Here's a rarity, a soft vinyl toy of a Korean kaiju.

There may be no better example of my tendency to gravitate towards the unique and unusual than Marmit's Pulgasari toy. It's a fine toy unto itself, but it holds a real attraction for me simply because it is based on a Korean monster instead of a Japanese one. Therefore it's something different and exotic and even though I haven't actually seen* the movie it comes from, I just decided I had to have it.

The ornate design of the scales along with the gold coloring really lends a sort of royal look to the monster. Without seeing the movie, I get the impression that this is the sort of monster that would be feared and worshipped, instead of just being a target for the military. More of a god-like creature than a monster. I'm sure the film is nothing like that, though.

Part of the Vinyl Paradise line of toys, Pulgasari stands 9.5" tall and has 7 points of articulation, including at the elbows, which is pretty unusual for a vinyl kaiju toy. I certainly can't think of another one offhand that has this feature. I think it gives the toy a little more character than you usually see.

I think this is a really cool toy. The sculpt is nice and the vinyl is solid. The paint is just a little bit sloppy on the arms (notice how the gold from the outside of the forearms bleeds into the red in the picture above) but the overall look is quite eye-catching. Pulgasari was sold in a bag with a header card and was released in this color scheme as well as a black version and a gold exclusive version. Also look for a giant size version of the character that was sold in a box, as well as a baby Pulgasari that released in the Vinyl Para-Baby line.

*Hey, look. I just found out that the entire film is on Google Video. I guess I'll get to watch it now...

A very similar toy to the Giant Robo jumbo sized vinyl, but a much cooler looking character. You gotta love those bad guy robots!!

The GR-2 is a much cooler toy than the Giant Robo in my opinion and it always drove me nuts that it wasn't readily available here in the US. The Giant Robo bootleg was everywhere, but this one just never seemed to show up on Ebay. From time to time I saw it on Yahoo!Japan auctions, but always either at a time I couldn't afford it or just for a price I didn't like. But ultimately, I managed to pick one up at Mandarake in Nakano during my winter trip to Japan in 2006.

For the most part, this toy uses the same sculpt as the Giant Robo, with the obvious exceptions being the head and arms (although there is a Giant Robo that does use the same arms, too). This toy is taller than the other though, measuring about 24.5" to the tip of the highest part of the horn.

I really like the muted, dark colors on this toy. The whole thing looks like a shadow. It's molded in in a light black vinyl, with dark silver highlights. The only real color is the white of the eyes. The eyes are great, too. They seem to burn with anger, which isn't something you see on a robot very often.

The GR-2 is articulated in all the same places as the Giant Robo, but one thing I didn't count on is that you can also twist the horns on the head. A neat addition, but honestly, it really just looks best pointed straight up and there's not much reason to change that.

When I was in Japan, I had prepared a big box to bring on the plane home with me and this guy presented a problem because it was so large I didn't think I could fit it in. Fortunately, heating with a hair dryer allowed me to separate it at the waist and it then fit in fine. So I didn't have to pay any extra shipping to get it home, always a plus.

Despite it's jumbo size, this guy was released in a bag with a header card just like most vinyls.

Until further notice, this is my favorite Godzilla vinyl.

Despite the almost innumerable amount of kaiju characters released as vinyl toys over the years, I've been a bit disappointed with the Godzillas out there. There are more versions than I could care to count, but none ever really spoke to me. I always wanted one that had the vintage Bullmark style and represented the Godzilla I grew up with, the ones from the early 1970s. Well, it's not perfect, but so far this Marmit Vinyl Paradise release of Godzilla from "Godzilla vs. Hedorah" is my favorite.

The face sculpt on this one really seemed to capture the ferocious yet somewhat comic expression that endeared Godzilla to so many kids my age at that time. The mouth is shaped in such a way that you're not sure if he's smiling or scowling. And the eyes are focused straight ahead with determined ferocity.

I think this vinyl tends to look MUCH better from the side rather than straight on. The body looks a little too wide to me at the base, although not too bad.

Godzilla holds Hedorah's eyes in his hands. I really like this idea, but where Marmit drops the ball a bit, in my opinion, is that they basically use the same silver paint spray for both the eyes and Godzilla's claws and scales. I think a bit more detail would have been nice. Also, it would have been cool if the individual teeth were painted.

Godzilla stands 10" tall and comes packaged in a bag with a header card. It features 5 points of articulation (shoulders, hips and tail). Unfortunately, you cannot turn the head however. But overall, it's still the best Godzilla I've come across.

This is a nice vinyl if you can get it cheap, but if you want a really nice King Ghidorah for your collection, there are better options out there..

This Marmit Vinyl Paradise King Ghidorah (キングギドラ) is another vinyl I picked up in a bulk purchase. I was on sort of a vinyl kaiju binge at the time and wanted a Ghidorah that was predominentaly upright. At the time, the only other vinyl of the character I had was the realistic looking Bandai Big Size version. That's a very nice toy, but at 40cm long, the tail takes up a lot of space on the shelf. This one can stand in a group nicely without being a hindrance. It's only about 5" deep, in addition to being nearly a foot tall.

Unlike alot of my other vinyls, I think I like this one more when I actually pick it up and hold it, rather than lumped into a group or in pictures. I like the red and gold colors, but I could do without the silver and blue on the wings. They remind me of those old red, white and blue popsicles you could get from the ice cream truck back in the day (and maybe still can for all I know).

This version of King Ghidorah does have an interesting way of posing the heads. There are actually 4 points of articulation in the necks. Each individual head can be turned, but they all connect to one part which can also turn them all as a group. This is a nice idea, but it was takes away from the overall look of the torso, which now had a somewhat unsightly separation at this point. Besides the neck joints, you can also position the legs to your liking. The wings are separately molded pieces of vinyl, but don't move. The tail is also stationary.

This came bagged with a header card and was sold exclusively at the 2001 Chiller Theatre convention. The vinyl is solid and while the paint job isn't bad, it doesn't really blow me away either. I can't complain much as I only paid $20 for this one. It's certainly a nice buy for that price, but if you have room for only one Ghidorah in your life, get the M1 Bullmark re-issue or the aforementioned Big Size Bandai if realism is more your thing.

Not totally sure why I bought this one...

M1 versus Marmit.

These two companies seemed to get compared to one another quite often for some reason. Strange that these two should be singled out, since there is about a million companies producing Japanese kaiju these days. And Marmit almost always ends up on the short end of the debate. While Marmit has made a great many excellent contributions to the kaiju scene (I've already made clear my love of their Gallery Rodan Parababy), they just can't hang with M1 for pure CONSISTENCY of excellence.

Enter the Vinyl Paradise Sanda (サンダ). This might be the worst, ugliest toy in my entire collection. (And if you've been reading all my reviews, you know just what that means!) I've never seen a toy that looks more like it was defecated into existence than this sorry specimen. I feel certain that M1 would never allow such a thing to bear their name.

Molded in hideous brown vinyl with sloppy gold spray, Sanda also has one of the worst sculpts I've seen. The arms are actually longer than the legs and the torso is overly huge. He looks like he's wearing enormous shoulder pads. The right arm juts out at a 90 degree angle and then up as if he were throwing a spear. But he isn't and this throws off the symmetry of the toy. The overall effect is strikingly ugly.

He stands just shy of 9" tall and is articulated at the shoulders, hips and waist. He was sold in a bag with a very plain looking header card. This is truly an example of the worst that Marmit had to offer. Fortunately, this was an earlier release and many of their later efforts were MUCH improved. I suspect that if that were not the case, they wouldn't still be around today.

Sanda comes from the 1966 Toho film "Frankenstein's Monsters: Sanda versus Gaira" (aka "War of the Gargantuas"), which was a sequel to the previous years "Frankenstein versus Baragon". I don't currently own a Gaira vinyl, but when I get one, I suspect I'll also get another, better Sanda to go with it.

"War of the Gargantuas" trivia time! My parents were watching a double-bill of this and Rodan at the drive-in when my mother went into labor with my oldest brother. Strangely, he did not grow up to love Japanese kaiju. I know, it would have been a better story if it was me!

This Marmit vinyl was a pleasant surprise for me.

If you are a collector, then undoubtedly there have been instances in your life when you've made a purchase, not because you wanted the item, but simply because you were buying other things from the same seller and it was cheap enough that you said "Sure, just throw it in". Such was the case for me with this toy rendition of "Frankenstein" (フランケンシュタイン) from Marmit's Vinyl Paradise line. This paint spray was released exclusively at the 2001 San Diego Comicon, alongside his rival Baragon, whom he battled in Toho's aptly named "Frankenstein Versus Baragon" in 1965.

Of course, as so often happens with me, this toy that I didn't intend to buy turned out to be one of my favorites of the lot. In pictures, it had just struck me as some simple caveman-like toy with nothing very interesting about it. But in person, I was really impressed with the subtleties of the the sculpt and paint job. The sunken, droopy eyes. The overbite with the slight fangs on the ends. The hunch of the right shoulders. The way the brown of the hair contrasts with the green of the loincloth. All add up to make the figure more impressive than expected. Furthermore, there aren't too many characters like this in the pantheon of vinyl kaiju. He's both monster and human, which makes him stand out on your shelf.

I guess the only thing I could complain about is that the paint spray seems abit incomplete. Parts of the hair and cloth are still the flesh tone of the skin. Some might not like that there is no articulation at the neck (only the shoulders, hips and waist), but this doesn't bother me for some reason.

Not too much else to say about this toy. It's slightly more than 9" tall and, though this version was released in 2001, the sculpt has "Marmit 1998" molded into the bottom of the foot. It was sold in a bag with a header card.

An exclusive Baragon color scheme produced specially for the famous comic book convention.

This Baragon (バラゴン) from Marmit's Vinyl Paradise line is just the sort of toy I used to hate. I could never see the appeal of these non-realistic looking vinyl kaiju. I always figured if you were gonna release a representation of a character, you should strive to make it look exactly the way it did in the movie/show it came from, not some cartoony caricature with wildly different colors. I'm not sure exactly when the change happened, but somewhere along the line I saw the light and now I love this stuff.

This color-scheme was released exclusively at the 2001 San Diego Comicon. The green, purple and orange spray look really nice together and the toy is slightly larger than your standard size vinyl. Wide at the base and standing 10" tall, Baragon tends to stick out from the pack. The arms, legs, head and tail can all be moved.

Baragon may be more closely associated with the Godzilla series of movies, (having appeared in 1965's "Destroy All Monsters" and 2001's "Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack"), but he first appeared in the Toho film "Frankenstein vs. Baragon", which was retitled "Frankenstein Conquers The World" in the US. I saw this years back on TNT's "Monstervision" and remember liking it quite a bit. Fortunately, the original version will be released in Japanese with English subtitles on February 27th.

Charismatic Ultra-kaiju...glows in the dark...holds your cash...what's not to love!? ...But wait--there's more...!

Some time ago, I picked up this unpainted Marmit Vinyl Paradise glowie of one of Ultraman's classic nemeses, Garamon, along with his pet meteor(!), Garadama. It's actually a glow-in-the-dark piggy bank: there's a removeable plastic cap on the bottom and, of course, he's hollow. Anyway, it was a steal for the price from Kaiju-Taro...and besides, I just fell in love with that fun, goofy sculpt!

Shines like a beacon, no?

Among my other glowies at night, it's like a lighthouse! Still, not terribly interesting on a visual level, under either normal light or while glowing...

So, I had a couple options: either ship it off to a custom painter like my buddy, John Groff of KaijuZoo, or unleash my own imagination (and recently-purchased glow spraypaint!). I went with the latter--I figured this would be a great opportunity to muck around with the various colors of glow spraypaint I'd picked up from ReadySetGlo.

Right now, I have purple, red, orange, pink, and yellow to work with, though green, aqua, and some clear versions that glow in different colors are also currently available (and more products are added to their offerings all the time). With these, I came up with a simple, effective color scheme. First, I've always liked the red Garamon look as opposed to the more traditional(?) green. Besides...I already have a green glowie Garamon: the Popy/B-Club Bullmark reissue!

So, I decided to do a light purple over-spray up from the bottom just on the Garadama meteor, and then a thicker red over-spray from the top over Garamon, himself. This would leave quite a bit of glow vinyl still exposed and just leave the hint of color. When this was done, I would do a quick spray of pink on his lips, orange on his belly, and I would hand-paint his eyes with gloss black acrylic paint. I decided to leave the rest of the face, hands, and tail completely exposed.

After quite a bit of time-consuming masking with Parafilm-M, various stages of spraying, and final sealing using Minwax's "Polycrylic" varnish, the project was complete. It took the better part of this past weekend...and I'm pretty excited with the results!!

And here's how he looks alongside his Bullmark-esque counterpart:

The cool thing is that the glow spraypaint takes a little longer to charge than the bare glow vinyl, but it glows for much longer. This creates different interesting color effects based on different kinds of exposure. Real fun stuff for the glow nut in all of us!

I'll certainly be doing more of these customs and I look forward to sharing them with you. If you're interested in doing your own custom glowies such as this one, there are two important things to keep in mind when working with glow spraypaint from ReadySetGlo (Lebel Enterprises, Inc. products):

1) The spraypaint is actually a very fine glow powder suspended within a traditional acrylic paint matrix. The presence of the powder leads to a LOT of spray nozzle clogging, especially if you start and stop a lot. It definitely helps to have lots of spare nozzles. I recommend completely clearing out the nozzle after each coat by inverting the can and spraying for several seconds. I then simply remove the tip/nozzle and toss it in a container of paint thinner to await the next use.

2) Once your coat dries, you'll notice that there's a fine, sandy texture on the surface of your subject. That's the glow powder. Be very gentle with it as it will rub off under heavy wear. This basically means that you HAVE to seal your work. Any spray varnish will do and it'll work like a charm...just be dilligent about it!

Glow forth and prosper, my children!