Tanner, Ron, "Toy Robots in America, 1955-75: How Japan Really Won the War"

Tanner, Ron. "Toy Robots in America, 1955-75: How Japan Really Won the War." JPC 28.3 (Winter 1994): 125-54. Illus.

An important essay, with 24 figures illustrating the imaging of robots in Japan and the USA from early 1950s tin toys to the transformer robots ca. 1985 (sic—the title is rather modest), references to relevant films, and a brief but highly useful biblio. in its Works Cited. Among the statistic RT cites: "4,000 to 5,000 different kinds of sci-fi toys were manufactured betweeen 1955 and 1972[,] and virtually all of these came from Japan . . . "; in 1958, half "of the $1.3 billion in American toy sales . . . were sci-fi related"; and that toy robots "were so popular their designs changed nearly yearly or every other year," and that they "accounted for as much as one-sixth" of toy exports from Japan to the USA (126-27). Obvious questions, and questions dealt with by RT, are why toy robots were so popular in Japan and the USA and why US companies didn't try to fill some of the demand. Briefly, technology is valued differently in Japan than in the West, with the Japanese more unambiguously enthusiastic about the promise of technology. As embodied in Japanese toys and pictures, technology will help (re)build. That the kinlier robots of the 1950s and 1960s have given way to rather threatening and somewhat insectoid Shogun robots of the 1970s and the transformers of the 1980s is significant: "The Japanese toy robot of the 1970s, then, became most clearly what all Japanese toy robots have always been—insustrial icons that symbolize the considerable aspirations of the Japanese people" (150). Aside from a mistake on HAL 9000 in 2001 (134), an impecable job. Keyword search term for the Wiki: "toy."