Giant Robots have invaded the Earth!

I wish this was my original Reideen (aka: Raydeen) from when I was a kid. I also wish I had a giant robot sometimes, though parking it in front of the house might be a problem. This is a great little reproduction by Bandai. I don't know if calling it a reproduction is correct here as the one I had as a kid was probably just imported by Mattel from Bandai.



I found this on a trip to China in a little hobby shop that specialized in all sorts of robots and models, plus a few little odds and ends. I didn't care how much he cost at the time, I was going home with this guy regardless, I think I ended up paying about 20 USD at the time, which I'm still happy I did. Everything about this guy is just like the original. Maybe with the exception of some colors.



So, let me take you back in time, around the late Seventies. My parents would shop on a military base, at a shop called the Four Seasons. It was sort of the gardening shop on base, but it also housed the toys. Probably why I try to buy toys every time my wife goes to buy plants. Four Seasons was known to have a pretty great model section and some strange new robots called the Shogun Warriors. I would say the my entire collection of Shogun Warriors from when I was a kid came form this shop.



Now I do not have any of my original Shogun Warriors from those days, except for a piece that belonged to a 24 inch tall Mazinger (aka: Mazinga), so you can imagine how excited I was to be face to face with a buddy from my childhood in the middle of Hong Kong. I have some great memories of my buddies and I gathering all our Shogun Warriors to do battle, and it didn't matter if you had the little die cast ones like this one or the giant roto cast ones, they were all welcome to the battle.





Raydeen was a two in one, or a transformer. He could change from his robot mode to a cool bird like craft. Yep, before the Transformers and the Go Bots we had transforming robots.



I can remember off the top of my head the robotic warriors I had amassed. In the small die cast category I had Raydeen (going by their Mattel names here), Dangard and a sweet tank called a Shigcon Tank. In the larger class I had Mazinga and of course Godzilla. I miss my Godzilla.



What a cool idea for a toy company to go and gather up all these different giant robot shows and market them under one name. Maybe one day I'll track down a few more of my Shogun Warrior friends, until then I have Brave Mazinga here to battle any giant monsters or robots in the neighborhood.

The Great Mazinger!

Toy Joy strikes again! On one of our trips to Austin I picked up Mazinga, Mazinger, or whatever you prefer from my favorite toy stops Toy Joy! This trip I knew I was getting a windup robot from their awesome selection of windup tin men, I just didn't know which.



So I dug and dug through the stock on the shelf until I produced some likely candidates and lined them up for some final inspection. This seemed to amuse one of the shop keepers as he was stocking the section next to the windups. He asked if I was a fan of Windup Robots, which I responded with an enthusiastic "Hell yes!" and a smile. He said he was glad to hear, that he was a fan as well, that not too many people dig them around the shop.



I told him I was narrowing down today's purchase from the three I had lined up n the shelf to one, since I was also planing on picking up a few other odds and ends, and asked for his input as well. While I valued his opinion I decided to go with Mazinga here and left the others for another time. He got a laugh when I told him I would be back for the others, months later I did return and pick up one of the others, that's for another post.



Mazinga is from a family of Windups released from Marmit. They come in a little coffin style box with a photo of the toy on the front and the text in Japanese. The body is made of Tin with a print of the character design on it, the head is a roto molded plastic. Marmit produced several properties including among others Ultraman and Getter Robo. Oh and Toy Joy is the kind of shop that lets you look at the toy and try them out. They had several open robots for you to see and compare before purchasing!