BOOTLEG GODZILLAS
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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…
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These are bootlegs of such purity in their economy of production, and extreme rarity in their survival and availability, that I feel a sense of real pride at having obtained two in my hunts. If what thrills the pachi and bootleg hunter is the absence of lists of products with photographs issued by the manufacturers,…
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For those interested in bootleg Godzillas and a few related kaiju, the company names of Imperial and Dor Mei are the bedrock from which all else has been built. These are the ones that we, outside Japan, played with as children, and the vast majority of surviving bootleg Godzillas can be seen as an adaptation…
Confessions of a Kaiju Hunter 