What I wanted for Christmas #1: Tobor

Technically I’m a member of Generation X, which was the first generation to really realize just how much time you could waste while trying to make Microsoft products work.

The love of such futility didn’t come from nowhere. We had plenty of practice as children the 70′s and 80′s drinking deep from the unsatisfying fountain of a rapidly maturing consumer culture. And as it is now, the spigot on this thing was opened wide during Christmas.

Now that there have been billions and billions of dollars invested in the internet, we can stream commercials from that ancient era on a whim. So I’m going to do some posts outlining the various trinkets I wanted for Christmas as I grew up.

Up first: Tobor!

This little robot was actually just a motor with a swiveling wheel and the ancestral technology used in The Clapper. The ‘remote’ was a clicker that made a loud noise to activate said clapper brain, so really anything could set it off…a hand clap, firecrackers, the sound of your little brother banging on your door….

And if you ended up with two of them click-clacking away in the same room. Let’s just say skynet was still a few years off.

Really, this robot was about as “remote control” as a cat–inasmuch as you can yell insanely at a cat and make it run for it’s furry life.

But even then, there were only two actions. Go in circles, and go in a straight line. The commercial tries to make this sound awesome. “To circle. To proceed forward. To circle. Or to pick up the service module….” Yeah, and picking up that small plastic “service module” was about as likely as getting a girl to play with this thing. (Both of which happened in the commercial).

So was the Tobor a bad toy? Of course. But we knew it’d just be a few years before real robots were doing all our household chores while we got in our flying cars to go to the mall and buy more stuff.

In other words, it didn’t stop us from wanting it. And that was the name of the game for 70′s and 80′s toys.