It was Christmas 1973, and boy did I love being a kid. Waking up Christmas morning, seeing all of the presents out under the tree, spilling halfway across the living room. Of course there were six kids, two parents, a grandma and uncle there, so it was always deceiving. I never got as many gifts as I thought I was going to get, but I still loved coming around the corner and seeing all of the gifts. It was like I hit the jack pot.
Anyways, as we settled down and started opening gifts, I got the usual, hot wheels and underwear, just going through the motions waiting for that last gift, you know the one your parents kept til the end, the grand finale. Oh and it was a good size box, must have been two feet tall, at the time I wasn’t much taller then it, I knew it was going to be something good, and boy was I not disappointed. As soon as I pulled off the first corner of the paper I saw the word “Robot” and I knew I had scored. Pulling the rest of the paper off, there it stood, “Johnny Robot”, man was it cool looking, “over 18 inces tall” the box said, and back then, toys were still made out of metal, so he was cool looking, painted all red and blue.
To that point in my life, that was my greatest moment, then I started playing with it. Of course the first couple of weeks was a blast, I would have Johnny Robot destroying cities made of blocks, crushing my hot wheels and saving the day. After awhile though I slowly became disappointed in the fact that Johnny Robot didn’t do anything. In all reality it was just painted metal. Sure you could move his arms back and forth, but so could my 12” Bionic Man, and shoot the bionic man even had the roll away skin revealing his bionics, and the eye-pieced drilled in his head so I could pretend I was using his bionic eye. Johnny Robot didn’t do anything, his arms & legs moved, and his head moved back and forth, big deal.
Well that wasn’t going to work for me, no way. First modification I had to make was to give Johnny Robot a voice, so one day when my brother Jim was at softball practice I stole his Tandy tape recorder and took it apart. Cutting up my Johnny Robot wasn’t too hard, my dad had all the tools any boy could need. I of course placed the speaker in his head where his mouth should be, drilling a small hole so that the sound could get out, I then placed the tape compartment on his back where I could access it easily, but it was still out of the way visually. The buttons however, looked more like teeth, so I cut a notch on the bottom of Johnny Robot’s head and hung them there. I always thought it was cool the one red button for record, really gave Johnny Robot a menacing look.
I then of course recorded his first statements, always beginning with “beep, boop, beep”, and ending with another “beep”, because after all he was a robot, so he had to sound like a robot. “Beep, boop, beep, Hello Steve! beep” was the first thing Johnny Robot said. I could still hear him in my mind, it was so cool. Other cool sayings I gave him were, “beep, boop, beep, Johnny Robot, protector of the innocent, beep” and “beep, boop, beep, Laser Blast! beep”. As the days went on more and more sayings were added, however I noticed that when I cut the metal on his head for the buttons, that some of the paint where his eyes were had peeled back, and it seemed so fake, I mean, who has painted eyes?
Hmmm... Ok, so I know my Mom has a video recorder, and I know she never uses it, so she probably wouldn’t miss it. I also know we have a projector, that we rarely use, they both have lenses that wouldn’t be missed. So after sneaking both items out to the garage, surgery began, and it wasn’t long after that, that Johnny Robot now had two glass eyes, one was a little larger then the other, but that wasn’t a problem, it also shot light out of it, the one larger eye, it was sweet, Johnny Robot now has laser vision! There was already an antenna on his head, so I just put the toggle for the light on top of his head, and added some wire to it to make it look like a second antenna. Another cool thing that I didn’t think of, but worked out by chance, was when you turned the light on for his laser vision, the antenna was pointed forward, really giving Johnny Robot a menacing look. Johnny Robot was getting cooler and cooler by the day!
Well we played like this for a couple of months and we had a good time, but one weekend my dad was out front working on my mom’s ‘68 Cougar that had the automatic doors covering the lights. Well back then they were ran by a pneumatic vacuum from the motor, and one of them was sticking on my mom’s car so my dad was going over it, and boy did that give me an idea. So after talking to my dad a bit, and showing him what I wanted Johnny Robot to do, he acquired the right parts and I got to set-up Johnny Robot to have pneumatic arms and legs. We ran a couple of wires out of his back to a make shift remote allowing me to control him. It was pretty cool, we also hooked up a wire to control the light in his one eye as well as the tape recorder. I left the buttons on the front however because it was just cool looking.
With this new tech, we were buddies all over again... for awhile. It got kind of boring controlling him. I wanted a real buddy, someone who could follow me around and play with me. Well one day my brother Robert and I were playing down at an old empty field. Sometimes people would dump junk at this field and we’d go through it looking for anything worth something, when I found it. Someone was throwing away an old Mac Plus computer that had become outdated and too slow for whatever purpose they needed it for. So I told Robert I needed the computer for Johnny Robot and he helped me carry the thing home. Back in the garage I opened up Johnny Robot’s chest and started filling in the hollow innards with the computing power of this old computer. I then hooked the remote control pieces to the computer, allowing the computer to have full control of Johnny Robot’s limbs, eyes and speaker, and the best part? The Apple logo was illuminated, so I placed that right on Johnny Robot’s chest, like a crest all the super hero’s have. Again, it was sweet. Rob and I stood back and looked at him and were just thrilled over what we have created.
Then Robert asked, “What’s his super power?” and I quickly replied, “he shoots a laser out of one of his eyes, duh” and Robert said, it’s not a laser, it’s just a light that projects a picture. Hmmm... I started thinking again, knowing that Robert was right. “Doesn’t dad have an extra gun he never takes to work? (Dad was a Sheriff’s Deputy for Los Angeles County). Robert said, yeah he does, he hides it in his closet. So with Rob distracting mom for a short time I snuck into the room and got his extra .357 magnum and got it out to the garage. When Robert got there, he had seen I had already taken off the handle to the gun, then he asked, “what are you going to do with it?” That’s easy I said, I going to take off one of his arms, and the gun will replace it.
Johnny Robot was awesome, he stood there with his two different size eyes, one shining a light out of it, his tape recorder button teeth, and the oversize Apple logo on his chest. But yeah, the master piece was the .357 magnum right arm, and he could now think for himself. Johnny Robot would follow me around, constantly swinging the gun upwards in protect mode, just to see it’s a cat jumping a fence or something. I decided the best job for Johnny Robot was to protect the house, so that is what he did. Constantly circling the house, protecting it from intruders. I guess the only real problem was that we lived in a good area north of Los Angeles, and it was 1974, so crime wasn’t really out of control back then. So Johnny Robot spent most of his times just walking in circles. Until one day...
One day a car was coming down our street real slow. Johnny Robot went on alert not recognizing this car, and the fact that it was driving so slowly with the driver looking at all of the houses. Well in those days we lived on a cul-de-sac and the car, realizing that she was not where she was trying to get to decided to pull into our driveway to turn around. Well Johnny Robot didn’t know that, and since me and my brothers and sisters were out front playing, Johnny Robot needed to protect us, so he ran around real quick raising his magnum “beep, boop, beep, INTRUDER! beep” and shot out one of her tires. The lady screamed and pulled out of the driveway as fast as she could and drove down the street on her flat tire. In the mean time my mom and dad came running out of the house to see what the commotion was to see Johnny Robot’s smoking gun and the car driving off.
Boy was I in trouble. Dad sat me down and had a big long talk with me about what had happened. He also sat Johnny Robot down to and talked to him about the proper way of protecting us. My dad also replaced all of Johnny Robot’s bullets with rubber bullets so no one could get hurt. I had to pay back everyone for the equipment I stole and was grounded for a month. My dad let Johnny Robot live, and Johnny Robot continued to protect our house, however one day Johnny Robot decided we didn’t really need any protection and he took off. I haven’t seen or heard anything from him to this day. I search Facebook sometimes just to see if he’s set-up a page, but he hasn’t. Not yet anyways.
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