what was your first piece of kaiju/j-vinyl? and what about it got you hooked?

my first kaiju toy was this basic orange smogun:

i came across some info on all this stuff in a book called Full Vinyl, and i thought all the pics looked amazing, but with the steep prices they carried, and since i had never seen anything in person, i took a cheap first step and bought this dude. the best thing was when a bunch of my friends were wondering why i had a dog chew toy on my shelf when they saw it....

Ahh.. .I can't remember exactly what got me looking for Japanese toys.. I know I had picked up some crappy Ultra Man toys a long time ago.
The first Japanese Vinyl I sought out and purchased was this guy:
http://www.clubtokyo.org/listings/itemListingRpt.php?catID=1&subCatID=6&contentID=83
Regular old m1 Gorgos followed quickly by a m1 GID Greenmons.

I still have both.

Black prototype mantis

valentine's day '06 ghostfighter:



couldn't resist the clear pink vinyl and pipe cleaners, the perfect gateway drug.
and i thought 50 bux was so high for a toy when i bought it... laughable!

Wow now I have to do searches on flickr for my old kaiju pics because I lost everything from the past year and a half in my hard drive wipe out. Flickr also makes it difficult to embed images here (never work). Oh well there is always photobucket.

Anyhow this is my very first pic ever of kaiju (notice the blurry shot). I won then both on ebay from the same seller and immediately was hooked. Never looked back. Notice also it's a woo and matango (and glowies). The only two sculpts I would get really obsessive over.

Hmmm...first vintage...I still have some of my Godzilla's Gang, PraWres Sanshiro, and Dunbine vinyls from when I was younger.

"New" vinyl? The first Dokuroman S7 offered.

it was probably the random bandai hedorah purchase i made - not sure if those count

then i ended up with a CCP black hedorah or an orange, glittery marmit hedorah... can't remember which came first

the purple deathra (bottom left) wasn't my first--it was my third. but this one figure alone got me hooked on japanese vinyl toys.

from Hank's flickr...

This is the one but it wasn't the first toy I bought. It was actually the red one that I bought first. I had never seen plushies inside of vinyl toys before and the quality of the clear vinyl is just way too good. I took a manufacturing class when I was in school so knowing how difficult it is to make clear vinyl made me want this even more.

Saw these two and it was downhill from there.
Notice my ghetto pic.

I blame the entire "Black Issue" of S7 for my demise. Medicom Balzac VCD would be my first, but it wasn't what got me into "the scene" as they say. It was more of an "I like Balzac" thing before I knew any of this other stuff was out there. Than I got the S7 "Black Issue" and my brain exploded.

I count Ghouls Night Out S7 x SB GID set as my official first.

It was the Atmos Walking Life set...





They glow so well! My favorite Pumpkin Brain as well!

this is what got me hooked
first blobpus was purple wall LKS

i got them both at about the same time but it was either the blobpus last kaiju mono or the
skullbrain Kinikuman version.

Back in 2004, this was my first kaiju love...and it is still one of my favorite !


(credit : kingoji)

this duder was the beginning of my downfall

This was what plunged me into the deep end. Couldn't get over the beauty of the Mutant Evil sculpt and the quality of the vinyl.

Here was my first one:

wow, nice ghidorah

The Black Magura, He was/is ,chubby, knarly, cute and cheap ($15.00) and since I still couldn't wrap my head around why folks paid soo much $$$ for JP vinyl at the time I figured this would be a great way to dip my toes in the Kaiju puddle which turned out to be a raging river.

Pushead Fanclub Pirate was my first step into the J-vinyl world.

I originally bought this figure to be included to my black & white shelf. The shelf consisted mostly of western toys. After having them all displayed, I couldn't believe the difference in quality of the vinyl. Definitely the Pirate was the odd one out, but instead of getting rid of the pirate, I got rid of the rest of the shelf.

Just seeing the difference in quality made me reconsider everything else I collected till that point, and thats what pretty much got me hooked into J-vinyl.

Aside from all the little blind boxes I used to grab from the local anime toy store. My first J-vinyl was a Charactics Hedorah, green vinyl with silver spray.
I sold him later, I shouldn't have done that but he was my only Godzilla figure and I felt like I should sell it since I didn't have others. Should have kept him since he was my first.

These brains started it all for me...scored from my very first trip to Super 7 two years ago.