Lately I’ve been on a small Virtual-On run, mostly attempting to get some rare model kits, but also picking up various figures along the way. Here’s one of them:
Ph34r teh gold
This is a Limited Edition Cyber Metal Figure of fembot Fei-Yen, made by SEGA. To explain the title (and the figure’s color): When Fei-Yen gets badly hurt in the games, she turns gold and goes into Hyper Mode.
Fei-Yen chooses you, Pikabox!
Fei-Yen here is made of die-cast metal and PVC and has surprising heft for such a small figure (about 7 cm tall).
Look at my prominently displayed copyright stamp!
She has some articulation, too, and includes her signature pigtails (in-game she’s quite Tsundere), skirt, and sword. So MOE!
(but not as MOE as the other Virtual-On figure I recently got…)
Ok, not really. It doesn’t move or anything. Still, very impressive looking. This life size Gundam is being assembled in Odaiba for the 30th Anniversary of Gundam, and apparently to garner support for the Olympics in Tokyo in 2016.
(photos from this site http://punynari.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/assembled-rx78-gundam-part-2/ – good photos of the Gundam, but beware of TEH MOE1111)
I know others have posted these, but it’s funny that this has been in the Seattle Center this whole time and I just found it now. One of these days, I’ll treat you kids to a pic of my fat ass in one.
This was my gateway. The handshake, the door that led to an ever winding path to madness.
Walking into Day Old Antiques has its price. The ferryman is unassuming and has a badass collection of punk 7 inch records and a lazy but intense depth of knowledge that would bitchslap any hipster out of his comfort zone and well crafted nonchalance.
He is as crafty boatman. The sarcastic enabler .
You hand him a coin.
Smack dab in the glass floor case sits little Mr “He’s a Samurai” , ready and willing to suck you dry of your college art supply money.
Just one fix. A taste.
You can always stop right?
Black Flag’s Six Pack thumps in the background, but loses the fight and gives in to the Der Ring des Nibelungen you now have created as a soundtrack in your own melting brain … because at this moment, that toy in the case is the one you never got as a kid and always, always wanted.
Always.
(Melodrama is key here.)
Its the first MIB Chogokin you have bought in almost 10 years, and it is the one that opened the crack in the dam. Don’t bother resisting.
Mike hands it to you, and all the years of Friday afternoons on Channel 25 flood back. The soundtrack shifts again. Jim Terry is your daddy.
Everyone in the room knows it son.
You are screwed. Lock, stock and barrel.
And you are OK with that.
No matter how many Popy boxed Ga 51s you see over the years since then, this little Shogun box will always and forever be your favorite friend… the designated driver that took you on your path to oblivion, which only a Robot skull can accomplish.
There are the toys you see on the online sites for years. The more common items that don’t pull in a lot of respect, because they are easily had and show up often enough on the radar to not be a priority purchase. Billiken and Osaka tins fall into this realm all too often, and sometimes like that hot librarian girl in high school, you don’t make the move until its too late. To hell with context, screw popular, follow your love, and those little zenmai will take off the glasses, undo the bun and show you the way.
“Patch” (from the Japanese “pachi,” a.k.a. “pachimono” (パãƒã‚‚ã®), literally “fake”) toys are just what the name implies. It refers to basically any kind of bootleg, but these days is most enthusiastically applied to soft vinyl kaiju figures: some modern homages or parodies, some vintage knock-offs, and others totally original characters with suspiciously familiar-sounding monikers, named to lure confused parents into buying the wrong toy (shades of “Kore Ja Nai Robo.”) They’ve gotten so popular that there’s even an annual “Pachimono Kaiju Summit” of collectors in Tokyo.
Above: a vintage vinyl kaiju by Miura Toy, discovered by Jim Maitland at a shop here in Neo-Tokyo, one of only two the obscurer-than-obscure manufacturer is known to have released. Any resemblance to more famous kaiju characters is purely… intentional.
Right now, the some of the most sought-after vintage pachi-kaiju toys are probably those made by an equally minor maker called “I.K.B.” (“Imagawa Kyodai Bussan,” or “Imagawa Brothers Products”), which in the early Seventies made a super-groovy series of pachimono Hedorah toys (1, 2, 3) that inspired a popular series of homages by the “designer vinyl” manufacturer Gargamel.
Thank goodness for Youtube. Please enjoy Yattaband and their reggae version of the Geeg opening theme song. The hardcore know of course that the Italian version kicks ass over the Japanese original. Here’s Yattaband’s website…
