Recently I went back to my parents' home and took a week out to work on my thesis. Didn't end up doing as much writing as I had hoped (so much reading), but I did take time to go through some of my old geeky bits and pieces as I figured some things may be of use (due to having dates on them) or just of general interest. So here's the first part of my photo collection - toys and figures!
SUPER-DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS VALKYRIE BATTROID FIGURES
I strongly suspect that these are Macross figures but I don't have the boxes anymore and they were bought and built so long ago that I don't remember anything else about them! I have no idea why I chose the above colour schemes, though clearly I was displeased with the yellowish look of the right-hand figure and decided not to use a base colour at all on the left-hand one.
If anyone knows what these are then please let me know!
Edit: Thanks to James Ridler for letting me know that these are both VF-1 Valkyries in Battroid form! The right-hand one is the training model that Hikaru and Minmay take for a joyride while on a date. Having now seen how they're supposed to look, I am even more ashamed of my terrible painting skills!
SUPER-DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS VALKYRIE FIGHTER FIGURE
I bought this at my second ever convention, back in 1998. I remember buying it in the dealers' room and being very excited - I've always enjoyed model kits and I was really into Macross at the time, so I was delighted to have a Valkyrie that I could build. I also remember showing it to someone I met at the con and having him snottily ask me if I'd even know how to assemble it since the instructions were in Japanese. It momentarily took the wind out of my sails until I opened the box and looked at the instructions and saw that - of course - they were entirely visual. Screw you, Negative Con Guy!
The kit gave you the option of using the stand with the UN Spacy symbol on it, or of having a missile on the bottom, presumably so you could suspend it from something. Interestingly, I painted the missile anyway but clearly thought the stand was a better option. There were also stickers in the box, which I guess I never used because I was scared of putting them in the wrong places!
I think this was also the only time I ever used enamel paints for a model kit, possibly because that was all we had at the time (my dad and brother had both been into building model planes so I borrowed some of their supplies)!
MACROSS 7 VF-11 MAXL FIGURES
These were both part of a snap-together plastic kit which I initially thought would only allow either the Fighter or Battroid modes for Mylene's Valkyrie - imagine my delight when I realised the kit included both! Some digging around has revealed that Bandai re-released this kit in 2009 for the 15th anniversary of Macross 7, but I had the original release!
I had never built a snap-together kit before and I remember clicking everything together, then thinking it would look better if I painted the pieces individually and carefully un-clicking everything. I was very proud of the shade of pink I mixed up for this - my dad came by while I was painting everything and commented that the pink looked edible!
I was probably about 16 or 17 when I got this so the paint job is a bit wobbly, but I did my best! I'm pretty sure there were stickers with this as well, which I suppose I should have used, but painting everything was more interesting.
Something that was really fun about this kit was that the Battroid mode was articulated, so you could pose it in a variety of ways:
I'm sure other fans were more imaginative on this front than I was but I was very happy to find that it still worked well after all these years!
And I still love the little Gubaba decal on the Fighter mode:
KAWAII 5-0 PEWTER FIGURES
I really don't know a huge amount about the backstory to these. They were made by Carl Desforges, aka Mr Panda, who is still a regular attendee at Minamicon these days - I really should ask him to tell me more about these! I know that they were figures made for Kawaii 5-0, a tabletop game of some kind, though I never played it. Carl made and hand-painted tiny pewter figures based on a characters from a huge range of anime series, as well as his own creations, and he sold them by mail order and in dealers' rooms at cons. The first time I saw them was in a report on RecontanimeTed in the short-lived J-Fan magazine in early 1996, and I spent ages looking at the photo and trying to name all the characters!
I think it was the first Ayacon in 1998 that I finally managed to pick one of the figures up, and it was Gally/Alita, as I was (and still am) a big fan of Battle Angel Alita:
Spun off from
Kawaii 5-0 was a fanzine called
Boiled Spoons, which featured Carl's original characters in short comics that made heavy use of puns and other terrible jokes, in true British comedy fashion. Although I am not and have never been much of an artist, I drew a few of these comics based on scripts that Carl sent me. It was enormous fun!
I don't recall if I bought these figures or if Carl gave them to me as gifts. Sadly I don't remember what either of these characters was called now!
RYO-OHKI PLUSH
Another early convention purchase, picked up at Shinnenkai in either 1997 or 1998 (I suspect 1998). The venue for Shinnenkai was the Radisson Edwardian (since renamed Radisson Blu), an airport hotel very close to Heathrow Airport but not even remotely close to literally anything else except other airport hotels. I remember getting on the airport shuttle bus with my mum on the last day of the con, clutching my Ryo-Ohki plush, and having the driver look at it and comment that she'd seen loads of them through the day!
Some time after the con I discovered that this was a US release - you can just about see the Pioneer tag in the bottom right. I saw what the Japanese version looked like and wasn't terribly impressed!
After all these years she's still in great condition, and cute as ever.
SAILOR MOON BUBBLE BATH
Now this is a funny one. I bought this when I was 16, while I was on holiday in Lanzarote - I always liked seeing anime merch that was readily available on the European mainland, since it was only available from specialist retailers in the UK and mail order was a much more arduous process back then. I hadn't seen a whole lot of Sailor Moon (and in fact I've only ever seen it in German, thanks to my dad setting the satellite dish up to pick up European language channels), but it was a title I encountered so much in the early days of my fandom that I absorbed it into my interests anyway! In typical fashion, I couldn't bring myself to actually use any of the bubble bath, so it's still in there and almost certainly no longer usable (for one thing, it smells like dish soap now). One other weird point is that the bottle has become discoloured over the years but Usagi remains nice and vibrant!
One nice thing about this is that Usagi is detachable - she's sitting on the bottle cap - and can also be rotated depending on how you want her to sit. Sadly her hair tails are just a smidge too long and inflexible to make her sit on a shelf or the edge of the table, but she looks best sitting on the moon anyway:
Now, the funny thing with this is that, as time passed and I got wiser to how things work with merch, I had started to assume it was a bootleg product. It's not like there was any shortage of it, and I'd bought this cheaply in a random shop. I even managed to pick up a "sailor girl" figure in Lanzarote that absolutely was a knock-off figure based on Sailor Mercury (sadly now lost to time or I would have photographed it too). So this should most likely be a knock-off, right?
Imagine my surprise when I checked the bottom of the bottle and discovered that it wasn't:
Copyright information and a product number! Completely unexpected!
Next time I'm back I'll have to empty the bottle and give it a good rinse, it's still in great condition but I definitely don't want it to deteriorate any further!
More photos of the other things as and when I have time!
