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

Tim Brisko’s stellar cover features the luscious (and ludicrously rare) missile-firing vinyl of the dangerously-close-to-an-expletive-sounding Goodam. Good ol’ Goodam hit the shelves thanks to the long-dead toy manufacturer Sanzen in 1976.

Gowappa Goodam (“Five Kids: Goodam”), as the series is known, is a product of the famed animation studio Tatsunoko Productions. It was a not-particularly-successful attempt to fuse the five-man Gatchaman team concept with the giant robot phenomenon. The twist is that it’s one of the few super robot shows to feature a female lead character, which may account for the robot’s glaringly red-pink paint scheme (but not the unrelentingly chunky body, which resembles a sumo wrestler more than a woman.)

This particular portrayal of Goodam features pop-off forearms that conceal a pair of missile launchers (actuated by those yellow buttons on the shoulders). It’s only a scant inch or so taller than an SOC Mazinger, but boasts a good twice the volume. And it also happens to be one of the single coolest — and most difficult to find — Japanese toys I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.