Remember this toy–Mr. Machine? It came out in 1960, and my kid brother soon got one.
The cool thing about Mr. Machine was, you could take him apart and put him back together, and he’d still work. The design was practically foolproof: the parts were simple and sturdy, very hard to break, and the only way you could put him back together was the right way. It would be nice if more of the gizmos in our lives were like that.
Maybe, if you were only three or four years old, and of a particularly sensitive bent, you might’ve found Mr. Machine a tiny bit unnerving. But the commercials were in black and white, and Mr. Machine in person–as it were!–was a nice, bright, cheery red. He wasn’t really all that menacing.