PACHI
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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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I accept that on the reading front, the world and I have diverged onto increasingly different paths – and if Melville or Tolkien wrote today they would be under pressure to get their point across in under 140 characters or in some earworm dance segment that reveals the author in his underwear in the last…
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As regular readers know, I try to keep it classy here, focusing my attention on the sophisticated and highbrow end of pachi and bootlegs. However, the popularity of a recent post on Instagram has persuaded me to open up the ‘guilty pleasures’ barrel and peek downwards at what lurks at the bottom. The public have…
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Before we get going with this post, it should be recognised that at least half the work below has been done by my esteemed friend and bootleg co-hunter and researcher, Jamie Francis (see here and here). Thus, this blog is published in both his and my name as a collective research project. Like any good…
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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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Some bootleg Godzillas are so glorious that it would be wrong to look at them too quickly – so just breathe with me and keep your eyes focused up here, and we can count together to steady our nerves: 1-hippopotamus, 2-hippopotamus, 3-hippopotamus, 4-hippopotamus, 5-hippopotamus. Ok, now look down: We finally come to the wonders that…
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Just as Spain has the crown in the western part of Europe for the number and variety of bootleg Godzillas and kaiju (see my earlier posts on JHL and Hermanos Pardines), then Poland has the equal honour in the eastern part of Europe. There are many similarities to the bootlegger’s art in both, and also…
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In another post, I set out the relationship between a Taiwanese-made pachi of Bemstar, a Triceratops-headed creature, a Zaragas, an ET, a warty Ewok, a bipedal Jabba and a smiling Kong (now there’s a litany of bizarre bootleg toys!), and the fact that the first four of these most probably came in a larger and…
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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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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 Polish…
Confessions of a Kaiju Hunter 