herbiehancock

In the spirit of the Sears Christmas Wishbook, I've crafted a crappy little Marusan Originals Wishbook page. So if any of my tens of readers comes across these somewhere, I'd love for you to let me know! I've fallen in love with these fun, crude sculpts... they remind me so much of the drugstore toys I used to crave as a kid. No priority here... the numbers and letters are simply for reference. Even if you don't know here to find them, perhaps you can just enjoy the little blurry pics and how many of these there actually are. I swiped the images from the scan of some sort of Japanese catalog.

Well, damn. My New Years resolutions have totally fallen by the wayside. I guess that's how it usually goes. I didn't realize it had been almost 4 months since my last post! I even have a lot more apes/monkeys to write about! ------------------ Anyway, thought I would at least attempt to start this back up (yet again) with a little update on my latest stuff. I've been really into these Marusan original sculpts lately. Crude, relatively inexpensive patchi kaiju that are just fun. They remind me the most of those random drug store toys you'd get as a kid and make up the story for. Marusan made many of these in the late 90s, I guess before the "boom" that kaiju/Japanese vinyl toys re-experienced a few years later. I won a great lot for cheap on Yahoo Japan recently, so eventually I'll be writing about them I'm sure. I haven't bought much at all lately, and these could probably be the last again for awhile. (Don't worry... I still have a lot to wr...

As promised, here I bring you these fugly guys: Giant Gorilla (ジャイアントゴリラ) by Marusan (マルサン). These are virtually the same across all colorways, so I will write about them all at once. Come to think of it, that is probably a better idea than how I have been doing it if i plan to show off the same sculpt in different colors right around the same time. I had a quote in the Buta No Hana Gorilla article explaining Toho's hesitancy in allowing companies to make toys called King Kong, and instead the vinyl toys manufacturers made giant gorillas to avoid any potential legal problems with Universal. I found some Marusan history in the Super7 Mook (a great resource for these as well as Secret Base and Real Head toys by the way) that was released late last year. Marusan was in the midst of a kaiju boom in the mid-1960s thanks to many movies and the Ultra-Q show on television, and Marusan moved from tin and plastic toys to the cheaply and quickly produced vinyl toys. The company produced vin...