As I get into learning about all this vintage goodness, I've just stumbled across some other companies and would love to hear about them. This site 3x3is9 forwarded me seems to be a Vintage Kaiju Museum. I'm sure its well known but its new to me.The URL is

http://mononofu.hp.infoseek.co.jp/museum/main.html

Killer shit on there and they feature companies I've never heard of like
Ark, Orange, Mastuaya, Nitto and more. Ark especially seemed to have some really amazing paint apps. Any info on these companies or links would be greatly appreciated.

This is TORAGIRASU from "Iron King" by Ark... my personal favorite so far

Once upon a time, I wrote an article on Orange for cooljapanesetoys.com (this was in the mid-90s). Maybe it will see the light of day again...

Ark was an offshoot of the reformed Bullmark, and there was some connection with Orange and the "big boys" as well. Most of these companies are obscure only because they released very few toys. Nitto is pretty well known, but they only made Daei stuff, which was the Gamera license and a few others. I don't see the Mastuaya link, I assume you mean Masudaya, which made tons of great toys for years. Masudaya has actually been around for over 100 years, in vinyl they were mostly a platform manufacturer, they made talkers, sparkers, tricycles, tin rockets, etc. and then licensed characters for those style of toys.

Like Brian says, Ark was founded by one of Bullmark's executives, Saburo Ishizuki (who incidentally wrote the afterword to _Super #1 Robot_.) Ark was just a Bullmark distribution management subsidiary until Bullmark went under, at which point Ishizuki took charge and made it into a full-fledged toy company. They co-produced a variety of kaiju vinyls both on their own and in partnership with Orange. You can read a bit about them here:

http://www.toyboxdx.com/infolibrary/tra ... hizuki.php

Robot collectors love them for their diecast "Arklon" kaiju toys:

http://www.toyboxdx.com/datafiles/data/ark/

Holy shit! Its Matt??? The Commissioner? Posting here? We are truly not worthy!!

We only need Alen Yen and we'll have all of ToyBoxDX here.

You've got your peanut butter in my chocolate...

Perish the thought!

great to see you over here matt ! been reading your stuff in otaku usa . you lucky bastard you got to visit bandai ! anyway , do you or anyone else know how enterprise fits in with orange and ark ? i always thought it was ark that did the mirrorman re issues back in the early 80s but mike j says it was enterprise .

I am far from an expert but I believe the full name is "Tsubaraya Enterprise," and is some kind of short-lived merchandising wing of the SFX company. They did release Mirrorman toys but I have no idea if they were the only ones.

I'm pretty sure they were competitors with Ark and Orange, not partners, and released only reissues of Bullmark stuff. (But that being said, considering that the president of Ark was also co-founder of Bullmark, he was probably involved in the negotiations for T.E. to release their versions. In fact he's still involved in B-Club's Bullmark reissue efforts today.)

That same page you linked to above has a lot of info about the various companies. It's kinda hard to navigate but you can select characters from the pull-down menus in each section and click on the gray buttons to display their images. (Only characters with a star next to their names have images.)

Here's the Tsubaraya Enterprise page:

http://mononofu.hp.infoseek.co.jp/museu ... _main.html

Here's the photos of Ark vinyls:

http://mononofu.hp.infoseek.co.jp/museu ... _main.html

And here's the Orange vinyls:

http://mononofu.hp.infoseek.co.jp/museu ... _main.html

According to this guy, in the Ark-Orange partnership, Orange was the company that designed and manufactured the vinyls, Ark was the company that distributed and sold them. Interesting!

Chad, your article is still accessible from the web.archive.org version of the site. Not all the pics are still there and some links may not work, but here it is...


http://web.archive.org/web/200406181719 ... orange.cfm

Time warp, back to 2000...

thanks Nekro!

Yeah thanks Nekro, and thanks to you too Chad. Good read!