Otakumerica have an important Godzilla head mold on eBay – I have forgotten how to breathe and I may faint

(Images here from Otakumerica’s Instagram post; reused with their kind permission)

Otakumerica continue to amaze with having the best stuff (plus also being the nicest and most helpful people – and those one in 100 toy-dealers who write back when obsessives like me ask really detail-focussed questions), and today they have listed this breathtaking nickel-copper rotomold used in the production of vinyl Godzilla heads for Equity Toys Godzilla backpacks, that were produced in 1998 (see image above).

Equity Toys originally began as Marketing Equities International in 1983, a travel marketing firm based in New York. The year after that Equity Marketing was founded as a subdivision of that parent company, and they expanded into promotional campaigns including toys, creating toys for Arby’s and a Cabbage Patch Kids promotion for Coca-Cola, before partnering with Burger King to launch a huge Thundercats promotional campaign and using that success to pivot into working relationships with Toys “R” Us and Walmart that focused on what was ‘hot’ in cinema at the time. All that set them up as perhaps the most important toy marketer in the Western world when the Tristar Films Godzilla reboot was released in 1998. Of course, these Godzilla toys were not bootlegs, but the vast flood of the toys produced (mostly in China, for the West), including pens, hats, hand-puppets and this iconic schoolbag, was so great that they deserve an honourable mention here. In addition, I suspect that one of the large hand-puppets may have been my among my first (and now long-lost) Godzilla toys (and was perhaps the only licensed one; alongside bootleg Korean Godzilla ‘grippers’ and JHL Godzillas bought in Spain). Badly dubbed Godzilla films on VHS were hard enough to come by in 1980s and 1990s Europe, and Sofubi were almost completely unseen outside of Japan, the Far East and certain pockets of America at that time.

From the knobbled or metallic-tumorous-looking outer surface here we can see instantly that this was produced by the same electroplating method discussed by me in my earlier post on JHL’s bootleg Godzillas. In that process, these were built up by passing an electrical current through a nickel-copper solution bath with a master mold (probably in wax) suspended in it. Once a thickness of metal between 5 and 8mm. was built up around the master mold, these were removed from the electroplating bath, and heated to melt away the wax of the master, leaving the aperture in the desired shape within the metal mold. These molds were then attached to iron or steel mounts and bolted in pairs (for balance) within a rotomolding machine, which when each was filled with a small amount of plastic powder and sealed, were then slowly rotated on two axes within an oven, causing the plastic to melt and evenly coat the internal mold walls. As a witness to the continued use of this method of vinyl toy production as late as 1998 in China, the survival of this mold is important enough, and even more so when we consider that, to the best of my knowledge, no earlier Chinese molds for Godzillas (such as those used by Imperial, Dor Mei or the myriad of other companies there) survived the recycling processes there after they fell out of use. We might presume that this one did as it was sent back to the head office of Equity Toys as a display model, or was carried off by an employee returning to the States after a period in China.

(Some extra images from the eBay listing; reproduced here with Otakumerica’s kind permission)

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Eitherway, in my humble opinion at least, there are collectors of toys, and in the rarefied atmosphere above them there are collectors of Godzilla and kaiju toys, and then high above them in the soaring and lofty vinyl heavens, those lucky few who get to own production materials from those.

The auction is live here, so why are you still reading this? Run towards the dream!

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Confessions of a Kaiju Hunter