I love ‘box toys’. I love them to death.
These are toys, often ‘action figures’, sold in sealed boxes so one doesn’t know what they are buying. Each series usually has a half-dozen or more different toys in it, and half the fun of buying them is wondering which one will be in your box. In Japan, KLS and I buy vast amounts of these. For particularly good series we’ll buy several, to increase our chances of getting ones we like.
When they first appeared they were relatively inexpensive (one or two hundred Yen), so the lower cost offset the fact you were taking quite a gamble. These days they have become much higher quality, and are priced higher to match. So some of them cost more than actually buying packaged action figures (where you can see what you are getting). Even so, the allure remains, especially if the sculpts are excellent (which they usually are).
A couple of weeks ago I bought a single box from the Ultimate Monsters Godzilla series. There are six possible figures inside, and I pulled ‘version 2’ of Godzilla 2004. It was immediately obvious that this was no standard boxed figure, but in actuality a scaled down PVC model kit:
< Unassembled
Twenty five pieces in total (I left out one sheet of spines in the image)! The body and limbs are painted PVC, and the spikes are molded rubberized plastic. Each spike was different, and coded to fit into one of the 18 slots on his back:
The attention to detail was amazing given how small the kit is, and everything fitted together perfectly. Here’s a shot of the finished beast, who stands less than 10 cm tall:
< Godzilla!
Even though the support is shown in that picture, he doesn’t need it to stand.
All in all this is one of the most impressive box toys I have ever seen/assembled. And it’s not even a video game character or cute girl! I’ll have to pay more attention to the monster boxes from now on!