Geoff's Superheroes, Space and other incredible Toys: Microman

Showing posts with label Microman. Show all posts

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Rubber Suits of Monster's legend...

Microman Godzilla / First Monochrome version, Takara, Japan, 2006

Japan always had a thing with their monsters... Radioactive mutations were a popular subject after the horrors of the second WW and what better subject to make low-cost movies that would thrill young and old movie-goers...

But far from the special effects of Ray Harryhausen stop-motion, Japan went the other way around and used real actors in latex suits... A process George Lucas would use some years later for lots of the monsters of the first Star Wars trilogy, before CGI kicked in and filming was made more like computer programming than acting...

Please read more about it here.

Resultado de imagem para picture godzilla actor

Haruo Nakajima, the real actor that did Godzilla "suit" acting

Saturday, March 12, 2016

See-through Biotron...

Biotron, Takara, Japan, 2000

When all is clear, you can see the guts of Biotron on a sunny day. Japanese toy-companies always have liked to do clear and black and white versions of whatever toy they brought on the market. It's just their thing...

Bagged !

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Microman... and women ?

Microman (?) with sarcophagus, China, 1999

Why the Statue of Liberty ?

In toy history, the Microman toy line from Takara (Japan) has great importance and paved the way to the oh-so-popular Transformer toys in the 80ies. The toy line started in Japan in 1974, and some of the figures soon made their way to the USA under the Micronauts toy-line (imported directly through Mego Corp.)

Some really cool web-sites are devoted to these, and are worth checking :

http://www.micro-outpost.com/

http://www.microforever.com/

Supergril, Takara, China, 2006

Packaging all pink and girly !

The nice thing about these figurines is that they are/were fully articulated. While Kenner and Palitoy were making stiffness the norm in their Star Wars / Action Force lines, Takara on the other hand was able to get about 30 (yes, thir-ty !) arculation points in their line. And all of this in a 3 3/4 inch figurine !

Furthermore, they came with ton of accessories, and could swap out parts from one figurine to another. At a certain point, they even introduced figurines with magnetized joints ! Tomy - Takara is continuing the line nowedays...