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I felt like using a lot of syllables in today's title.
Yajima-san of Dream Rocket has been a busy fellow in recent months, having released several new items over the past month. This is more than I've seen from him in a while, so I hope he will not succumb to the demands of the American market and will continue to keep his releases few and sweet.
Ok, ok, so here we go...
At Superfestival 46, which was held at the Tokyo Science Museum on April 29th (a Tuesday!), the star of the show was an 'update' of the original Kamen no Ninja Akakage kaiju, Gabari. Supposedly limited to 10 pieces sold, this Gabari features metallic colors sprayed over the solid grey vinyl also used for the first release. While the Max Toy Co. version of Gabari is beautiful, I feel this rendering is a bit truer to the original style of the monster. Also, puppeteer of the original suit, Hotta Shinzou, was on-hand for autographs.
Unreported was a lottery sale of eight one-off Razor Pegimons. I've heard these were sold lucky-draw style with numbered tickets given out early on the morning of Superfest. Quite a few have shown up on YJA listings- while most listings indicate a run of eight pieces, I think the truth is that this is most likely a series of eight one-offs, because each piece is numbered "Eight pieces, First/Second/Third, etc." on its header card. Sadly for the unpopular Pegimon, most have gone unsold...Here are a few of the Pegimons that I have seen:
No. 1 of 8:
No. 5 of 8:
No. 6 of 8:
This was noted by the seller to be one of the more popular colors of the Pegimon. Not hard to see why, as the metallic silver is quite fitting on this sculpt.
No. 7 of 8:
Pretty cool- looks like a nod to Gigan, which I believe was the inspiration for the Razor Pegimon design.
No. ?? of 8: 
Perhaps it is just the lighting, but I found this one to be particularly striking- almost looks like it's made from red lacquered wood.
No. ?? of 8:
On May 5th, the final World Hobby Festival was held at Big Sight in Tokyo. The sole Dream Rocket offering was this clear orange Doguma with red, black and gold paint. Doguma is my favorite Dream Rocket sculpt, but this one didn't really catch my eye- perhaps because of the similarity to the original colorway.
Ningyoushi also recently featured a clear Balbagon with clear pink paint sloshed inside the toy... pretty cool effect, but it doesn't seem well-suited to the detailed sculpt. The regular clear version is pretty interesting, though, and I may pick that up one day.
Trying out a few new things with my camera setup tonight. I replaced the normal lights with softer light incandescent bulbs, and draped white cloths between the bulb and table to reduce the harshness of the lights. I've been having a problem with certain shades of green turning bluish in my photos, and I was hoping that using a light source with more yellow might offset this effect.
Generally, though, it's almost impossible to take a front-lit shot of the bubble Mutant Head without it looking absolutely pustulent on account of light reflecting off of the bubbles. This one came out somewhat decent, if a bit dark. The color is pretty true to the actual toy.The back-lit shots are winners all. :)
I am normally not prone to heating and disassembling expensive vinyl toys, but a recent purchase arrived in a bit of an odd condition. Upon being unpacked, I was a little disappointed to find that this Dengu toy from Amapro had a warped leg, which kept it from standing level. In hindsight, this may have been the reason that it was sold in the first place, because it looked more like production deformation, rather than shipping damage.
So, how to fix it?To be honest, I have never worked with vinyl in the past, although I have done some work with soft PVC plastic toys. I do know that heat will soften vinyl, while cold will re-set the vinyl. So first, I put a large pot of water on the stove at low heat, and filled a pan with tap water and ice cubes. Once the water reached around 90 degrees or so, I popped the toy in a Ziploc bag and dunked it in the water for around a minute. The vinyl is pretty soft and malleable, but not enough so to create a significant risk of unintentional reshaping. I pull the leg out and adjust the arm, and then pop the right half of the body in the ice water bath to set the warm vinyl.
Unfortunately, I was careless and let water infiltrate the body of the toy. But fortunately, the back hatch was soft enough to slip off the main body and drain the water out. This also had a second benefit of revealing that part of the problem was the area around the leg, which had puckered due to the original damage. So I then reheated the vinyl and repeated the process, pushing out the belly and leg area before cooling the vinyl again. After letting all of the water evaporate, all that was left to do is to heat the bit of extra vinyl (by dipping it in the hot water) around the 'back hatch' piece, so that it could slip back into the main body. And then, good as new!
So what did I learn? Well, turns out, vinyl, and the airbrushed paint, is pretty hardy. Nothing was really damaged far as I can tell, and the toy emerged from its hot water and ice water baths none the worse for wear.
Amapro - Dengu (Monstock color ver.).This Dengu is a store exclusive by Amapro that was sold earlier this year at Monstock, in celebration of the store's 1 year anniversary. There were at least two versions for sale: this normal color version, and a secret color version with gold eyes and pink spray on the back. Another unpainted clear green version was shown, but I am not sure if it was for sale. Another exclusive released at the anniversary celebration was a black 'prototype' version of Touma's new sculpt, Destodon. These have been fairly hard to find on the secondary market, because Monstock sells most toys through walk-in only. Thanks to the person that gave me a heads-up on this one.
Dengu is a patchi-kaiju toy produced by Amapro, and based on a design by Karasawa Naoki that was originally shown in Figure Ou (Figure King) magazine. Amapro's website identifies it as 'Rampaging Space Beast Dengu.' There have been quite a few versions produced of Dengu in a variety of colors, including a green GID vinyl "1 billion volt" version. This particular Dengu is pulled in bottle-green vinyl, with metallic gold spray on its back and matte pink on its eyes. Amapro has only recently begun using clear vinyl, and I believe this is only its second toy to make use of it (the first was a Kaiju-Taro exclusive, standard-size Naruton).As one of the neo-vintage style toy makers, Amapro is somewhat the antithesis of Dream Rocket. Where Dream Rocket creates toys with clean lines, intricate detail and flawlessly executed paint, Amapro is roughly sculpted, textured and colored with a few choice passes of the airbrush. Much as with certain traditional Japanese pottery, the beauty is in imperfection.More photos below (and larger versions available here):
RAAAGHGARARARGHH. MORE SOON!
...I have taken a liking to Sara Bareilles album, Little Voice. You know- she's in that commercial for the Rhapsody music service.Frankly, I don't like Love Song all that much. She does, however, have some absolutely beautiful songs with piano and vocals. I highly recommend City and Between the Lines.
