This looks like an amazing send-up of a product demonstration film, but the product isn’t what you’d think, and the footage is in fact a newsreel. This is the first robot woman, “Miss Honeywell, the human-tronic saleswoman of tomorrow!” She has a fabulous costume, a permanent smile, and a removable fucking head. She’s endearingly acted by the most obvious woman-in-a-robot-costume possibly ever. This, again, was a real product demo, but the “robot” wan’t the product. Via paleofuture:

In the mid and late 1960s a highly suspicious robot made the publicity circuit with its “inventor,” magician Mark Wilson promoting everything from computers to blenders. With Wilson at the controls and a blue ladybot stiffly walking like a zombie to prove just how mechanical she was, it was quite a sight to behold.

The “woman in a robot suit” stunt is so transparent as to likely be harmless, but you have to wonder how many people saw this robot’s demonstration and thought it was real.

The newsreel is fantastic. All the genius is in the details.

The compere of this show tells his audience that Miss Honeywell would make a good assistant to any sales manager. He she or it replies “Assistant nothing! I’d make someone a very good wife!”

This, while she demonstrates her superior, mechanical opening-a-door-and-taking-out-a-thing skills while proto-poplocking for an audience of dorky men who are surely wondering if she’s “fully functional,” nudge nudge.

Really, preposterous (but era-appropriate, I suppose) misogyny aside, I adore this. The music is fantastic and the production design is top notch classic past-futurism. And I love that she has a wire running from the control console to, um, somewhere up her skirt. (Was that even necessary? They surely had radio remote control devices by 1968, right?) And check out the control panel at about 1:50—“respirator?”