Toy Ray Guns Site

Metcalf, Eugene. ToyRayGun site. Copyright date of 1998, in operation September 1997 at least through early 2015.

Web site. Called "a celebration of study of toy ray runs," the site looks at ray guns as the "stuff of fancy" and related to imagination and our capacity for wonder. Additionally, EM sees them as "weapons intended to protect us from our darkest fears of the unknown," reminding us just how dangerous that unknown cosmos might be. Ray guns also embody a kind of "testimony to the fact that we" Earth-bound humans "often conceive of even the majesty of space as a backdrop for our" necessarily parochial, by such standards, "conflicts and struggles." The collection pictures ray guns "From the exuberant Art Deco disintegrator pistols of the 1930s, to the streamlined and Futuristic tin litho sparkers of the 50s and the darkly post-apocalyptic" (arguably po-mo?) "nitro blasters of today" (home page). Includes an excellent link page to related sites on the World Wide Web.