Lamprey 33s Cigarette Cards

Early one-sheet printing of Lampreys 33's Trading Card inserts.  Many discrepancies are shown between these and the updated Popular Mechanoids  Premium Swap Cards, including backgrounds, the robot's details on the card backs, and even some names of particular mechanoids.  

Lampreys common parent company, with Popular Mechanoids Publishing, Tin Pin Toys, licensed this set of cards essentially to promote their range of newly released domestic and industrial robots. Ambitious executives, eager for share growth, jumped the gun on many of the companies yet to be registered Mechs.
Card 18, for example, Helidron, was still a military secret when the first nicotate stained fingers pulled from their highly addictive packet of Lampreys a card containing fully detailed specifications of what, at the time, was a Government sponsored, covert and arcane  killing machine.       

Tin Pins Trading Card strategy to segment, then target through promotion, was both a success and disaster for the company in the 1930s.  Although much was known about the public's buying habits, their perception of consumerism in an age where up to 80% of sales were made face to face, 60% of household items were often hand made, or included hand made parts, and a disastrous 70% were a once in a lifetime purchase, little was understood about the unconscious guilt driven and pleasure seeking motives for non essential and luxury goods. For a company based on a six month  'concept to sales floor' time frame, and an even more radical two year product life span, this was an age that, to the Tin Pin Board of Directors, seemed mired in the languid quicksand of sensible, quality based trade. A nightmare for the intended 'buy now, buy later' philosophy they expected to drop surreptitiously  into civilisation's Martini 

On reflection, whilst Tin Pins greed based, military funded, technological thrust in the early half of the Twentieth Century can be seen as an amoral assault on all that is good and decent, it also provided many with the means for a quality of life hitherto undreamt of. Buying power increased, tools capable of phenomenal work were placed into the hands of the righteous, wrong doers and indifferent alike.  Ecological disasters, now spawned by few, where once many would have had to have laboured, communities saved in the palm of a hand, or from the size of a suitcase. And armies laid low with the flick of a wrist, and the age of a child. All these events must be weighed by history, and judged in tomorrow,  before we will truly know what to write on the headstone that is Tin Pin Toys Incorporated.