When I began to work on assembling all known Godzilla bootlegs into a vast evolutionary tree, my greatest surprise was that no one had attempted it already. As I got further and further into the task, I continually hit the problem of perspective. Quite simply, while legions of people over the last few decades have been trying to sift through the links between various Godzilla figures to give context and more accurate dates to their production, no one I can see has taken anything other than a local point of perspective, and that dooms their efforts to only revealing a small piece or so of the whole puzzle.

An American blogger states that “almost all bootleg Godzillas come from Mexico”, because all those known locally to him do so. Yet a moment or so of contemplation and research shows that to be wrong. To many of the Spanish commentators, the Godzillas and Kaiju created there, are all the bastard impure children of the abortive Dinosaucers toy lines, and the fact that more than half of their bodies are drawn from Chinese and Japanese models is swept under the carpet. Similarly, the overall remit of venerable websites such as Toho Kingdom or the Sphinx fixes their focal points from one limiting perspective (in their former case from Japan looking outwards and no further than China; and in the latter only on what was present in the United States in the relevant decades), and collections of material, such as that found occasionally on Skullbrain.org, become too messy and disorganised to see any pattern clearly, or have any hope of being comprehensive. I do not mean to attack these internet institutions, and each is like a Holy Book to me, but only to point out that while their approach has purpose within their remit, it actively inhibits any global view of the bootlegging of Godzillas, and blocks our ability to see the whole picture.

The present distribution of almost every Chinese knock-off shows that these were carried to children across the globe almost without limits. In many ways these toys were the great unifiers of childhood experience in the 1980s and 1990s – and a Vietnamese child, or Uruguayan one might well recognise the Godzillas I owned as a small boy, or at least the gaping Chinasaurs. Where political or economic barriers forbade their wide distribution, or at least slowed their sale in large numbers in a locality, locally made bootlegs sprung up and carried forward the mission of their Chinese forebears. In that sense, these toys knew almost no boundaries, and so we cannot begin to comprehensively or accurately examine them if we halt our enquiries at some modern geographical line on the map.

Thus, I turn my attention first to the Chinese groups: the Imperial, the Dor Mei and the Soma clusters, and after that to their offspring around the world. I hope not to overwhelm my reader in variants, but instead to produce something like a field guide.