my robot collection!

i collect robots!

by which i mean, these are mostly vintage toys, with some degree of robotic/animatronic function to them.

many of these are thrifted, a few are from my childhood. i've had a special interest in robots and animatronics for most of my life - obviously my first great love was furbies, who will eventually have their own dedicated page because there are too many to list here.

at this point i think i'm going to do a little blurb ok it's more like a long rambling story. i'm going to convert this into separate pages i guess for the types of bots i have, then i'll upload personal photos of my collection gradually?

AIBO

ROBO-CHI

I-CYBIE

GEMMY

CRICKET

ohhhh cricket. it's not your fault the chucky movies first came out a couple years after your peak popularity. i'm sure that's not a coincidence tho

cricket is..basically the concept of a teddy ruxpin, but in a more humanoid form. the original appeal would be that your cricket doll could talk and tell stories via the cassette player in her back - the official tapes were encoded so the doll's mouth and eye movements would sync up with the audio, and of course the appeal was that you could in theory order new tapes and outfits for her as they were released, like some clunky analog DLC.

and, of course, you could just play standard cassettes in there too. from my shitty amateur understanding, it looks like cricket syncs up more accurately to higher pitches - i have some videos of her singing some early bjork, which i can try and upload from the depths of my old hard drive.

i got really hyperfixated on custom animatronics in late high school, around the time i started learning how to repair furbies and got deep into the AIBO fandom. teddy ruxpin et. al., are definitely Before My Time, but i was still familiar with the whole concept of 'put in your metallica tapes and see what happens'. i went to my local value village one day and came across a cricket doll - they were definitely charging value village-type prices ($75!), and i thought 'damn this would be fun to play around with modifying if the price was right'.

lo and behold, later that week i went to another local thrift store - this one is in an industrial part of town in a literal warehouse, it's been there forever. at the time, it was the kind of thrift store that requires high effort and time commitment, but potentially yielded high reward since they kinda just accepted anything for donation. the guys at the front would make a guess at anything that didn't have a price tag on it, and you could usually bargain with them because they weren't comparing their own pricing to random listings on ebay. simpler times.

anyway i found miss cricket under a pile of random boxes and furniture - she caught my eye with the sheer amount of pastels, and as i pulled her out of the wreckage i was like 'noooo fucking way'. got the doll for $5, waited til my next payday to spend... much more than that on the amount of batteries she required (one 9v, four C batteries - even the power sources were too outdated for the family junk drawer). and the rest is history! she's currently living in my bedroom closet because when i moved in with my now-ex partner, i knew she'd hate the idea of cohabiting with this doll, and to be fair i was also trying to avoid getting jumpscared if i got up to pee in the night. did i mention cricket has no eyelids? she has no eyelids.