I have a couple of figures from the so-called Marusan Original Monster Series. As far as I can tell, these are 1997 reproductions of toys made in the 1970's.

I have included pics of the two figures below.

One is sort of a tree-man with a turtleshell back, lobster claws, and "feathers" on his head.

The other is a rooster-dragon with two horns.

I cannot remember the name of either of these two figures. Also, I would be very interested if there is any "back-story" to either of them.

Both figures came with a newspaper like sheet in the bag with pics of lots of other similar old (I presume) figures. Both had the same header card. I have included some pics from the sheet and the header card... If anyone can read what the sheets say, I would be very interested in that as well.

Thanks!

The figures are Torutos and Dorango:

http://www.marusan-usa.com/item.jhtml;$ ... ID=1506064
http://www.marusan-usa.com/item.html;$s ... ID=1506056

There's not much of a story behind these guys. In the early 70s Marusan was trying to sell kaiju that weren't based on Tsuburaya licensed properties, so these guys were created. Some of the designs like Ebireon, Bamer, and Seabull have been updated for the TEDEROS line.

Thanks, Roger!

I went to that site, but couldn't get to those links for some reason???

Cheers!

And your tickling my memory with the names reminded me of this thread (where Paul Kaiju has a different colorway of the Torutos):

http://skullbrain.org/bb/viewtopic.php? ... 3250534abf

Yeah, they're sold out of those, so the individual product pages are no longer linked from the main catalog, but I found them in Google's cache.

Thank you.