Shinsei: UFO Commander 7 • シンセイ工業 UFOコマンダー7

Text: Matt Alt + Robert Duban, Images: Josh Fraser + Alen Yen
Toys courtesy of the Solondz Collection

“UFO Commander 7” is the name of a 1976 toy series created by the company Shinsei. Founded in 1949, Shinsei rose to prominence with the launch of its “Mini Power” series of diecast metal vehicles in 1973. These highly detailed toys of real-life construction equipment, trucks, and race cars were similar to contemporary Dinky and Corgi diecasts. Shinsei produced a sizable number of vehicles under the “Mini Power” and “Mini Power Wide” brands, plus a variety of plastic and battery-op toys. But for the purposes of this Datafile, we’re going to zero in on a particular subset of the Mini Power line: the UFO Commander 7 line.

After several years of producing Mini Power vehicles, Shinsei decided to step out on that delightful path-less-traveled: making their own toys that seemed like licensed sci-fi characters, but were actually totally original. (In this, they were undoubtedly inspired by the success of Popy, whose Popinika and Chogokin diecasts of popular characters were breaking sales records in Japan.) Just as with Nakajima’s famed “Astro-Mu” experiments of the mid-seventies, throwing off the shackles of having to follow the spec-sheets for an existing series allowed Shinsei’s designers to think outside the box. The result? Some truly charming toys.

Although the series is called “UFO Commander 7,” there are actually eight pieces in the line. (The “7” refers to the members of the team.) Each of the toys is made almost entirely out of metal, giving them a serious heft even by the heavy-metal heyday standards of Seventies Japanese diecast toymaking. The high level of craftsmanship and attention to detail makes them standouts even today.

The double-edged sword of creating an original toy series is that while it’s a lot cheaper than sponsoring a cartoon or live-action show, you lose the power of television to help promote your products. As such Shinsei paid for a series of “UFO Commander 7” comics to run in the pages of Terebi-kun magazine from July of 1976 through February of 1977. (Advertorial content, thy name is Terebi-kun.) They were drawn in a style more reminiscent of American comic books than Japanese manga, featuring characters dressed in outfits suspiciously similar to those of Shotaro Ishinomori’s “Cyborg 009.” Excerpts were included as pamphlets packaged with each toy, and they are filled with some truly odd imagery. Land-lubber dolphins wearing glasses, veiny-brained alien emperors, and human-machine romance as the sentient construction robot Jeek Tunnelin professes its undying love for the female lead, Karen. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. We don’t kink-shame here.

The overall plot is simple. The year is 197X, because of course it is, and alien invaders are trying to destroy the Earth, because of course they are. Time is running out, for the climactic final attack is timed for the next planetary alignment. At the time the UFO Commander 7 toys were released in 1976, this would have been in the far-flung future year of 1982. That you are reading these words now would seem to suggest that the team succeeded in their efforts. #neverforget.

Interestingly for foreign collectors, a number of these toys were released in the United States. In the early ’80s, a company called Empire Toys began releasing Shinsei’s UFO Commander pieces under a new name: the Galactic Star Mite Collection. Empire also apparently managed to get the rights to Yonezawa’s Astekaizer series, mixing and matching parts to create a set of bizarre mutations.

In the Seventies, Shinsei worked together with Bandai to produce several battery-operated toys featuring anime characters such as Mazinger Z. In 1987, Bandai acquired Shinsei outright, and released a number of video games for the Family Computer and Game Boy under the Shinsei label. In 1990, Bandai merged Shinsei with an Osaka based toy firm to form a standalone toy division called Yutaka. In 2003, Bandai merged Yutaka with the old “garage kit” label B-Club to form a new incarnation of Popy. Several years later, this was in turn folded into the Bandai engineering company Plex, under which name it continues to operate today. Talk about complicated org charts! But this also means that Bandai currently owns the rights to the UFO Commander 7 series. Might one dare to dream of Soul of Chogokin styled reissues?

The UFO Commander 7 toys are numbered within the overall sequence of “Mini Power” toys, but with the added “UC” designation.