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While the foreign car factories were laying off staff in favour of this toy’s older brothers, kids across the land were celebrating their new-found ability to remotely move objects around the kitchen table. By twiddling around a couple of joystick levers on the base, Armatron’s various shoulder, wrist and elbow joints could be manoeuvred to pick up anything within it’s admittedly limited reach. In theory. Anything slightly more delicate than the plastic canisters, cones and globes included (an egg, say) would break under pressure between the rubberised jaws, and so any notions of performing David Banner-style laboratory experiments were soon similarly shattered.

Although the lab-coated ginger kids on the box photos hinted otherwise, Armatron was actually intended as a race-against-time game of skill and coordination. Bright-orange ‘energy-level’ indicators on the console acted as a kind of countdown: when the gauge reached zero (‘total discharge’), Armatron turned itself off. Although this probably conserved some of that D-cell battery life, it wasn’t half annoying if you were just seconds away from tightly gripping on to your sleeping cat’s tail.

Armatron was manufactured in Singapore by Tomy and imported by Radio Shack, inspiring loads of knock-off versions in the ’80s.¹ A veritable miracle of engineering, it shipped with a single electric motor and a mass of nylon gears and clutches throughout the entire base and arm (as anyone who opened it up would discover). A late addition to the range was the Mobile Armatron, which came on caterpillar tracks (though the remote control wire was only half a metre long). Quite what this added to the game is anyone’s guess.

Robotics enthusiasts delighted in ‘hacking’ the toy (i.e. ‘tricking it out’ with motion sensors or a steam-powered engine), which makes a complete one hard to track down these days. In any case, poorer kids had to make do with the manually ratchet-operated Robot Arm, a Terminator-esque Robot Hand or Robot Claw, each of which–though less impressive–could be secreted up the sleeve of a Parka to aid in the pretence of the owner having been transformed into some kind of futuristic human cyborg. Pop into Hamleys and you’ll find a new version of these going by the name Armatron. But we know the truth.

See also Tasco Telescope, Electronic Project, Slinky

1 Radio Shack eventually acquired the manufacturing rights and re-released the toy in the ’90s under the new name Super Armatron, even though it was mechanically exactly the same.