BOOTLEG GODZILLAS
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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…
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When I began to work on assembling all known Godzilla bootlegs into a vast evolutionary tree, my greatest surprise was that no one had attempted it already. As I got further and further into the task, I continually hit the problem of perspective. Quite simply, while legions of people over the last few decades have…
