Tomy product. The last one is comical, where a now deleted version of the Metal House wikipedia page is sourced stating that Mr. Robot and Mr. Mercury were manufactured by Marumiya and that Tomy never made tin toys, "Just ask them", heh heh.

 

*https://www.alphadrome.net/forums/topic/6140-tomy-robots/*

*https://www.alphadrome.net/forums/topic/10168-directional-robot-variations/*

*https://www.alphadrome.net/forums/topic/7421-metal-house-in-wikipedia/*

[plasticaugie]

Just finished browsing through the history of Lilliput thread, I forgot how great it was with everyone trying to figure out the origin of it all. A point of contention in the early parts of the thread is the state of Japanese tin toy production during the 30's. In the Tomiyama link that Joe posted earlier in 1929/1930 Tomy had success with the Looping plane, I managed to pick up a complete example and it carries both ET.CO and C.K (Kuromochi). When I got home from work I was expecting a box on the porch but no, the thing is tiny and was inside my mailbox. Here's the pics.