Chinese-region bootleg Godzillas -the plastic tide from the East
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Somewhere in the blizzard of strange toy mashups that was the 1980s, and driven by the booming popularity of skateboarding, a lot of mini toy-figures on skateboards hit the market. I was way too physically uncoordinated to ever get on a skateboard or view them as anything other than instruments of torture, but many were…
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In a previous post (‘“Call me Ishmael”: the hunt for the great white Gojira’) I discussed a close-knit group of white Dor Mei Godzillas, all produced in China and with the copyright date ‘1986’ under their feet. It is clear from that post that the manufacturers struggled with their materials in the production of these…
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Toy bootlegging, at its heart, is an anonymous pursuit, usually operating on or outside the boundaries of copyright law and trying to avoid simple detection. Thus, the companies involved often did all that they could to cover their tracks, and not lead any disgruntled toy manufacturers to their doorstep whose designs may been ‘borrowed’ or…
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If these little critters, with spring-loaded arms that allow them to be clipped to objects, don’t bring you immediate waves of warm nostalgia, then I’m afraid you might be too youthful and filled with zest, vigor and natural joie de vivre to be reading this blog. … Ok, now it’s just us old farts lamenting…
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Two notes before we deep dive into the nerdy details here (I can tell you already as excited as me) – the first is the quote in the title here is obvs. from Shakespeare’s Othello, act 3, scene 2. The second is that some of what it written here has already appeared in my vast…
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This post is a little different to my others, as it originates from a nearly empty file of mine, despite lengthy searches for information. I have hit a wall, and so this post is more an appeal for information, than a crystallisation of my conclusions. It concerns an exceptionally rare Godzilla bootleg, produced in hollow…
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(Images from Jamie Francis, and reproduced here with his permission) I hope not to shock devoted readers by a non vintage offering (here in an example in the collection of my friend and fellow devoted kaiju hunter, Jamie Francis: see Facebook and Instagram). However, this bicephalic Godzilla bootleg has so much charm that it is…
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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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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…
Confessions of a Kaiju Hunter 