G is for Gashapon - Introduction

Well, these have been in the queue for nearly two years! A mate, Adrian, was doing the Cherry Blossom trail in Japan, with his wife, and I said to him "Oh, you'll be able to fill your boots with Gashapon!", which required a quick explanation of the particularly Japanese take on capsule-toys, as they evolved from Western gum-ball machines, themselves evolved from earlier, Victorian postcard dispensers, a mutual friend - Gareth - backed up my enthusiasm, and Adrian was clearly intrigued enough to look them up while he was out there.

 

What I didn't know was that when he came back, he would present me with results of his research as a fiftieth birthday present! So we're looking at them over the next few days, purely as a brief overview, their full story is far greater and there are catalogue-type books on the subject available in Japanese, rather like the O-Ei-A books on the similar, but tending to more juvenile, Kinder Toys.

 

So, Gashapon, from Gasha (the cranking of a 'one-armed-bandit' handle) and Pon, the actual capsule; Japanese capsule toys; not the occasional tray of chocolate eggs, or the odd machine outside a convenience store, but rather a semi-industrialised craze, primarily 're-invented' by Bandai in the 1970's, with Tomy ('Gacha') and Kaiyodo also heavily involved now. There have, since the late 1990-early 2000's, been whole stores dedicated to banks of the machines, which we are looking at here, all shot by Adrian.

 

Clockwise from the top left we have, 'luck dip' mystery prizes, highly detailed miniature firearms, specifically semi-automatic military rifles, I guess pistols or machine-guns will be separate issues/series? Some kind of miniature viewers (?), construction-brick bunk-beds, cat's arse rings (who knew there was even a market for them!) and Tama and Friends keyrings - more Hello Kitty knock-off?

 

Squishies, manga deforms, some kind of pump-dispenser keyrings (?), Halloween wallets, more cutesy keyrings and miniature lunch-bags - it's quite an eclectic collection of subjects, and materials, especially when compared with Kinder*, but that - in part - explained by the larger capsules, and the fact that adult collectors don't hide under Edwardian leftover shame as we do, in the west, the Japanese 'grown-ups' happily collecting them as an expression of Shōwa nostalgia.

 

*Kinder do seem to be moving (at a glacial speed) in a similar direction, with more keyrings, phone-hangers and luggage tag type prizes, appearing these days. 

 

A canyon of gift-dispencers!

 

Choices, choices!

 

Advertising display cabinet, I believe all the larger Gashapon stores have something like this, with a selection of current of recent offerings, to kick-start the consumer urge, among the undecided!

 

Platform shoes and fishing lures! And the lures, conveniently telling us - in English - that they are the 5th wave, I think? And - even more weirdly - without actually knowing much about it, I suspect, you could remove them from the keyrings, tie them into your tackle line, and use them to fish?!

 

Miniaturised, or doll's house scaled, tea-ceremony furniture, and necklaces of . . . Japanese mythological themes?

 

Miniaturised foods or foodstuffs seem common themes, both modern and nostalgic, and the display of cartoon, Manga or Anime figural models, above the machines, may be some of the staff's own duplicates? Or maybe leftover/end-of-line stuff, or damaged capsule comtents . . . something like that?

 

Likewise, here, where more necklaces and keyrings feature in the machines themselves, including miniature beach sets, blood bags (?!!) and two different 'Juggler' related things I can only guess - badly - at!

 

Watch-battery illuminated, stand-ups of Harry Potter characters.

 

Sci-fi feature quite heavily, along with historicals, and here we see stuff related to The Rocketeer, Batman, Star Wars and The Avengers

 

More Anime/Manga stuff, either side of miniaturised Pioneer Hi-Fi decks!

 

An amazing maze!

 

A mystery to finish, not speaking Japanese, I can only guess these are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland coasters? Featuring Sir John Tenniel's (the first commercial illustrator to be knighted) original artwork? Which would require the largest size of capsule? There are different sizes and designs of Capsule, as we'll see working through them, while a few sets seem to be cheaper or more expensive than the 'standard' Gashapon.

 

Many thanks to Adrian for all these images, which give us a good flavour of the subject, and for the toys which we will be looking at over the next few posts.

F is for Follow-ups - Recent Bits

When Chris Smith sent his parcel a couple of months ago, I told him I'd seen another of those finger monsters, a day or so before, and then spent ages looking for it, real rabbit hole stuff, in the end I went through most of the near-thousand folders in Picasa, thinking I must have moved it by mistake (sometimes you pick something up, absentmindedly, on the cursor and dump it elsewhere, without even realising it, on the way to somewhere else!), only to find it the other day, in the short or 'this year' queue, in a possible post on an exhibition!

 

Definitely a forth sculpt/pose, and if the paint-chips are anything to go by (almost certainly home-painted), this one is yellow plastic, which reinforces my - still possibly false - memory of a brown one? And obviously some kind of Kaiju from the Godzilla or Ultraman franchises.

 

From two different show reports, the Reliable figures and probably Reliable side-by-side, the standing shooters look different, because the foot-plug on the older version is not fully pushed-home, but I lined them up, and they are almost identical, even down to the long, adjustable iron-sight, over the breach, so clearly they just added integral bases changing the tool from a two-part to a three-part mould.

 

And thanks to Anonymous for highlighting the link, in comments, I was using the Way Back Machine version of the now defunct Ponylope as a guide!

 

Also from recent posts; show reports and donations, we've seen three of these recently in two posts, the others earlier in the year, brought together, you can see the two sizes (bigger pair on the right), to which can be added the several base marks, which I previously highlighted.

 

When combined with the couple of dozen which have come in over the last three-or-so years (get-at'able in storage), it will give an even better picture. While the master collection, buried in the container, which also includes the big ones, when all the new ones are added to them, will be the basis of a much better overview, one day.

 

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In this post;

 

https://smallscaleworld.blogspot.com/2025/02/t-is-for-two-roarsome-rack-toys.html

 

We saw a metallic dino'bird/pterosaur kind of thing, which bore little resemblance to the other four on the card-back, but separately, and also from BJ Toys, I've been picking these up at petrol stations, namely the Esso outlet at Tongham/Hog's Back, and Bordon's BP station!

 

Plant spider!

 

Reverse colours.

 

Balrog's horns on this one!

 

The trouble is, they seem to appear one or two at a time, in a large counter display carton on the bottom shelf of a dedicated/custom BJ Toys sales display unit, mixed-in with an assortiment of other novelties, so I don't know how may there are, or whether they all have reversed colour versions.

 

And if you think this link is tenuous, for a follow-up - I thought I'd already posted one! But they were in two folders, with the other not photographed, so I was happy to find the Dino-phoenix, looking for the non-posted dragon! The point being, I think they are from the same source, not BJ; in China?

 

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On the subject of ducks,

 

The two vintage British plastic foul, one from Peter and one from Chris (pretty sure I have another in pink, or a maroonish-purple somewhere), brought together with the TK Maxx crayon ducks and a generic CHINA-marked goose from a rack-toy bag/toob/tub, for scale.

 

Similar, but simplified toys from Sonsco of Hong Kong, again I have several of these in various colours, including a fluorescent pink one which is just as leery as the green one in this set!

 

And on GI's,

 

This set of re-issue ex-Marx figures, being a mix of different sets, has the chap, both Chris and me thought "looked like Marx?", middle-top, and, sure enough, he was a Marx sculpt!

 

But I'd totally forgotten that Chris sent me this shot ages (six years) ago, when discussing something else, probably wanting it to feature in a Question Time, so, to repeat the earlier question, we know the re-loader is a Marx pose, now, but can anyone give a maker/brand to this marbled maroon-brown chap, and B) does anyone know anything about the figure on the left?

S is for Seen Elsewhere - Sci-Fi Library (1) Toys

I shot these for a Faceplant group, over a-year-and-a-half ago, and unlike the other shots in this occasional meander through my library, these were all cover-scans, taken at the time, rather than the more casual shots of the previous posts (see: Bibliography Tag), and most subsequent posts, which will take a year or two to get through at the current rate, with some duplication, because shooting them all was a bitty business, as they were recovered from the garage, reunited with the stuff in the house, added to on the hoof, and/or sent off to storage, in batches!

 

Beautifully illustrated with, yeap, a thousand images, actually more, and even more items, as there are a few multiple shots, however, the beautiful illustrations, a trope of all Taschen publications, is tempered by another trope of theirs, a 'coffee table' lack of text! It's really just a captioned guide to some of the loveliest Sci-Fi toys ever made.

 

And yes, I need both the figures on the cover! But they are likely to turn up in some mixed-lot from Adrian,  Chris, Peter, Gareth or Trevor (the guys who regularly save me this odd, ephemeral, unknown stuff), as they are likely to turn-up in a rummage tray, at a toy figure show!

 

 

In it's day a lovely book, albeit a cheap softback, it's now a bit dated, but still a useful reference work for quickly flicking through to find the robot you may be trying to identify, or to ID the robot a more generic toy might be based-on, so worth grabbing if you see it.

 

This is a lovely guide to what appears to be one man's collection, and from the given dates (1972-82), there's a suggestion other volumes may exist coving the 1950's or 1960's, but as I bought it for next-to-nothing as a remaindered import from one of the shops in the Charing Cross Road, or more likely, a vast, bare floorboarded, enterprise selling straight from the cartons, on the Wandsworth Road, or Lavender Hill (I can't remember, it was more than 30 years ago!), I've never known?

 

 

These two are less useful, being more in the style of the Taschen, but less well illustrated, and with a fair bit of duplication on the more common robots and spaceships from Horikawa, Masudaya, Yoshiya &etc. but the text is more useful, being as how, while both are also in the coffee-table style, they do have more author's input and narrative text.

 

Think 'Pulp', and this is the meisterwerk! But, it barely covers the tin-plate stuff in the five tomes above, concentrating more on the 'Western' pocket-money ranges of the 'Dime-Store' plastic-era's, bagged and carded toys, and the related peripherals such as board-games, home casting sets, hollow-casts and the like, with chapters on the books, magazines, comics and annuals . . . masks, helmets, costumes . . . cards and artwork, ray-guns, pin-ball machines and such like. But, the modern 'Bible' on plastics, with a very good chapter on Dr Who stuff, contributed-to by an old colleague of mine.

 

More of the same but with a wider remit and covering a bit of everything, it's quite a good primer, and worth having on the shelf, to try, if you can't find something in one of the others!

 

While this is a private, or semi-private publication, I think, very much in a recognisable US style of a certain kind of collectables book, I have quite a few of, now, cars, planes; usually a guy sharing his collection. And, in this case what he shares is quite thorough, but his collection parameters are quite tight, so it's very useful for what's in there - Colorforms, Matt Mason, Zeroids and a couple of others, but that's your lot!

 

While these three are, really, only 'shelf-fillers'! Some nice imagery, mostly borrowed from bricks-&-mortar auction-houses, who may or may not have a commercial interest in the title, post-publishing, beyond the name-checks?

 

But the contents of all three are common or popular stuff, aimed at the general or casual reader - the same-old-same-old, big name toys, few of us collectors have forgotten, or really need to re-learn about, and which now have whole sites, forums and wiki-pages dedicated to them, so/also, of limited use as research-tools and adding nothing to better works! The third is a more general title and could go elsewhere in these posts, but was included here for its connection with the TV-Movie related theme.

 

I still buy them, 'just in case' there's something new, interesting or useful, but usually when they are remaindered in The Works or similar, although, in recent years remaindered book stores have all but disappeared, indeed, on the high street it's The Works or nothing, but you can often find them on Amazon or evilBay for next to nothing, and grab them as shelf-fillers/box-tickers.

 

But PostScrip, the mail-order people, often have useful collectables books in their lists, especially the autumn lists, with all the coffee-table titles for Christmas presents! And there's Books2Door, which I haven't tried yet, have you; are they any use?

L is for Lots of London Loot - Eight is for Late

December's London Toy Soldier Show, was a quiet one for me, not much purchased, and of that, we've seen one or two bits already in other posts, and one of the larger sets has gone to the archive, because I'm not Blogging them at the moment, but here are a few things which may interest some loyal readers!

 

A couple more of the Charlie Chalk figurines/pencil-tops, of which we saw one a while ago. Then, I hadn't heard of the show, now I've genned-up on it, but still haven't seen it, and it doesn't seem to be as iconic as some of his (Ivor Wood's) other stuff.

 

The Trader Joe seems to have had his hat crushed by the factory machinery, which, to me, makes it more interesting, the figures (I think there are seven) are always the same colour, so finding a normal one is inevitable, but a factory-damaged one is a different take on the subject.

 

Paul from the South Coast had a basket of these, and I saw them at the start of the show, and said "Oh, I'll have a few of them mate", forgot all about them as the show got busy and by the time I found them at the end of the day, only one Officer was left and colleagues on the Friends of PW site have posted better samples!

 

I have a few others, including Reamsa originals of these, which are probably Gormasa/Soldis reissues, and it's one of those corners of the collection which is building slowly but surely, as a decent sample of post-war Spanish troops.

 

Board game pieces, not sure which game, but I think the answer is in the archive, so they'll end-up on the correct A-Z page one day!

 

Two Phidal Buzz from Toy Story figures, a third would come in Peter's January lot (which we've just seen here), but Peter may have brought a bag to the show, that's one of the reasons why all these posts are getting the same title, they all got a bit mixed-up over the winter!

 

The other reason I forgot about the Reamsa reissues, was I bought these Eyes Right figures, from Britains, off Paul, at the same time, they're hideously brittle, but absolutely mint, they were worth the gamble to get the shots before they become micro-polymer dust, forever! The Band Major didn't survive the lift home!

 

The Royal Marines standing band, they don't seem to be as brittle as the red ones, but it's not like I'm going to test that theory, with any robust stress experiments! The Eye's Right (and some of the Swoppets) really are the high-point of toy soldier production, the finer detail leaving both hollow-cast and composition figures, in their dust, but soon-enough replaced with lower quality shite out of Hong Kong, after losing out to Timpo's, cheaper, technicolour 'sweeties'!

 

A couple of the 'Middlesex' regiment, the sword failed and will need a gentle glue-spot to get the better shot. This was the standard band's uniform of 'County' line regiments, like my own Glosters, now mostly light-infantry (the horror, the horror! Some awful grey and black arrangement with busbies, now!), but a paint-conversion will be easy!

 

We've seen these before, and it's not like I 'need' them, but as I have them unassembled in Almark packaging, and assembled (and factory painted) as Minimodels, it makes sense to have the other iteration, for the ultimate comparison/look at them all one day!

Bit of fun! About . . . 2007 (?) these started appearing all over the place (Marx websites and evilBay); novelty skiers, both civil like, this and Disney types, of interest in that they are manufactured in the same dense, flesh-coloured, stable PVC as the Injectaplastic-JSP-Culpitt-AHM stuff, AND some late Corgi die-cast vehicle accessory figures. The hint [from me!] being that they all come from the same factory, possibly Tai Sang's Blue Box Vinyl Manufactory in Macau?

 

A hollow-cast boot, for very small peep's to live in! I had a chat with James Opie about this purchase, he has one, and Joplin put one in one of his books, but as yet, there's no known maker for it, there is another, which is known (Segal), an upside down one, in red leather, but this - possibly a cake decoration, or miniature 'Japanese' garden ornament  - remains elusive.

 

Rounding off with a PZG or similar polish Napoleonic type, there must be a handful of hollow-cast missing from these show-purchases (I've got in the habit of always raiding Adrian's 50p/£1 trays at the end of a show), and some space-stuff, I think, but it did all get a bit muddled-up, and the point of these mixed posts is eye candy and the odd question-mark rather than an accurate diary of how it all comes in!