Oh yeah, Jim C was around before the internet. I worked at a certain shop in Emeryville and used to call HIM for toys, that was how hard it was collecting before the internet. And going to Japan, hahahahaha. If you had never been before good luck finding the toy shops when you got there and if you asked someone who had been before they probably wouldnt help. I can understand this though, it was so much work back then that you wouldnt want to give info away for free.
This is a great thread for everyone. To understand why so many of the "O.G." guys have such crazy collections is to really understand the depth of their dedication back then. I have been collecting now for 17 years, before the internet, and before even mainstream toy magazines. (I remember when AFN#1 came out, and it was a really innacurate magazine about star wars among other things.) So basically, at that time, toy collecting in all genres was in the dark ages, much less Japanese toys. For me, it was a long standing flea market, goodwill, japanese foreign echange student, comic book shop or comic book show that allowed me to find anything at all. Information was guarded like gold, and any advantage any collector had over another was used to full advantage. There was a very loose knit group of collectors, and a few isolated shops. Basically Pony toy-go-round in LA, and Kimono my House in SF. Later shops like Day-Old, Showcase, A shop in Chicago (not sure if it was the bookstore) Atomic City, Third Planet, Right Brain/Left Brain and others sprang up, but it was originally only the two. If you were a really serious collector, you bought Toy Shop magazine (the newsprint one) and dug through all the tin toy ads hoping to find a japanese toy. If you did, you had a 50/50 chance of getting a good deal or getting gouged, that is, if it was still there. The super-serious guys paid for express/fedex shipping of Toy Shop, so half the magazine was sold before it hit the newstand. Most collectors used a few different side dealers who mailed out a newsletter once a month, or a color copy "catalog" twice a year. In most cases, you paid $10 for them to copy the catalog jsut to even look at it. To say it was difficult was an understatement. That said, if you stuck with it, you had to really love it, and when you work that hard at it, you get your share of good stuff. If you saw something you wanted, you had to make an instant decision or chances were good that you might never see it again. It probably operated like this until 1997 when ebay first really started kicking in. Still, at that time, very few people were buying, so good deals could be had, and a few internet dealers popped up. Even better was the advent of yahoo japan and japanese ebay in 1998-1999 who went head to head for about 18 months before ebay japan folded. I got amazing stuff then for amazing prices, but we all knew it was too good to last, and you had to have a japanese friend willing to set up a bank account for you just to bid! There was no celga or rinkya. If you read a few of my Super7 columns, especially from issue 1, I talk alot about how much I hated the "man in the tower" refusing to share his knowledge for the betterment of others. That is one of the reasons we started Super7, to get the word out, and to tell the truth. So far it has been a fun ride.
man , im getting ready to bust out my markalite magazines ! probably the first guy i knew of who may have been the first guy who went to japan to bring stuff back to sell was butch . dennis knew him and sometimes got toys from him . he mostly sold at shows and had incredable stuff . he was pre kimimono . mostly i went to kimmono and sometimes heros but there was another small shop called scooby that would get kaiju from time to time .does anyone remember a shop called galvanised in SF ? mostly a japanese model shop but had other cool stuff . jim c helped me out a great deal and john jackson was the reason i could go on my first trip to japan . both truly kind people . oh , and mr club tokyo let me pass out drunk on his couch , thanks mike !
When I moved to Los Angeles in '89, I found good stuff at Wacko on Melrose Avenue. I got a loose Mattel Rodan, a bagged 10-inch Akumaizer-3 guy, and a bunch of other stuff. I got to go to Pony Toy a few times and a bunch of trips to the top floor of a Japanese department store called Yaohan next door always had lots of stuff at retail...
I remember those catalogs from toy dealers that I would get at the Chicago Toy Show! Grainy b&w photos of Popy toys galore. I remember drooling over the Popy Mego-esque Battle Fever J figures as well as the Henshin Cyborgs. Brian's spot on about flea markets...they could be a treasure trove. Alen and Matt over at TBDX helped a ton in bringing alot of this info out to the masses, as well.
I jumped through the same hoops as most of you: the Toy Shop race/runaround, Markalite and G-Fan, slower-than-shit BBSs, etc. I could always effortlessly find a new piece of vinyl in the basement of NYC's Forbidden Planet and the Queen City Bookstore, though.
yeah, i forgot about those catalogues you'd pay 10 bones for - just for the privilege of finding out if the dealer had something you wanted. Ray Rohr, the tin robot dealer, used to sell those. i still have them as well as some photos KMH sent to me showing what stuff they had for sale (you sometimes had to have them send you photos because there was no other way to know what the monsters looked like) And Toy Shop - yeah, looking through the classified adds in the back - as Frank said, there was an overlap between the guys who sold tin robots and vinyl - sometimes you'd get lucky and a guy who had robots for sale might have an occassional kaiju or two. it's almost hard to remember how cumbersome it was to send a letter off to a dealer and then eagely wait for the reply which might come 2 weeks later - just to root out a monster or two.
Toy Shop was the ultimate nightmare/ bblu-ball tease. I myself was really into tin space and robot toys and it was insanely depressing how hard it was to even have a chance at that stuff..and prices went up INSANELY right around 86-87 to the point where I had to give up collecting. All because of that one dudes ads 'will pay any amount for XXX'. fucker. I got ripped off multiple times by people in that newspaper. sucked.
Living in Cleveland we had no real "source" for Japanese toys. Some comic stores and one model shop imported the Yamakatsu and then the Bandai vinyls. Occasionally they would get in other Japanese toys, but I was hooked on vinyl from the start. I remember once actually getting a Spectreman vinyl from a call to a dealer in Toyshop after having called dozens of dealers about other toys only to be told they were sold out. There also used to be a few dealers in ToyShop who would run phone auctions. I remember many nights sitting up for, "auction ends at midnight or 10 mins after the last call." I managed to pick up a few Bullmarks this way but soon realized the prices some of these things could go for, and you never really knew the final selling price, only the last price you bid. Jim C from Club Daikaiju was the first person who spent any time talking to me about these toys and sharing his knowlege. Some great finds could be had in the early ebay days. Another early internet source for me was Ilene and Wayne from Hawaii.
There's a good idea....I can hear it now: "Well see...in MY day, if we wanted Japanese vinyl, we had to walk to get it. Uphill. Both ways.....you kids got it easy with your Celgas and Kaiju Taros and your internets....."
I almost forgot Frank and Brian were in the Austin area. Good old Atomic City is still around and my brother did some kits for Prince in the 90s. That was the place in Austin for any real Japanese toys.(Prince was recently on the cover of the Austin Cronicle a couple months ago with some of my brother work!) In the early 90s the only source I really had was the Austin Collectors Convention and they would have a few vendors selling busloads old diecast for hundreds of dollars and at the time silly Godzilla/Gamera knock offs I soon found out were bullmark and bandai toys. Eventually G-Fan became a resource and the rest is history. It really did suck, and prices were nuts often and information was even harder glad I have the internet now to eat my paycheck.
I can't say I was a "collector" back then, but I would BEG my mother to drive 40 minutes in traffic any chance I got, to the Japanese toy store in Little Tokyo in LA. (Pony Go Round??) back in the mid to late 70's. No way would she buy me any spendy die-cast. That was only for birthdays or christmas. I remember begging my parents literally all year long for the die-cast UFO Diapolon Robot for Christmas and if memory serves me correct it was $30. I got this Raideen vehicle for my birthday and I think it was $12. I had to feed my craving with less expensive pencil cases, erasers and stickers of Raideen, Go Rangers and Kikaider. I would stare at the glass cases filled with all the amazing die-cast robots until my mother dragged me out kicking and screaming by the arm. ahhhhhhh.....good times.
This is a great thread. I'm not sure if I wish I was a part of it or not judging by some of the stories. Sounds like a real pain in the butt way to go about things, but then I also think of the stories I've heard of people getting things for good prices before it was really known how rare they were and things like that. I suppose you gotta take the good with the bad as with all things.
This IS a great thread. This has to be brought back---it's just too cool! Coop talks about the pre-internet toy collecting days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-xlmcp5tXg
I first became aware that cool vinyl even existed back in 1987. That’s the year I went to college in NYC and left my small town in upstate New York for the first time. It was at a store called ‘Love Saves the Day’ (the store still exists and is, ironically, right next door to ‘Toy Tokyo’)- amoungst all of the hippie clothes and metal lunchboxes they had a number of bagged Bandai Ultramonsters so I bought an Eleking figure. It was cheap and crude, but for a kid raised on nothing but the same ten Godzilla movies for twenty years it was like a magical breath of bizarre air. These days I have hundreds of toys in my collection, but that day only one. You could find some shops in Chinatown that had stuff but usually only Bandai products. ‘Forbidden Planet’ (the old version, when they were a huge multi-storey affair) sold kaiju toys in the basement. Again, mostly Bandai. They were the most expensive retailer of these ‘common’ toys (back in ’87 I’d be surprised if there were more than 20 Bandai Ultrakaiju available for sale in ALL of Manhattan island at any one time)- but they also had the best selection. The real place to goes was a store called ‘Children of Paradise.’ The proprietor was old and cranky but the store was amazing. A real dark hole in the wall with toys dripping off the walls. I saw my first Bullmarks there. He wanted outrageous prices like $100 for a MIB Hawaiian Meteron- outrageous for someone on a college budget who was accustomed to paying no more than $3-5 per figure. The front window was a riot of tin robots and exotic plastic. On one of my trips to Forbidden Planet I asked the guy who worked the register if he knew of any shops in town that sold vinyl. He gave me the name of this place I’ve never heard of and have long since forgotten. Suffice it to say it was an upscale Chinese bookstore in SoHo. “You have to tell them you’re lookin’ for toys”, he said “They keep them in the back.” I followed his directions and after some searching found the shop. Sure enough it was a storefront filled with nothing but boring glossy import magazines and newspapers. Perhaps a Sanrio pencil or two. Upon asking the girl at the counter I was taken to a back room divided from the well lit spotless shop by a dramatic curtain. Behind the curtain was a small dark room lit by a single bare bulb. A thin Asian man of about twenty five sat posed on a stool. He was dressed in a black three piece suit and a cigarette hung limply from his hand. The room was filled with smoke like London fog, in one corner was a raised portion of the floor perhaps ten feet square and a foot tall- a small stage that may have been used for poetry slams in some past life. He stood on his stool on this raised patch of floor… surrounded by vinyl toys. It was dark and smoky and totally surreal. I couldn’t even tell you what I saw- Great Monster Series Godzillas, a Bandai giant sized Red King perhaps? I was overwhelmed. As others have said there was no network of information, for the most part I was ignorant as to what I was seeing. He singled out a few figures and spoke at length about them. It was like secret knowledge being transferred. I only bought a few small figures but he didn’t seem to mind. He could see my passion and that brightened his day. I never went back again and I’m sure the setup was gone six months after I saw it… but I always wonder about that smoking man in a suit sitting on a stool in the dark- did he just sit there all day waiting for kids like me to come stumbling in off the street? Oh yeah, I bought from Jim Dai Kaiju too by mail in the early 90’s. He would send out catalogs for free. I still have them all. I sent him some photographs once of the Ultrakaiju I had in my collection asking if he could tell me there names, at least a few. He was kind enough to take the time and not only write out the names of all forty of the kaiju I had, but also the Ultra show that each one was from! It seems small now but at the time it was a tremendous help, when information was scarce. A very decent man, that Jim.
^^^ Wow! Great post! That jarred alot of memories about NYC loose for me. I remember taking the bus into the City from Jersey every Sunday afternoon to go see the all ages hardcore show at CBGBs. So I must have been 15-16 years old. I'd walk around downtown all day afterward and have alot of memories of Love Saves the Day and Forbidden Planet. It's crazy that both places are still open. Although, as you said, Forbidden Planet is no longer what it once was. I took my kid to Toy Tokyo recently and it was great to see LStheD was still there, crazy and psychadelic as ever.
i still have some of those early mail order catalogues from Club D and Showcase. I should go back and check how the prices compare to today. I would obsessively pour over them planning what to save for - trying to buy a monster with every paycheck as a way of rewarding myself. Bullmarks seemed so rare and unobtainable back then - i also remember looking at the Bandai Godzilla Museum book (the first reference book I'd seen at that point) - and thinking to myself that I'd likely never see some of those figures in person much less own any of them (which is still true for the Hawaii Hedorah, Megalon and MechaGodzilla). Ah, memories. And remember that record store down the street from Toy Tokyo - "Wowsville" - it had a lifesize Rat Fink inside and all those Roberta Bayley vintage punk photos on the wall. The guy who ran it, Alberto, was a super-nice guy. He gave me a poster off the wall just because he noticed me admiring it.
kimono my house In the 90's kimono my house was the place. So flipping rad. Got my first Microman there.
Wow... This is a GREAT post. I've been collecting since the age of 12.. I could tell you of all the stuff I DIDN'T get in the day? I wouldn't even know where to begin.... Seriously...
