BOOTLEG GODZILLAS
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Today I feel a bit foolish, but am glad of the chance to rectify my earlier omission. In my previous post on the Tsunami of Chinese-made Godzilla bootlegs for the Western market, I catalogued a bootleg of the Dor Mei Godzilla (my *Bootleg of Dor Mei model 1, the ‘lunar-crater skin Godzilla’ in my earlier…
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kaiju Sometimes the hunting of new and rare kaiju takes you into strange territory. While online and idling away a long sleepless night sometime ago, I stumbled across a toy offered by a Polish seller just north west of Warsaw, described as a USSR-made character named Cebulka (‘Little Onion’), but in fact a previously unrecorded…
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My passionate love for all things JHL continues – a few weeks ago, I saw a sale post by the friendly and helpful Luis Cesar Marquez (I heartily recommend him to any reader as a contact in the Spanish toy-trade) and added an update to my main post on JHL about a brown variant with…
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I recently acquired this gloriously illustrated sticker album, complete apart from five stickers – and those missing stickers all from the last leaf of the book where the spaces for the final four stickers in the main sequence were repeated twice more at the end of the album – presumably to drive the original child-owner…
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As I have said in another post, the Dor Mei Godzilla bootlegs usually come in two colour schemes: green with orange highlights, and black with red or green highlights. But, there is a third, much rarer, variant in a pale blue-white base colour that was thickly painted over a dark (usually black) vinyl body, and…
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A pedantic reader might well make the assertion that the subjects of this particular blogpost are at some remove from Godzilla, and they may well be right. There is much of the silently screaming chinasaur here in both. However, when we turn to the ‘Kong Hong’ finger puppet here, it is clear that it was…
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The company JHL are synonymous with European bootlegs of Godzilla, and yet very little is known about them. Like most toy bootleggers in Spain they operated out of Ibi in the south-eastern province of Alicante, and exploited the grey area between the existing Spanish legislation around bootlegging and the authorities lax enforcement of this for…
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The same Orion Home Movie rental promotion that released the bootleg Godzilla-clock into the United States in November 1989, which in turn gave birth to the near-identical Chinese bootleg (see previous post on the Serbian bootleg Godzilla), also gave rise to a group of common bootleg Godzillas in Spain. Spain had a booming toy-bootlegging market…
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China and Hong Kong dominate the world of bootleg Godzillas, and thus any produced elsewhere are fascinating in themselves, and the few produced in Europe are extremely so. European bootleg toys were not produced everywhere, and seem to have been made mainly where political barriers (such as the Iron Curtain) or economic hardships placed the…
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I will discuss the ‘Super Dino Monsters’ minis line of pachi in another post, and will show there that these were probably produced by Muraoka in China at some point in the late 1980s, or more probably the early 1990s, and marketed to the United States and to Japan (in the latter’s case with the…
Confessions of a Kaiju Hunter 