"Infant Catcherbots" Public Information Poster (1975)

After last week's post about the Bladder Clown surgical toy we thought it seasonally appropriate to show you another artefact filed in our Automaclown Archive B.  

Parents in the 1970s were required to submit their children to civic trials, the details of which are not fully clear to us now. We do know, however, that the few children who survived them developed debilitating paranormal powers such as retrospective-clairvoyance - the ability to see the future of people who lived in the past.

Perhaps understandably, many children went unregistered for "The Trials" and the council was forced to track them down by ever devious means. By 1975 the council had developed Catcherbots which, in various guises, lured and apprehended unregistered children. In addition to the Clown Catcherbot (see the council's Halloween poster campaign above) there were also the Jesus, 'lovely Nana', pony-demon and Noel Edmonds Catcherbot models.

Once an offending child had been identified, Catcherbots sucked them up through their 'catcherholes'. Early quantum technology made it possible for dozens of children to be imprisoned inside the Catcherbots in a space no larger than a shoe box. At least, that was the theory: many of the children were never seen again. The same technology was later used in recycling machines that crush and process plastic bottles.

Happy Halloween/Samhain! Do you know where YOUR child is tonight?

"Old Coffins are Death Traps" Public Information Poster (1975)

The recession of the 1970s gave Scarfolk Council no choice but to raise the age of retirement to 95 for men and 92 years, 36 months for women. This meant that when some people died they had not, in the eyes of the state, completed paying their dues to society.

All across Scarfolkshire coffins were exhumed and the cadavers put to work in the community. Fresher examples were dissected by children in biology classes or used in experiments by pharmaceutical and cosmetic firms. Less fresh cadavers served as scarecrows, supply teachers or junior ministers.

All this meant that hundreds of discarded coffins littered Britain's conurbations and countryside. Before long, Scarfolk's runaway children gathered the coffins in their thousands to make shanty-town-styled coffin 'cities' on the outskirts of urban areas. These settlements, which were given names such as 'Gravesend' and 'Bury', were pronounced death traps and a special branch of the police, called the Necropolice, were called in to dismantle the sites. Riots broke out and many police and children alike accidentally died after receiving nasty splinters. Despite this loss of life, thousands of pounds in funeral costs were saved as no new coffins were needed.