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Remember when you were a kid and all you wanted was some Star Wars toys, and then Christmas came around and what Santa brought wasn't official Star Wars stuff, but some kind of off-brand something that vaguely resembled Star Wars only not closely enough for legal action? Or when you wanted that Beatles record and what you got was "The Beetle Beat" by studio musicians pretending to be Merseyside club rockers? 

The disappointment of youth becomes the fascination of adulthood as we look back on these knockoffs with amusement and fondness. The West wasn't the only arbitrary geographic region to have its merchandising afflicted with items vaguely similar to other, more popular properties. Japan itself had a wonderful time selling almost-Kamen Riders and quasi-Ultramen and not-quite-Mazinger Zs to kids who didn't know any better and adults that didn't care one way or another, here's your thing, now shut up for five minutes. Let's take a look at two of 'em! 

I bought this children's rice bowl at a Japanese grocery store, entranced by its perfection of shape, its lustrous sheen, and its fake Transformers robot characters. It's seen lots of use mixing watercolors, acrylics, and ink washes in my enthusiastic if not quite professional artistic career; if it had been used as originally intended it would undoubtedly have been accidentally smashed on a kitchen floor long before now. 

The best part - well, apart from the legend "Batul V"-  is this illustration of the human characters, which seems to be a snapshot taken when Random Anime Hero met a girl cosplaying as Amu Fanneria from HEAVY METAL L.GAIM. On the other hand that guy may very well be a badly drawn, not-legally-actionable Daba Myroad. Sure, why not. 

As a huge hit prominently featuring a public-domain historical object, SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO inspired a wide variety of really blatant knockoffs, many of which are highlighted at the Starblazers.com website. Our subject here was purchased under the mistaken impression that it was official Yamato merchandise, a misapprehension no doubt shared by countless Japanese parents, to the chagrin of their kit-building, obsessive- compulsive-disorder suffering progeny. 

Part of the "Space Animation Series No. 1" collection from Tokyo Marui, the box art for this model kit promises to take you on a hundred-thousand light year journey to battle evil from beyond the stars, along with your vaguely Matsumoto-esque heroes. Other kits in the series include the Cosmo Shark, the Battle Tiger, and the Tiger Zero. 

Upon opening the box you're greeted with thirty-year old rubber bands and an ancient tube of model glue, protected by the visage of the no doubt evil Emperor Debiru, or as we like to call him, "Little Debiru". 

Basically the Comet Empire's Zordar with a copyright-defying beard, Emperor Devil here comes with his own little stand so you can prop him up like a paper doll in front of your completed Cosmo Warp kit. Tokyo Marui is now a world-reknowned manufacturer of airsoft guns, so you can now have the pleasure of shooting one Tokyo Marui product with another Tokyo Marui product. And so, the great circle of knockoff merchandising life continues.

THE TERROR OF TINY TOYS

The Japanese robot explosion of the 1980s may only properly be appreciated by the shock waves it generated on the other side of the world. The swelling pressure of thousands of suppliers creating millions of plastic toys, mounting to alarming strength, could only be relieved by using the children of America as a safety valve- children who hungered for toys from these shows and yet DID NOT EVEN KNOW THEY EXISTED. Is this evidence of the fantastically creative work of Japan's anime designers, or were they tapping into a collective unconscious of juvenile desire that knows no nationality? DO STRANGE FORCES FROM BEYOND THE STARS CONTROL OUR DESTINIES?

Well, I don't know. What I DO know, though, is that years of sifting through trays of toys at garage sales and flea markets have yielded a bounty of Japanese robot plastic that neither knows nor cares of its origins or ultimate destinations. Where did these toys come from? Carnival prizes? Party favors ordered through the mail from the Oriental Trading Company? Bubblegum machine prizes from the local Zayre's or Treasure Island or K-Mart? Let me tell you, when you see a Kroger bubblegum machine advertising GOD MARS robots in a decaying strip mall in College Park Georgia, it will turn your entire worldview upside down.

But enough of that. Allow me to show you photographic evidence of the startling penetration these "orphan" Japanese toy robots had made into American society - circa, let's say 1985.



MAZINGER Z shows off his metal muscles in this tiny super-deformed style inch-high rubber figurine hastily spraypainted a neon green. Yes, the Jet Scrambler is majestically attached to his tiny green back.

Meanwhile a pink Real Robot from FANG OF THE SUN DOUGRAM raises his articulated arm in defiance. in 1984, this two-inch rubber figure was individually wrapped and sold in Spencer's Gifts in the mall with a triangular label reading "Leadworks Taiwan" affixed thereon. I could get an entire column out of the crazy anime stuff I found in Spencer's Gifts, but that's for another time.





Meanwhile, MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM is here represented by a printed cardboard target mounted on a plastic base. This was packaged with a dart gun, encouraging America's youth to regard the "White Mobile Suit" as an enemy. Influence of Zeon spies in the toy industry, I imagine.



If you ever wanted a tiny super robot to wear as a good luck charm to ward off evil, this COMBATTLER V charm fits the bill, coming complete with a little ring for threading and jointed arms and legs. Hard to believe this super robot actually weighs 550 tons, let alone could threaten us all with his super electromagnetic yo-yo.



He never made it to television as part of the VOLTRON series, but DALTANIAS here proudly stands as tall as he can, being only two inches in length. Still, his regal bearing inspires confidence.

For some reason I have a whole bunch of tiny figures from GALACTIC WHIRLWIND SASURAIGAR, the third of Kokusei Eigasha's J-9 series of early 1980s robot cartoons. Unlike Daltanius or most of these other robots, the J-9 never got within a hootin' holler of an American TV release. Not wild enough to be "super robots", way too improbable to be "real robots", shows like Sasuraigar defy categorization by anal-retentive anime fans. At any rate, our tiny inch-high Sasuraigar poses with gun in hand, molded in soft yellow plastic.



The actual mecha from the show is a lot closer to this Takatoku toy. Of course the actual mecha from the show transforms into a space-faring steam engine railway train, the better to allow it to wander freely through space fulfilling the pun in the show's name ("sasurai" means "wandering").



The cast of the show was also tastefully rendered in the medium of multicolored tiny plastic figurines. Why don't more artists express their vision thusly? From left to right we have Rock Anrock, Beat McKenzie, Birdie Show (in pink) and suitably green is I.C. Blues, the computer-genius zillionaire who built the Sasuraigar in order to win a bet. (Character names courtesy C/FO MAGAZINE VOL. 2 # 10, 1985.)



More familiar to American audiences will be this MOSPEADA figure. Is that Stick Bernard or Rook Bartley inside that Cyclone? We may never know. This little snap-together model came in one of those plastic eggs you bought for twenty five cents of your VERY OWN MONEY. The little bit of kneaded eraser at the foot there is to keep him standing up, them little toys aren't so balanced.



And here we have the little GOD MARS robot purchased in the Kroger bubblegum machine. Actually this was a transforming robot, if you got all six robots - Gaia, Sphinx, Uranus, Titan, Shin, and Ra - you could stick them all together to assemble God Mars, just like Takeru does in the show! However, they will NOT, repeat NOT, combine to make a bomb designed to destroy the entire Earth.



Who knows what tiny anime toy treasures lurk in the crevices of automobile upholstery, the corners of toy boxes, under sofa cushions across America? Can the history of Japanese cartoons in America be written in rubber and plastic? We here at Let's Anime say YES.

LET'S BUY ANIME STUFF-- 80s STYLE!

Hey guys, the new BOOKS NIPPON catalog showed up! It's 1984 and the only way to get Japanese animation books and magazines is through the mail, and that means catalogs!



Books Nippon was/is the American branch of Nippon Shuppan Hanbai, Japan's largest book distributor! At some point in the early 1980s, they figured that there might be a little money to be made out of re-routing a bit of the gigantic tidal wave of anime books and magazines currently submerging Japan towards the United States, where a small but devoted audience of what would one day be known as 'otaku' waited, cash in hand, for their chance to buy Roman Albums and This Is Animation books.

Earlier Books Nippon catalogs were xeroxed and had a charming punk rock cut-and-paste aesthetic that resembled the fan pages of your better anime magazines.



Even though Cat's Eye isn't about three detectives, somehow the friendly clip art and hand-lettered copy makes you want to shell out $3.30 for "black and white comic novels". This is back when the word "manga" wasn't a overused tagline and the yen-to-dollar conversion was a lot easier to calculate.

But even the friendliest of graphic design has to move with the times and soon Books Nippon's catalog got all professional-looking with screentones and set type and everything.



When you're back in 1984 be sure and pick me up some Roman Albums, okay? I will gladly shell out $7.10 for the Brygar Roman Album! Publisher Tokuma Shoten's guides to the anime world, "Roman Albums" were/are thick paperbound magazine size books jam packed with production art, story notes, character designs, color pages, posters, stickers, and other bromides, and were absolutely vital for the informational needs of anime fans circa 1984 and beyond.



Another "thank you" goes out to Books Nippon for introducing us to the world of "black and white comic volumes" based on our favorite anime! Turns out it's the other way around, that many of our favorite anime series were based on the comics. Or "manga" as we later learned to call them. All your favorites are here - Urusei Yatsura, Space Cobra, Dr. Slump, Locke The Superman, Golgo 13, and Patalliro. 24 years later, however, and I am still unsure what "Star Boy" is. I'm pretty sure they don't mean THIS "Star Boy."



The Keibunsha Daihyaka books are great little bricks of data; written for grade-schoolers, the Japanese is simple, the kanji are all ruby-equipped, and the photos are big and grainy.




I find myself hauling out my "All Animation" volume for reference a lot more than you'd think. Okay, so it's only updated through 1983, but who cares?

Probably the best part about the Books Nippon 1984 catalog is that it was, for many of us, the very first place to ever advertise Japanese Animation video tapes for sale. And I use the word "sale" very loosely, because HOLY CRAP CHECK OUT THOSE PRICES!!



Do I LOOK like I have ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY UNITED STATES DOLLARS to shell out for the first Space Cruiser Yamato movie? Minimum wage back then was $3 an hour. Do the math. Prices on commercial releases of anime remained high for most of the decade, leading to a thriving bootleg video market and the sad spectacle of little clubs of fans pooling their money to buy Crusher Joe or Urusei Yatsura Only You or Final Yamato at the bargain price of $202. I think these days you could fill a cargo container with anime VHS for two hundred and two dollars and hand them out on Halloween like circus peanuts. Beta - TWO cargo containers.

But that's not all Books Nippon offered - they carried a full line of fashion magazines, the charmingly censored Japanese edition of PLAYBOY, and a full page offering glossy color magazines all about your favorite British pretty-boy bands.



24 years later, and the teenage girls have abandoned Duran Duran for the manga - sorry, the "black and white comic volume" section at Barnes & Noble! And thus, the great circle of life... continues.