‘Star Adventures’: a Polish children’s colouring book, partly inspired by Steel Jeeg, from Warsaw in the years immediately after the fall of Communism in Poland

September 30, 2026

‘Star Adventures’: a Polish children’s colouring book, partly inspired by Steel Jeeg, from Warsaw in the years immediately after the fall of Communism in Poland

Recently, a small cache of deadstock Polish colouring books began to emerge on the market. These measure 205 by 145mm., and are secured at their tops by staples (either side of a long hole cut for rack hanging or for a carrying by a child). They are reversible, with sets of line-drawn images with two different themes on either side of the pages – allowing the user to follow images within a particular theme depending on which direction you flick through the book. Small printing errors in the form of the outermost edges of some drawings appearing at the extremities of the wrong pages (most noticeable in the Batman series: see the images at the foot of this post), indicate that these were printed as one or more large double-sided sheets, and then cut down to assemble these books.

I know of three of these:

a Disney / cartoon animals book, which I will confess held little interest to me;
a He-Man / Batman book, which is worth looking at for the raw efficiency of the bootlegger’s art, if nothing else (I reproduce the He-Man and Batman series in full in an appendix at the foot of this post);
and a “Gwiezdne Prygody” (‘Star Adventures’) / Tom and Jerry book, with a large Mecha robot character on one of its front covers, looking like a cross between a MOTU Horde Trooper and Steel Jeeg. When ordering, I hoped this book might be filled with further bootlegged Mecha and Tokusatsu figures – but on that (and the absence of those), read on.

Of course, I bought copies of all three for my collection, mainly as they have real charm, and as these seem to be such local bootlegging efforts, I suspect I will never see any for sale again.

However, they then arrived, and I questioned if I should even write a blog on these – as the Steel Jeeg figure on the front cover of the third one is the only reference to Mecha or Tokusatsu here, and that only apparently in passing. However, on reflection, I suspect no one else will ever write these up, and the contents are so wild, that I hope my readers will allow me this small and slightly off-track self-indulgence, as something akin to the main interest of this blog that deserves to be better known.

Among the inscriptions printed at the foot of their covers, all three have the commodity classification number “SWW 1825-219” (= Systematyczny Wykaz Wyrobów, ‘Systematic nomenclature of goods’, with ‘1825’ the number for paper products, stationery, and school supplies, and the ‘-21’ suffix denoting drawing portfolios, art folders, and specialised paper pads; this system was used in Poland during the Communist era and through the 1990s). The first and second books in my list above have the somewhat obvious added statement that these are “Teczka do Kolorowania” (‘colouring books’), and a price.

However, the one that interests us here goes a little further, and tells us that it was made by “Z-d. Gal. Pap. Format” (= Zakład Galanterii Papierniczej, i.e. ‘Paper small-goods factory Format’) and gives us an address: 41 Stroma Street, Warsaw, 01-370. Surprisingly, a quick google tells me that address is the current site of a printers with the remarkably close name of ‘Format Plus Rafał Kożuchowski’ (that business founded in 2010), and I think we can presume that a previous generation (perhaps even of Mr Kożuchowski’s immediate family) operated a print shop on the same site at the time of the collapse of Communist Poland.

The contents of the book we are interested in here, as well as one of the Batman images, establish a remarkably precise date.

Let us walk through the images of the ‘Star Adventures’ series together:

The front cover, as said above, has a giant Mecha robot standing before a mountain range on a planet, with an oddly land-dominated planet and a cartoonish rocket in the sky behind. The general form and large Batman-like red bat symbol on the chest of this Mecha is that of the Horde Trooper first seen in the MOTU spin off TV series, She-Ra, Princess of Power, which aired in 1985 and ’86 in the UK and US. It ran for only two seasons, with the second cancelled before its run was over. At the risk of exposing my decrepitude, I remember it well from after school. Interestingly, this series did not air in Poland until July 2000, and so its influences here should be seen as foreign ones, accessed outside of Poland, or in materials quietly imported from Western Europe.

(A Horde Trooper from She Ra; image from this informative post here)

However, the large red oval at the figure’s waist (as opposed to a bronze circle), bright yellow armour sections and perhaps also its fluted gauntlets, clearly echo the main character of the Steel Jeeg TV series, produced by Toei Doga (now Toei Animation) and broadcast in Japan in 1975 and ’76. It was dubbed into Italian and aired in Italy in 1979 as Jeeg Robot d’acciaio, and from that Italian incarnation a Polish-dubbed version was produced for the TV channel Polonia 1, named Stalowy Jeeg, which saw enormous popularity in Poland in the 1990s.

(Steel Jeeg; image from here)

Due to problems with the surviving records of that tumultuous time, an exact date for its initial showing in Poland is now hard to pinpoint, but we can be certain that it did not predate the launch of the Polonia 1 network in March 1993, and was most probably part of an initial wave of classic Mecha and Anime imported by them from Italian TV as soon as they opened for business.

Sadly, that is the last Steel Jeeg reference in this book, which instead chases a children’s TV space series theme, and shows, in the following order:

2. A strangely clothed Alf-like alien (Alf aired in the UK and US from 1986, but in Poland from March 1991), wearing long flowing robes and epaulettes, and with antlers on his head (if any reader has more information on the source of these antlers please do get in touch);

3. A futuristic vehicle, half armoured tank and half dragster, that I cannot easily identify any source for (again all suggestions gratefully received);

4. A simplified Kowl from She-Ra;

5. A threateningly squatting Shredder (but without his weapons, most notably the sword-like knives mounted in his gloves) from the TMNT series, that first shown in the UK and US from 1987 to ’96, but in Poland from September 1991;

6. The same Alf-like alien, now perhaps with his wife or partner;

7. A simplified depiction of She-Ra within a circle;

8. Most oddly of all, the female versions of the California Raisins, an advertising gimmick popular on TV and in novelty figures and the like, from 1986 to 1994. The image here was taken from the intro to the California Raisin Show, which aired in 1989 in the US and UK, and in Poland in the early 1990s:

(Image taken as a still from this Youtube video, here)

9. And finally, Princess Adora and a somewhat clumsily drawn Madame Razz from She-Ra.

I shall give the He-Man and Batman images from the other book, in order of appearance, in an appendix at the foot of this post. However, one of the Batman images is relevant here, in that it shows the Joker, with the distinctive facial features of Jack Nicholson, who played the character in the 1989 film Batman:

So we can establish the date quite closely, in that the origin of most of these images, at least in Poland, fits into the last year or so of the 1980s and the opening years of the 1990s. The majority of these references cluster in the opening years of the 1990s, and the Steel Jeeg overtones in the cover image were probably a topical note that probably fixes the date of these colouring books in the second half of 1993 or the opening months of 1994.

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These may only contain a small drop of our usual subject matter here, but they do show the importance that the arrival of Steel Jeeg had in post-Communist Poland. Alongside other Mecha, Tokusatsu and kaiju TV programmes, these were welcomed there as part of an explosion of interest in foreign cultural goods and influences, immediately after the lifting of the strict restrictions on such cultural influences under Communism. As such, these are important witnesses to a crucial moment of social transition in Poland, with its wonderfully creative Communist-era bootlegging industry still in full force, but before any real integration with Western European business practices.

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Appendix – the He-Man and Batman series.

The He-Man series: