PACHI
-
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…
-
In the last years of the 1980s and around 1990, a Spanish toy manufacturer named Hermanos Pardines (‘the Pardines brothers’; often shortened to HP) from Ibi in the province of Alicante in south-eastern Spain, jumped onto the Dinosaucers figures bandwagon. The region of Spain around Ibi was an important one for the Spanish toy industry,…
-
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…
-
A chance purchase of this strange-looking Bemstar, then unidentified, lead me down a long rabbit-hole, linking this remarkably rare Taiwanese-made pachi to one of the most common ET bootlegs of the 1980s and some spectacularly rare and peculiarly innovative Star Wars inspired pachi, including a standing Jabba bounty-hunter and a nightmare-fuel Ewok with piercing blue…
-
Here we take a trek into what is perhaps relatively unknown territory for many Godzilla and kaiju collectors – the lawless wastelands of 1980s and 1990s Italy and its prolific and inventive bootleggers. When collecting bootlegs, one occasionally finds illicit copying of intellectual property so blatant and shameless that you are tempted to stand and…
-
There are a few rare Pachi that I always have one eye on the Japanese market for – and by a strange stroke of fate both this exceedingly rare Taiwanese tortoise and his bull associate recently appeared in sales in Japan in the course of a single week. The bull was unidentified there, while the…
-
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 