Robert the Robot, who was a product of the once-mighty Ideal Toy Company, didn’t do much, at least compared to the standards set by science fiction at the time. Unlike the helpful humanoids of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, Robert was just a 14-inch-tall hunk of plastic that could utter a few phrases, wheel around with a tethered remote control, and grip objects in his mechanical arms.

Still, Robert deserves credit for being the first plastic toy robot made in the United States, and the first toy robot to become an American sensation. He was the subject of children’s songs, enjoyed a Hollywood film cameo, and was quickly imitated by rival toy makers. He also preceded the industrial robotics boom by several years, capturing people’s imagination long before we truly understood what robots could do.

Robert maintained a high profile through copious advertising

Robert was not the first toy robot of the post-WWII era. That honor, according to Collectors Weekly, goes to Lilliput, a Japanese robot made of tin. After the war, tin lithograph toys were a popular export from American-occupied Japan, and Lilliput spawned plenty of successors.

But Robert was an American original, who according to Robotapedia was originally supposed to be a tie-in to the 1954 robot film Tobor the Great. Although Robert never appeared in the film, he received plenty of promotion on his own, debuting in the 1954 Sears Christmas catalog with an asking price of just under $6, or about $54 in 2016 dollars.

Instead of tin, Ideal used plastic injection molding–a process that itself rose to prominence during the war. Plastic was cheaper than tin or cast iron, and it allowed American companies like Ideal to produce their own toys instead of importing and reselling them.

“Robert was an answer to this massive amount of tin toys that were coming from Japan,” says Justin Pinchot, a Los Angeles-based collector of vintage toy robots and ray guns. “It was really the beginning of the plastic era.”