The Incredible Shrinking Robby November 9, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : General, DVD News & Info , add a commentRemember when you were a small child and everything looked so big?
Everything that mattered at least; the telly, toys, food, bed, your first primary teacher’s breasts (precocious child, I). Wasn’t hard to empathise with Grant Williams in The Incredible Shrinking Man who had to put up with baggy clothes (hand me downs from my older brother), gigantic scraps of food (I swear the local chippy deep fried cod two-foot long) and huge, scary arachnids (they’ve always looked huge to me; me and Woody Allen, who once famously dealt with a spider ‘the size of a Buick’).
But toys; when you’re seven or eight, those little wind up things look, thanks to a childs almost limitless capacity to create worlds within worlds (cardboard boxes becoming anything from a three masted man ‘o war, to Supercar, a Tardis, or an arrow punctured stagecoach), as gi-normous as the real thing. Or in the case of Robby The Robot, the real, imaginary thing.
As I described in Monsters, John! Monsters from the id!, my childhood model of Robby was so damned cool, though it stood probably no higher than eight, maybe nine inches (20 - 25 centimeters for those confused by Imperial measure). In my head it was an unstoppable, mechanical hero or villain (depending on the scenario), spitting fire from it’s tiny clockwork head, falling over when it hit anything larger than a tinned bean (or the back of mum’s hand - ‘get that thing off the table!’)
So, my Forbidden Planet Ultimate Collectors Edition arrived today. It’s a humongous tin which, in itself (size being everything), is exciting. In transit (to the suppliers I suspect, the package being unmarked), it’s taken a couple of whacks, nothing serious. I claw, somewhat frantically, at the plastic cover, whip open the tin’s hinged lid, and…blow me, what’s that?
I feel like the kid on Christmas Day who wakes after dreams of sacks full of goodies, hand delivered by Santa himself…only to find that it’s still barely November (and, besides, Christmas is cancelled this year). Yup, there’s the Forbidden Planet digipak 2-disc set, complete with a sleeve of nicely produced lobby card reproductions, and underneath is Robby.
Barely three inches tall, like a pea on a drum. Shrunken in stature a la Fantastic Voyage. Tiny. Not big. Small.
Look, I’m 50-years-old and I can’t even wind the damn thing up and play with it? It’s not a wind-up toy, dummy, it’s a faithful reproduction of the actual Robby, scrupulously detailed….aw, screw that. I wanted to wind him, watch him go, spit phony mechanical sparks and tell me that there is ‘danger! Danger…!’ No danger of that. He’s about the size of your average (economy) fish finger, and about as threatening.
Bugger. Bugger, bugger, bugger (bugger). So, here I am, running out of shelf space, buying an Ultimate Collectors Edition the size of a medium sized roasting tin (and far less useful), for almost triple the cost of buying the two-disc set itself, which, when it comes down to it, is all I’m interested in. I am a marketing man’s dream.
Come on, the voice of reason (or justification) whispers softly in my head, you’ve got yourself a collectible tin, a finely crafted homage to a Hollywood legend (‘not a toy’ should be printed on there in 72-point bold), a desirable piece of…no, won’t wash. I repeat, all I’m interested in is the 2-disc set. Well, that and turning back time.
Your youth. When it’s gone, it’s gone. You can’t even buy it back, it seems…