Mr Machine

I was surfing randomly while watching The Jayne Mansfield Story– which I hadn’t realized had Loni Anderson and The Governator in it. Bizarre.

At any rate, I saw this toy I used to have, “Mr Machine,” made by Ideal. It was a wind-up plastic clockwork man. You could wind him up, and he’d whistle and wheel around. When I owned Mr Machine, I used to wonder how he worked… you could see his gears inside.

But today I found out just now that he was the lamer, “safer” version of a even cooler version of Mr Machine- the earlier version you could take apart! He came with directions and was over 160 pieces.

I am so jealous. Some of these memories online are pretty funny though- recollections of taking him apart and not being able to put him back together again. I don’t think that would have been me- I had almost every “Zoid” ever made up through the early 1990s, and we kept them in pieces in a giant bin, ready to be reassembled.

Oh crap, looks like once again, I can buy things to overcompensate, this time a reproduction from Robot Island. A mere $89. Yikes. Also, here’s the commercial!

Someday we will figure out how to efficiently generate energy from plastic. And then people who live on landfills will be RICH!

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