{"id":426,"date":"2008-03-02T20:09:04","date_gmt":"2008-03-03T07:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/?p=426"},"modified":"2008-03-02T20:30:44","modified_gmt":"2008-03-03T07:30:44","slug":"a18-dewey-drone-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/?p=426","title":{"rendered":"#a18 :: Dewey, Drone 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"0302081.jpg\"<\/a>I fell in love with Drones 1, and<\/a> 2 and 3 as a geeky 11-year-old science-fiction junkie.<\/p>\n

Weaned on Lost in Space<\/a>, search<\/a> Star Trek<\/a>, 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/a> and Thunderbirds<\/a>, I also grew up as a faculty brat on a college<\/a> campus awash in Earth Shoes, granola and hippie-earth-love.<\/p>\n

When Silent Running<\/a> came out, I tumbled …<\/p>\n

Bruce Dern plays the last caring environmentalist on the last star freighter carrying the last species of Terran plants and animals away from the smog-killed planet Earth.<\/p>\n

When his commanders order him to blow up the biospheres and bring the ship home, the only ones he can trust are these brilliantly designed bipedal robots.<\/p>\n

He programs them to tend the forest domes, then jettisons the domes and commits suicide by nuclear bomb. Joan Baez sings. Roll credits.<\/p>\n

Corny? Fuck yes, so what: Choked up, staggered and thorougly hooked, I set off on a quest to learn everything I could about the Drones.<\/p>\n

They were created by the great Ron Cobb<\/a>, who brought us the Nostromo<\/a>, the flying DeLorean<\/a>, Deep Core<\/a> and most of the weirder creatures in the Mos Eisley cantina.<\/p>\n

And I remember vividly a now-lost Esquire magazine profile on the double-amputee actors who climbed into Cobb’s meticulously engineered costumes and brought them to life – walking around on their hands, hoeing mulch with their tool-claws and hissing through their vents.<\/p>\n

I’ve searched in vain for a good model kit: After turning up only obscenely overpriced Japanese resin kits and the build log<\/a> for one robot nut’s<\/a> stunningly good full-sized repros, I had to settle for downloading a free papercraft version<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It took me about 4 hours to print, cut out, crease and glue together this magnificent little toy. If I can find the time to build the rest, I’ll be able to reunite him with his cardboard brothers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I fell in love with Drones 1, and 2 and 3 as a geeky 11-year-old science-fiction junkie. Weaned on Lost in Space, search Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Thunderbirds, I also grew up as a faculty brat on a college campus awash in Earth Shoes, granola and hippie-earth-love. When Silent Running came out, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,11,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-symbol","category-toy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heavylittleobjects.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}