Chinese-region made 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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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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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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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…
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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…
Confessions of a Kaiju Hunter 