[Blobpus / ブロッパス] Lovecraftian Lovechild

Have you ever stared at the big Dokugan and big Last Kaiju from Blobpus... maybe clonked them together a bit and made kissy sounds? What? No? Well good, me neither. But I'll wager that a few of you have wondered why Blobpus' toys all use the same parts.

Blobpus [ブロッパス] built his initial following on only a handful of sculpts: Blobpus, Blobpi and the Last Kaiju. Blobpus is the mid-sized tentacled figure that we all know and miss just a little bit at this point. Blobpi [ブロッピ] is a baby Blobpus; Last Kaiju is Blobpus all growed up. Later, the torso from Last Kaiju would be given bat wings and a cyclopean mushroom head as the Dokugan. Swapping out the wings for the Last Kaiju tentacles made a Cyclopus [サイクロッパス]. I wrote a little about the Blobpus sculpt back here. Of course there are many more Blobpus toys these days, but back then, all the small vinyl toy companies made do with not much.





Dokupus is a small-run piece that Blobpus brought out at the Subcarism show held at the Stitch Tokyo store in May 2009. Only 5 pieces were available at the show- and all sold by lottery! Amazingly, out of the 5, 3 (including this one) were sold overseas to Skullbrain board members. Despite my hesitation to purchase artist customs, the mini-run justified the purchase in my mind (making it semi-production, as opposed to a one-off), as did the beautiful rainbow of colors sprayed over the flesh vinyl. I am such a sucker for bright colors on flesh vinyl... blame my time in Hawaii!



This is also a pretty cool tweak on the Blobpus sculpt, because it provides a key to the puzzle that I alluded to above. The building blocks of a Dokupus are a Dokugan DX head (clear outer shell with 'guts' piece) and a flesh color Blobpus body. So I think of it as a Cyclopus growing from a Blobpus body- the innards are the original Blobpus head with the shell beginning to form around it. Maybe Cyclopus/Dokugan is really a parasitic creature that takes over the bodies of Blobpuses.

Regardless of what you read into it, Dokupus ties the big one-eyed toys in to the original Blobpus toy in a neat way. It's just a shame that so few were made.