I purchased the above in Japan. The name seems to translate to ‘Poop Pals’ and each of the two animals is talking about playing with poop (I think). Obviously their heads resembles the poop emoji.

What the heck is this?

It’s a model kit! The above photo shows the entire contents, and you’ll notice instructions and runners common to other plastic model kits. There’s also two bags of what the kit calls ‘clay’:

This is weird stuff. It’s very lightweight, and feels more like foam than any clay I’ve ever known. It’s also a little oily. For the Australians reading, it has the texture of those old banana lollies, albeit fluffier.

Assembly of the animal bodies is trivial, so I’ll focus on the heads. The poop clay is softened by kneading it, and then stuffed into a mold. A lid is then put on and rotated to flatten the base, and then the final poop-shaped head is complete. It’s easy and works surprisingly well. I imagine kids would love this step.

Then you put stickers on the facial features and your animal is complete. Don’t you agree my cat look wonderful…? Here’s the bear:

The clay/foam apparently dries solid after exposed to the air, so I imagine these things would last a while. But as a model kit it’s quite poor, with ill-fitting pieces (which is very unusual for Bandai) and clay that isn’t adhesive enough for the ears and eyes to stay on.

You get enough clay to make three heads though, which of course I had to try:

I think the above is a ‘twisted bear-cat’. It’s my masterpiece!

This was fun, and were I a drooling child I imagine it would have been lots of fun. But it’s also weird and imperfect, and therefore not surprising that it cost me only ¥99 (about $0.65). We saw it for as much as ¥2000 during our recent trip, and at that price it’s not even close to worth it.

So it was fun while it lasted, which was less than the time it took me to write this post 🙂