Buffalo Dreamtop colour sheet

Earlier on this blog are posts of some Designer Toys, including this, Buffalo Dreamtop, from my Tomahawk Toys range. This is that toys colour sheet.
My feelings about the cereal toys that influenced its design are best summed up on that post, and so I repeat them below also.

From a very early age a steady diet of Kellogg's Frosties allowed me access to some of the most evocative memories from my childhood, Cereal Toys! 
 In between what seemed like so many breakfasts...a new box finally! Pulling out the pillow of cellophane, trying to spot the prize through  that mist.
Wiggle rings!, lassoing cowboys ,their horses kicking up dust at the twist of a wrist. Camel trains, stretch pets... they actually WORK!! Crater Critters, actual aliens... before school even! Noodle Nodders,that snake in a log, and the hippo, the mechanism was so smooth, his mouth just kept going and going,  this stuff was better than television! and one of the best series, the Totem Tribe. So smooth, almost chewable, and they fitted onto each other so perfectly, soft plastic, sensual form and wondrous colours.
Zoom ahead 40 or so years, and  and it is season for a tribute.
 Buffalo Dreamtop is my memory of those wonderful totem figures, blended together and twisted by time. With the smell of Play Doh in my nostrils, and the feel of silly putty under my hands  So thank you, to whoever thought some kid would scream the supermarket isle down to get his hands on anything that looked like a toy, even a tiny piece of plastic stuffed in a cereal box. But what giants they seemed to me then.

Mc Tuff

What if Mickey wasn't born in Sunny California? What if he did not turn out to be the poster boy for Disney and settle into a multi billion dollar empire?
Meet Mick Mc Tuff. 
Born on the wrong side of Detroits rusty tracks, mutated at an early age from sniffing diesel and smelting computer memory. This desperate wretch finally found employment in a tin button factory, where he hit upon the idea of smuggling out factory rejects and selling them in alleys with his mug plastered on them. Sales were, at best, abysmal, and he now resides in a doss house awaiting trial for theft of his employers property.
Oh but for a few miles difference, and the right light on a sunny afternoon in a downtown pet shop.

Popular Mechanoids Card 10 - Silentic Schematic

Presented in glorious Mech-O-Vision, Silentic Schematic 

The subtle crackling polystyrene,
Parting slowly as I tear it,
Inside each soft round hard edged robot
Like arrows shot from whisker biscuit
Slowly I immerse its body
Into my unsweetened coffee
I realise
That heaven lies
In a Tin Pin Patented Silentic.

Silentic- Silence is Golem.

Card 9 0f 600. Silentic.

Late night ozone crepitates over yellow tube eyes, unmoving unless moved, like Adam, created from dust, the unshaped form of Silentic sits.

Where do we place our inherited innocence?  Certainly not in our ego, where sin is treasured, love is conditional and we wait for death whilst wishing death on all others. For to see a body is to see death, built with a phenomenalistic mind, encased in unconscious guilt.
Surely the only place must be in the young, where the title innocent goes hand in hand. And when the young grow old we look to animals, our or others pets, we pat and love with no hesitation. And when their short lives are laid aside Silentic is there, non judging, a relic lit from within. Whose time with us will outlast, outlive, outside. Until the day we reclaim what is rightfully ours.

Let there be light!

Schematic of the amazing Torchey! 

Card Number 4 in Popular Mechanoids Premium Trading Cards, Red Series.

Cycloptoid Schematic Card Number 6

Some details about Cycloptoids classic power plant.

A good old fashioned 2800 cylinder radial engine, (1400 cylinders placed back to back), each row of pistons slightly offset from the previous, forming a semi-helical arrangement to facilitate efficient mercury flow cooling.A mechanical gear-driven triple stage variable speed centrifugal type supercharger provide forced induction, whilst some models have been fitted with 200 Gyro brand Turbo chargers.

  

12 to the power of 12 = 8,916,100,448,256 litres.

Essentially a 9 Tera Litre engine.
5600 deep-mount, Ceramalloy, spark plugs.
Power Output: 222,200 hp at 862,894 rpm
Specific power: 72000.661 hp/in³
Compression ratio: 6.85:1
Power to weight to intelligence ratio: 00.82hp/lb/neuron
Bore and Stroke: 15500.600 mm (600.125 inch) x 17400 mm (600.875 in)
Weight (Dry/Mercury induced) : 34595kg
Cycloptoids entering retirement are often required to provide

 hearing protection for all life forms within a 17 hemisphere radius.

My optic friend

Card Number 5 in the Popular Mechanoid Premium Swap Card Series
Cycloptoid!

One of Cycloptoids most talked about mysteries is the overwhelming memory capacity provided.  Upon initial inspection  one might assume it is to complement the extremely robust, long life Rev/Rip Hull. But realisation how maintenance-intensive such a heavy duty suit is reawakens the debate immediately. The second justification may arise in the exceptional environments such a machine would find itself. Unmapped, unique, data intensive milieu needing minute clarification, then  classification. A quantum of options to sift and decide, every moment...but.....this observation could all be done on a dinner plate, served up to as many hungry satellite drives as needed. To be digested at leisure by such smaller devices still, and just as accurately as an apparatus so large in quantity, and hungry in power ,that 75% of motivation available is used to simply move this memory around.
And so we arrive back, a little late, slightly thirsty and certainly slighted, to this original quandary... why? Why so much, so long, and at such cost. Certainly a life form with these criteria would not last one generation, before buckling under its own weight, suffocated by its own corpulence. For it is this final, strange blade that cuts past every casual enquiry, and sits quivering inches from Cycloptoids very heart,.. entropy. That strange inevitability that ensures the very state of its organised, regimented memory will secure the eventual flight into chaos, as sure as a stars giant gravity will be the strength behind its collapse.
Surely this was known to the engineers, building essentially into their own creation unnecessary, almost cruel, redundancy. How many Cycloptoids roam now, witness to the wonders of the Universe and time itself, unable to articulate even their own name.

Carbo Cut-Away Card number 2

Number 2 from the Popular Mechanoids Red series: Carbo Cut-Away!

Carbo Cut-Away card back

Portrait of a robot

The Popular Mechanoids Trading Card Series allowed some robots exposure they would otherwise never have experienced. This manifested in various manner, the most renowned being  Ocular 7 (Red Series Card  Number 742)
 Becoming  Automaton magazine's  Gear of the Year in 1952. Starring lead in the classic film, Attack of Contraptica. Finally, becoming the subject of  avant garde artist Anti-Warp Hol-o-graph's acclaimed 'Fragmentions' series  (sample seen above).
  Ocular 7 went on to blaze a trail of independence for Mechanoids everywhere. The first to patent his own chemical formula, (Silica Eye Lubricant) , the first to own his own electrical sovereignty, and perhaps most significantly, the first licensed mechanoid to register as a free citizen of the Earth. 

Torchey, true sight is knowledge

Third of 600 in Popular Mechanoids Red Series of Trading Cards. This robot is built with vision including a negative lens, positive cornea, and mono focusing (allowing each 'eye' precise focus and high magnification). To recreate stereoscopic vision, Torchey uses a geometrical system, tracing paraxial rays of light through his optical axis to conclude relative distance, much like a chameleon. This ability does away with the need to turn, and considering the dereliction of any functioning neck mechanism, suits Torchey just fine. 

An experiment several years ago using interferometry saw eight Torcheys combining their amazing capacity to focus, cumulating in a picture of the known universe so beautiful that several scientists observing had to leave the room.