A 1998 bootleg toy turns the Titanic into a giant robot. Naturally, somebody built a full web page and dropped an iceberg on it.
Visit Reasonably Clever’s Titanic-Bot page
The page identifies the toy as “Titanic-Bot,” a Fall/Winter 1998 bootleg associated with Flying Dragon Toys. Its ship mode resembles the doomed liner, while the transformation produces a robot whose smokestacks protrude from its chest and whose masts become weapons.
This alone would have been enough material for most websites.
Reasonably Clever kept going.
The scientific method, approximately
Christopher Doyle’s page documents the packaging, item number, robot mode, transformation, artwork, and construction. Then it asks the only question that actually matters:
How does Titanic-Bot handle an iceberg?
The test procedure is gloriously stupid and completely documented.
First the toy is floated in water. It barely floats, but it floats. Then Doyle freezes a block of ice. Finally the iceberg is dropped onto the toy from roughly six feet.
Titanic-Bot survives.
The resulting page is exactly the sort of object the modern web tends to erase. There is no SEO justification for spending this much effort on one terrible transforming toy. There is no affiliate funnel, no ten-item list, and no attempt to turn the subject into a content franchise.
Somebody found an absurd object, thought it was funny, photographed it carefully, wrote down everything about it, and published the joke permanently.
The page still carries period web debris too: references to Macromedia Flash, LiveJournal, homemade graphics, and the old habit of placing legal trademark disclaimers directly beneath something profoundly unserious.
Reasonably Clever describes itself as wasting the reader’s workday since 1995.
That is almost a mission statement for an entire lost category of web publishing.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes many pages that survived because somebody cared about a subject far beyond any reasonable commercial value.
Titanic-Bot is one of the dumbest.
That makes it one of the best.