Saturday, October 31, 2009

The sale... FROM HELL.

Happy Halloween to all you folks out in blogger-land. Never really did the trick-or-treating thing as a kid (lived in the boonies and didn't trust our neighbors), but I still have a taste for the holiday nonetheless. These days this taste is indulged primarily through reruns of Roseanne Halloween specials and the opportunity to buy cheap candy from the supermarket. And Halloween blog posts. Still have those.

And I guess I really missed my chance with the Skull Head Butt stuff... that would have been perfect for Halloween. Nonetheless, the second spookiest toy in my menagerie: EXOHEAD's RFSO Galtan!

EXOHEAD - Galtan (6-07 RFSO)
You should have flipped me when you had the chance!

Back the OLDEN DAYS when there was no Zollmen and EXOHEAD was just EXOHEAD, the mini-size Galtan [ガルタン] sculpt was an object of much desire. I know it is hard to believe now when you can barely get rid of these at retail. A well-known board member on the Skullbrain.org forums managed to broker a deal with EXO allowing a domestic sale of painted glow-in-the-dark (GID) Galtans under the "RFSO" label (hence this being commonly called the RFSO Galtan). I'd tell you what RFSO means, but it contains a dirty word (not the F).

Thirteen pieces were allocated for U.S. sales, with a handful more sold in Japan. Each was packaged in a beautifully airbrushed and tied folding-box (which sadly did not come with mine). An even smaller number of unpainted GID versions were distributed to Real Friends Only.

Of course these sold out in flash and people whined, threads were locked, etc. And then people that did get them started to re-sell. Ha! I bought this one (from the Japan allotment) way after the fact, and let me tell you that it sat untouched for a LONG WHILE.



EXOHEAD - Galtan (6-07 RFSO)
Asstar.

Galtan is originally a patchi-kaiju design taken from a vintage trading card. It is an amalgamation of Baltan and Antlar, with a big, fat skull head planted on top. This mini figure captures the crude and distorted feel of patchi-kaiju perfectly; although it is only articulated at the waist, there is sort of an implied movement in its posture. The colors on the RFSO version are sprayed over GID vinyl and tastefully restrained, much like M1Go glow vinyls. Burnt, creamy orange and metallic light blue match well with the off-white vinyl, and perhaps unintentionally correspond to the color palette of pd+MM-111 RUSS (the last Man Machine toy from EXO). While I think many were drawn to this piece because of its rarity, it is still a very strong composition in its own right.

Alright, time for a Halloween afternoon nap. More weirdness later.

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