toyboxdx toy blog brog: is graceful art of daily expressing japanese toy  

Santa Claus and his elves repair some
Takatoku Akumaizer Gullibirds ;-)

I have been on this plane for what seems like years. I had a sinus infection for the better part of my work trip, but this did nothing to throw my insane plan to stop in Tokyo during my extended 12 layover. I had a mission, and that was to find the girl a present from Mandarake.

With my call to Alt the night before and a few quickly scribbled notes on the location of the Mandarake Complex, I got on the 7:44 am NEX from Narita and got my camera ready to document the quick trip to the motherland.

I relied on my memories of the train system and managed to get to Akihabara a couple hours before the noon opening of this black monolith of Otaku. I spoke briefly and polished up my crippled Japanese skills with a couple flyer girls asking where the store was and found I was pretty close by. A good friend of mine came along from work and we got some food nearby. I ate my mackeral with abandon dreaming of what the store would have waiting.

Needless to say, I was slightly dissapointed as most of the floors catered to the new skool and I silently regretted not going to Nakano to get my vintage fix. That said, I did manage to pick up a cheap Billiken tin that I needed and afterwards turned to my companion and said I wanted to get to Shibuya…it was near his hotel anyway, and I still have maybe an hour before I needed to be on the next NEX train to the airport. I was counting minutes literally.

Back on the Yamanote we go, and 30 minutes later, I am in my familiar zone, the place I used to hang and eat, watch overage women dressed as local school girls to keep their wealthy aging benefactors , and steer around the sketchy Eastern blockers who always made Hong Kong Rolex dealers seem tame and legit. I LOVED being back here even if it was for 20 minutes… literally.

Run down “seizure” strobe stairs into the depths of Mandarake, and make my way past the teenager cosplayers who greeted me.

Walking with purpose I notice the quality of vintage has been severely depleted by the raging internet and my hopes of finding anything seem dim at best for my nerd woman.

With 2 minutes left in my clock, I spy a worthy option, a Mint in bag Curricular machine st vinyl. His teddy bear stare prompts the yen in my pocket to loosen and I motion the tween store clerk out of his slumber to bring this gem to the even younger check out girl. Bagged, paid..score.

One minute to go, I say my goodbyes to my friend, promise we will hang out longer next time and get back to the train with moment to spare. I sit on the train and sigh with relief. Regan will be pleased and I make a mental notch on my hardcore belt.

Sometimes it is fun to be insane.

Added Bonus: Mandarake Dec 15th at 1:30 pm

バルタン星人

Lazy sunday on the couch. Time for some sand dune motocross action!

Aoshin Tekkaman Cycle. The plastic bike is battery operated, drives forward
and it even could do wheelies. High tech gimmick called “spin action” .

The Tekkaman Cycle comes in a nice colorful box.

Tekkaman rides back into the glass display.

I need my couch for myself. Lazy sunday continuous…

Custom one-of-a-kind Mach Baron Machinder Qee by Spencer and Stephen Ong of Rotobox Vinyl Anatomica.Rotobox. (Photo by Spencer & Stephen Ong)

Six months ago, I came across some custom jumbo vinyl works by Spencer & Stephen Ong and I was really fascinated by them. The brothers did some beautiful one of a kind pieces like Mekanda Robo, Voltes V, Gaiking, and Daimos. Being a designer, I really appreciated the level of craftsmanship and detail that they put into each piece. Well, my friends here know I have a thing for Mach Baron and that got the gears in my head spinning. “I wonder if these guys can make me a custom Mach Baron?”, I thought.

So that’s how it all began. I got in touch with Spencer and said I would like to commission them to create a Mach Baron. “Sure, we can do a custom Mach Baron.”, said Spencer. After some emailing back and forth, we agreed on a timeline, price, etc. I sent him some photos of Mach Baron and requested certain Tamiya colors for the figure. And away they started with the work. Spencer was really quick in turning around some sketches. I gave him my feedback and had him tweak Mach’s eyes to my liking. It was a nice collaborative effort. Spencer would periodically send me photos of their progress. I learned a lot about how they went about sculpting a generic vinyl cast into a Mach Baron. It was all fascinating to me.

When I finally saw the finished piece, I was more than please…I was BLOWN AWAY! I got everything I asked for and more. These guys are truly dedicated to their craft. I have many wonderful Mach Barons in my collection but this one by the Ong brothers is definitely a MASTERPIECE that I will treasure.

If you would like a custom piece of your own in 6″, 8″, 16″, or 24″, I recommend you contact these two da Vinci brothers at info@rotoboxvinylanatomica.com or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/rotobox.

Takara King Walder Jr. Plantman – 9" doll

You may have already figured this out but I’ve spent a good (embarrassing?) chunk of the last decade collecting, photographing, and obsessing over (primarily Japanese) toys.

In the interim, I have taught myself a lot about studio photography, photoshop composites, and credit card debt.

One of the main effects this odd combination of craft and immature materialism had was the drawing of my incipient visual creativity out of its cave and into the light: due to my success with the tools and skills, I went from being overqualified as a retail schmuck to entering the fields of graphic and web design. Had I not felt the urge to share my toy-obsession online with similarly obsessed friends, I might still be toiling unhappily behind some store’s counter.

The flip-side, however, is that I somehow felt that what I was creating – images of other people’s plastic and zinc designs composited with scenes I chose to place them in – was viable beyond the simple titillation of my chosen group of online hombres.

Fueling this misconception, in the mid-2000’s and thanks to a friend, I reached a verbal (if you can call email “verbal”) agreement with a publishing company to produce a book of my composite shots, a deal that petered out a few months later when the company realized that marketing the images would be difficult.

Despite this reality check, I continued to make the images, not only for fun but also convinced by people’s professed enjoyment that I had a shot at marketing them. As a test, I began selling shirts and calendars of my toy pictures via Cafepress and gained a small following of people who continue to pick up my offerings with relative, annual regularity.

Though my situation eventually changed so that I could no longer afford to buy toys, I continued to make composites, using them as a bridge to my still-collecting, online friends … and my illusion of the images’ value outside this fan-boy circle grew.

Earlier this year, I felt ready to set out once again to produce the book. Before beginning, I solicited opinions from a few trusted parties and, with my new skills, decided to layout the book myself, thus creating a more professional vehicle (if not an actual end product) for the collection.

During this process, there was a war going on within me between the rational and the hopeful. On the one hand, I really felt that my work was not only fun but valid, marketable. On the other, I knew that what I was engaged in was really a gigantic cheat. The central focus of my images weren’t mine. Sure, I’d applied lots of hard-won skills, labor, and money into the project but that didn’t change the fact that the main designs had been stolen from others. Imagine a book of Disney-related toys in similar shots being produced and sold without Disney’s permission and outside their original story lines. Yeah, no problem there … *cough*

When I felt I had something to show, I asked the same friend who’d hooked me up with my original publishing deal, now wiser and a published author himself, to take a look at the rough draft of the book for me. He kindly did so and then hit me with the facts: this was good, fun, fan work but otherwise pretty unrealistic, as it constituted copyright infringement.

His tactfully presented but clear comments hit home, shattering the remnants of my illusion. I mothballed the project and entered one of the deepest funks I have known in years. I felt, after a life of half-assed creative endeavors, of endless, idiot pipe-dreams, that the one thing I’d finally managed to take all of the way, the one thing I’d finally created that held any real value … didn’t.

Rather than shouldering the burden of this knowledge, as I have now, and using my considerable creative momentum to blaze ahead into one of a dozen other potential projects I have lined up, I crumbled. I tried to put a brave face on it but, inside, I was a mess and ended up making an ass of myself on the forum of the website where the seeds of the project first took root; an act of public self-immolation I still shudder to think of. Awesome.

As with all superficial wounds, I eventually healed, grew up a touch, and moved on. Sort of.

I still sometimes have the urge to make toy composites and, yet, know that my motivation for wanting to do so is wrong-headed and that I’ll never be satisfied doing so again. I ache for the sense of accomplishment that producing something publishable will give me and, to that end, the toy shots amount to nothing more than a distraction and a dead end.

So I am saying goodbye to making my toy composites, at least for now. This year’s calendar will be the last. Ending with the image above, a self-portrait I produced for the ill-conceived book, is a bittersweet irony for me … but really, its just a silly composite, of a silly man, being silly with his silly toys.

Onward!