Sunday, November 23, 2008

Retro Cartoon Robot Papercraft

There are two things that always make me smile: monkeys and robots. So you can expect to see builds of both in the future. :) Today the post goes to robots.

On the left is Rosie the robot maid from the early 60's American television cartoon The Jetsons . The model may look simple but it actually took some time to complete. The original template is very small, without instructions, and was not designed with any gluing tabs. I enlarged the template almost 100% and improvised my own gluing tabs to make it easier to build. The original template was designed by Phil Shore, USA, 2008 and can be found here.

On the right is H.E.R.B.I.E (Humanoid Experimental Robot, B-type, Integrated Electronics) from the 1978 Saturday morning cartoon The Fantastic Four which was based on the Marvel comic book series of the same name. The H.E.R.B.I.E character was designed by none other than comic book legend Jack Kirby who was working as a story board artist for the show at the time. After the show was canceled, H.E.R.B.I.E eventually began making appearances in the FF comic books themselves. The template for this papercraft was designed by Sean Kleefeld, USA, 1998 as part of a "fun pack" which is offered on his Fantastic Four fan site here. The original template was designed to be assembled without glue but I improvised some gluing tabs on the head and body to help the model hold its shape better.

UPDATE 05.27.2009: Unfortunately the link to H.E.R.B.I.E seems to be permanently dead. I don't think Mr. Kleefeld would mind if I posted an image of the template so that others can continue to enjoy building his creation, so here it is: