Fake robots! They're fake! Yay!

[mmcirvin]

A few years ago, spurred by an old children's book illustration on the Paleo-Future blog, I mentioned two prominent fake robots of the Sixties and Seventies, Miss Honeywell and Quasar Industries' Klatu. Here's more!

Paleo-Future just posted an article with a little more information on the Miss Honeywell magic trick, an illusion in which a magician appeared to assemble a woman in a creepy-looking robot costume out of mannequin parts. It was staged as a promotion for various technology or appliance companies, and the gimmick was always that the robot woman was advertised as a new product being demonstrated by a company engineer.

I've been reminded that a version of the same trick was actually used as a special effect in a movie, Ib Melchior's The Time Travelers. Several of the scenes in that movie used what amounted to stage-magic tricks in place of cinematic special effects. I guess it was economical.

Here's a Modern Mechanix post of an April 1978 Interface Age article on the Quasar robot. The author of the article claims in a comment on the blog post that it was intended as an April Fool's joke, though, as he acknowledges, the head of the company genuinely took in a lot of people and I personally remember their impending domestic-robot release being widely touted in the media. The main revenue stream seems to have been more or less the same as Miss Honeywell's, the use of the robot (in this case, actually an automaton controlled by a guy behind a curtain) as a promotional gimmick at trade shows and product demonstrations.

The detail here that really takes me back to 1978 is Reichelt's mention of bubble memory as the next big technological step. For a little while, it seemed like the future of nonvolatile data storage was going to be a solid-state component with no moving parts, like the move to flash memory that happened decades later. I remember being excited that, real soon now, Atari was going to release a bubble-memory module to replace the Atari 400/800's data cassette recorder. What happened instead was that disk drives of various types jumped ahead and dominated for the next 25 years.

Comments

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to figure out why I can't find anything online that says MST3K's Tom Servo was modeled after the Quasar Industries Robot, because the bodies at least look identical.

The Maid Without Tears was unbelievably creepy when I read about it, but I think Miss Honeywell upped the creep factor a few notches.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think the Maid Without Tears IS Miss Honeywell.

In that earlier post I put a link to someone who's still doing the "Robotic Woman" act at trade shows. The costume looks a little different these days, and I think they've dropped the shtick of advertising her as a real product.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

You're probably right. I was relying on memory; I didn't look up the Maid Without Tears article I read a couple years back. The video about Honeywell on the Pathe website was new to me, though.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...You have a point there about Tom Servo. There's a definite family resemblance. I wonder if it was a subconscious thing for Joel Hodgson, since, being a man of his interests, he'd surely have caught wind of the hype through that whole episode.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...though I suppose you could also argue that Servo and the Quasar robot were both distant derivatives of Robby and the Lost in Space robot, both designed by Bob Kinoshita.

[piehead.livejournal.com]

When I worked at http://www.src.org/ the president would occasionally opine how silicon integrated circuits how we know them today was not guaranteed as the next big thing in the late 70s. But here we are.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Through the Eighties I remember people saying there would be a move to gallium arsenide any moment. One of Seymour Cray's companies actually made a supercomputer based on GaAs, and when I say they made a supercomputer, I mean they literally managed to make one.