well then... looks like it's time to break out a tiny flat-head screw driver, carefully lift some hinges, open this thing up, and see if I can get it working again!
Very happy for you, that the repair job was successful. Have to admit, i am a bit jelly though. Kittyfire looks great sparking like a champ!
Excellent - I have alot of sparkers and a few that don't work. Ive always wanted to pull them apart and fix them but never had the time. Cheers to you
Wow, that's excellent Charlie! I am so happy that you were able to pop him open and return him to good health. So what was the problem with the sparker, and what did you need to do to fix him, if I might ask? Could be some useful advice for others on here. Such a great toy. I can think of fewer more suitable kaiju to be made as sparkers. And even better now that he is his old self again.
whoops, sorry I forgot to reply ultra! my job of having to fix it was a lot easier than expected, once I pried the clips open it started working again. when I bought it, it would just barely wind, it was already pretty wound up. so seems like it must've just been something was rubbing and preventing it from being able to spin. so thankfully it was an easy job for me.
I scored this little gem on the bay yesterday. I remember reading this thread a few years back and was curious about them, and also seeing @scobot awesome collection photos on flickr. Other than that, i know very little about them, but i do know it will be a cool addition to my collection. I have no idea if it still sparks and the seller only said it 'runs on the wheels' which doesn't necessarily mean the wind up mechanism works either. For what i paid i wont mind if it doesn't work - the condition looks great to me for its age and i'm a sucker for red toys! I was thinking it would be nice to have a few more of these beauties, but after searching my regular sources, i have to assume these are quite hard to come by and pretty rare?
nice catch I was watching the auction too and hoped someone on here would snag it.I found another auction in the US for the same toy and it was called a Yonezawa 'Fire Monster Todola'
Mate, i think we are going to be bidding against each other at some point . . . if i'd seen that lot with the Tiger 7 you scored recently, i would definitely of bid on it. I suppose its inevitable, seeing as the Sofubi collecting community is so small in the UK. Missing that Tiger 7 hurts. Oh it buuurns! But i'm glad it went to a good home . . . . .
I know mate, aren't they the best? So much fun. There's another scan featuring 'em on this thread somewhere, but I'm pretty sure this one has more helmets. I don't recall seeing the top and middle left before. Just imagine a bunch of kids at a festival somewhere, all wearing those kaiju helmets and running around, it would be hilarious. Haha!
Thanks for the scan! Very interesting that they have King Gomera, but not King Dragon (which supports my theory that Dragon came out last). @The Moog Sorry I didn't see your post about Todora earlier. I never thought of the small sparkers as particularly rare, but they don't seem to show up as often these days (as, say, 10 years ago). Most of the ones that I have were bought when Kaiju-Taro had their big sell-off years ago.
I've only seen one of those helmets before, there were a few out there, none cheap. What a mind-blower to see all of those. My temple is actually throbbing. Well, it's been a long day, but still.
Definitely green with jealousy Moog! Please let us know if it still sparks when he arrives! Thanks for sharing the Yonezawa page, very informative.
View this post on Instagram Thanks again to @The Moog for getting me hip to tiles and such for photos. Really makes the process a lot more fun. And thanks to the excellent brainer who sold this to me!
@Michael Beverage Lookin' goood mate. Love the toy as well. I didn't even know there was a green colorway!
Speaking of Todora, I came across a fairly intriguing item recently: a variant of the red Todora: I bought the one on the left years ago; same one as in @The Moog 's post above. It was sold alongside a number of the other mini sparkers, most of which were in pristine condition. So I think the paint and vinyl colors are largely unchanged from their original condition. The one on the right is the recent purchase. At first, I thought it may have been the same figure, but with fading to the red pigment in the purple paint (giving it more of a bluish hue). Upon closer inspection, there does not appear to be any fading, and in fact, the paint application is different than the normal red version. So, just a paint variant, right? Maybe not. When you turn both figures over, there is another surprise. The obvious one is that the variant red has a 'Made In Japan' sticker in place of the stamped lettering on the normal red. Less obvious is that the variant red actually has a completely different base plate, which is missing the third hole on the tail side. The most likely explanation seems to be that there were different runs of this figure, with variations in the materials and paint selection. Probably not uncommon at the time, but any such run variation for these mini sparkers was previously unknown to me. The 'Made In Japan' sticker is especially interesting, as many of the export (Hawaii) versions of Bullmark vinyls also carried a similar sticker. I don't know much about the distribution of Yonezawa's vinyls and sparkers, but it does make me wonder whether they may have produced some specifically for export.
@akum6n Interesting stuff, the toy world is full of things like this. Do you think its possible they sold the molds to a different manufacturer? Maybe that's why the base plate is completly different? This happens a lot with the vintage squeakers I collect. Combex were a British manufacturer but briefly opened up a factory in Australia which used different types of vinyl than the UK one. I've also noticed certain sculpts that appear in official Combex catalogues were also used at some point by Ledraplastic (who are Italian) the only difference between those is the makers stamp on the bottom.
It's certainly possible. This is the first time that I have seen a variant on the normal 6 mini sparkers (orange Gomera, red Gomera, green Gimegon, yellow Gimegon, red Todora and green Todora), so their manufacture and sales were probably not as straightfoward as previously thought. This is just speculation on my part, but I think the Yonezawa vinyls were sort of a halfway effort to cash in on the kaiju boom of the 70s, and which were jettisoned fairly quickly. Yonezawa historically was known for tin or mechanical toys, which were probably on the decline by the 70s. As might be expected, most of their vinyls- aside from the famous standard size patchis- incorporate some sort of mechanical gimmick. They did not have many licenses; only Mirroman and Kamen Rider come to mind, and both were only mechanical vinyls. My guess is that the mechanical patchi kaiju vinyls came after the licensed figures and were used as a way to extend the usage of the mechanical parts without paying additional royalties. Once the vinyls petered out, there is a chance the molds were sold to another company. (As a side note, Yonezawa is one of the few companies that actually survived the toy explosion in the later years of the Showa era. After making the vinyls, they went on to produce plastic and electronic toys in the 80s. Eventually, I read that they were acquired by Sega in the early 90s, and continue to exist as Sega Toys. This may be part of the reason that Medicom was so cagey about using the Yonezawa name on their repros of Saidon, Uchuu Genjin and the nodders, as Sega theoretically could still own the rights to those designs.) All that said, the production quality seems the same between the two red Todoras, so it doesn't seem to be a case of the molds being shopped around to increasingly lower-end manufacturers. It's too bad that the packaging was missing, as that would have probably provided some clues as to the circumstances of this Todora.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing this Daniel. I think you are likely right with that summary. It is great to see these subtle, but very clear, variations, as opposed to the more often cases of just general paint differences from who might have been handling the toys during manufacture. I am not certain, but I feel like I have actually seen the blue version more often. I need to pay closer attention from now on for these sparkers, as likely there could be similar release differences on the other sculpts too.
@Roger That takes some guts to wind up and run the King Dragon. From what I have seen, they rarely turn up. @ultrakaiju I know, I wish I had kept better track of the random mini sparkers that turned up on YJA over the years. When I look for images of Todora, I've only seen this red/purple one. There is a red/blue Gomera that has paint that is similar to this mystery Todora.
