Fourth in the new series. Last year I shared a couple newer robot designs I made based on the theme of “what if sci-fi tin toys never faded away, and continued to be made beyond their “golden age” of the 1950s-60s? What would they have looked like?” 

As I’ve noted before, a mix of safety concerns and cheap plastic manufacturing led to the decline of mass-produced tin toys; by the late 1960s, the era was virtually over. Before fading away though, some of the bigger tin toy makers like Horikawa, Yonezawa and Nomura pivoted to producing all (or mostly) plastic versions based on their signature tin robot designs. As a kid, I enjoyed these post-tin plastic robots nearly as much as the OG ones for their functionality, but even then, I could sense they were less intrinsically “valuable,” more like something meant to be eventually discarded.

Missile Robot here has quite a bit in common with its tin forebears, including the general proportions and “Rotate-o-matic” movement. In fact it reminds me of Super Astronaut, the first tin robot I owned. Rethinking plastic robots in tin involves plenty of guesswork: as I’m building indivdual parts in Blender, I just try to imagine how I would press them out of sheets of tin. It usually comes down to simplifying shapes, joining parts together with crimps and clasps, and so on. It’s all in 3D so I could literally do whatever I want, but I do try to make the tin construction appear believable. I still have a few more of these plastic-to-tin imagined robots on my list, so I’ll get to them soon.