European made Pachi
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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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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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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
Confessions of a Kaiju Hunter 