I've seen a photo of a full set of five or six of these, all painted with metallic finishes, but i've only found two.
Amazing collection. I'd love to see what's in the rest of those boxes . . . . The Bandai ultra kaiju line is the place where I started too before taking the leap into vintage. They were so inexpensive it was easy to build a collection quickly and they fit so nicely with the vintage stuff. They are still some of my favorite sculpts and paint jobs. At some point in the late 90's, I think, Bandai starting making these out of really squishy vinyl and they were manufactured in China rather than Japan. There was such a difference (for the worse) in quality that I lost interest in continuing to buy them although the OG's are still great when you can find them. The paint jobs are really close to the ones on vintage figures.
Nice, I will show my wife so she thinks my collection is humble. I bought a couple of your vinyl stickers at a head shop here in Austin. Alien and woman, witch on jack o latern and BBW devil girls... lemme me know if you or other SB'r's want me to raid their sticker mine.
Awesome stuff. Love the Woo in the 2nd pic. I've never seen that one before. I know someone who could use a 12' display case!
>The Bandai ultra kaiju line is a gateway drug. Coop, I see some hard tags still attached. How many do you have? What about the EX and SP Bandai kaiju? Did some of these come from Pony Toy Go Round? I saw bagged ones there complete with a header card...and I see some bagged ones in your photos.
I think there's something like 300+ of these guys, counting variations. A lot of these came from Pony Toy - I was just noticing Pony Toy price tags on some of the cards. The rest came from arious places, including Kimono My House, and that other store on Geary(?) that sold a lot of japanese garage kits beck in the 90's, There's EX and SP stuff in there too. I also have a bunch of the Bandai Godzilla stuff, but it's not in the photos.
Ugh, I used to have a big display case from the 50's - about 6' x 5' x 2', but after moving it a couple of times, I gave up. I found some nice stainless steel cabinets with glass fronts in a local thrift store, and some old metal modular lawyer's bookcases from a navy auction, that seems to be doing the trick for now.
loving these pics, coop...Bandai really goes under-appreciated here imo - in spite of the fact it probably started many of us off. I know it did for me, my Grandma bought me one every now and then when I was a kid (I wish I still had them).
About the switch to squishy vinyl - this was a necessity to comply with safety regulations (to earn that "ST" on the tag). Remember, these are actual toys, sold for $5 a pop on the racks at Toys R Us. Coop, I believe those "bronzed" kaiju at the top of page 2 were Banpresto crane game prizes. I think there were four, but I don't remember what the other two were. Probably King Joe and another one. I don't think they're hard to find but I can't imagine what you'd use as a YJA search term.
