Cris Rose is known within the the toy community as a customizer with excellent painting skills. Add toy designer to his growing rep. He’s about to drop the first edition of his original hand-cast limited-edition resin figure, Runcible.
Cris has developed an extensive story for this charming robot (included after the jump), but the quick synopsis is that Runcible ends up inhabiting a world devoid of humans and other robots and thus tends to caring for plants and animals. As a reassurance to wary humans, his long gone creator restricted Runcible’s means of communication to a visual one – whatever the robot is thinking about appears in the clear display area in his head.
Each edition of the figure will have a different object embedded in the head. For this first debut Edition A it’s a leaf symbolizing nature. Cris will be making the five Edition A Figures (£ 39.99 / $74) plus one special “Grandfather’” one-off edition (£120) available through his web store this Sunday, September 28th @ 18:00 GMT.
The Grandfather edition is a tribute to Cris’s grandfather, a radio repairmen, who was the inspiration for the project. Each runcible edition release will be accompanied by a Grandfather edition which will incorporate a radio part from his grandfather.
This is a very cool project with a great aesthetic and the price is rather amazing given the hand-cast low-run nature of the figure. Cris’s future plans include Runcible Edition B (10 pieces) to be released exclusively at They Walk Among Us. There will also be two additional figures in this line – the 3.5” Rotund and a larger Reaper figure. See more of Runcible after the jump.
Runcible Backstory by Cris Rose
Runcible was created in London, 2108 – the life’s work of one man. He had long realised that the reason why people rejected the idea of intelligent, humanoid, robot companions, was because their cold and emotionless forms always seemed to be hiding something sinister. They couldn’t be trusted.
This, combined with the unrealistic energy demands of such complex creations, had stunted robotics for a century and kept the whole of society from moving forward…
His technological solution was brilliant, his social solution simple. Runcible was the first to be powered by a self-repairing Nanomagnetic core, drawing the power he required directly from the earth’s magnetic field. No fuel, no pollution, no maintenance required. He was made without a voice or face – instead he was given a giant clear head into which all his thoughts and feelings were clearly projected, meaning that he could never conceal his true thoughts.
The acceptance was instantaneous, and the social effect overwhelming. People no longer feared him as he wasn’t an attempt to imitate and replace them.
With unlimited financial backing given to his creator, Runcible would soon be made rendered obsolete. However his creator was very fond of him, and quickly ensured that he would made a permanent member of his family by exercising his newfound power and wealth and having him declared equal to humans in every way. There was still fear though, so a provision was made stipulating that no robot would ever be created equal to man again. Law was passed.
Soon the robots outnumbered humans as Mankind reached a new golden era. With robots taking over basic tasks mankind was free to dedicate himself to higher concerns.
One afternoon, April 2318, Runcible was wandering the family estate deep in the English countryside, tending to the grounds and collecting wood from the forest he himself had planted 200 years previously. He’d been happy to spend his time helping raise subsequent generations of his family, and helping them continue his creator’s work. Runcible found himself at the very centre of the forest, where a tree bigger than any other stood. This was the single Oak his creator had planted as a small child, and where he now lay buried inside it’s hollow.
It was then that the mistake happened. The blast knocked him to the floor, deactivated. Runcible lay next to his creator in that hollow for 140 years as nature reclaimed the planet.
Runcible was reactivated by a young Deer that nudged his foliage covered body, and he found that mankind was no more. Nothing man-mad had survived intact, except for him, protected by the forest and the mightiest oak. After some basic repairs to his corroded body, he wandered the country looking for a reason why this had happened, but found nothing. So he returned to the Forest and decided that as no humans remained, and it was nature that had saved him, that he should continue to tend to the grounds as he always had and become friends with the animals that inhabited it.
Edition A finds Runcible at this point, 350 years old, decayed and coming to terms with his new existence.
