Category: Otaku

The Box Of Treasures

September 25, 2022

This came in the mail the other day:

It’s a box from Adam’s sister (let’s call her AC) in Japan! It’s a large box and had been traveling for almost 3.5 months! It was sent surface mail which could be the topic of a blog post in and of itself (but I shall save for another time).

The box was a big surprise, and I couldn’t wait to open it. But never in my wildest imagination did I expect the contents:

Look at this pristine condition burger box from McDonald’s! Back in April Macca’s Japan had a Shin Ultraman collaboration which featured the return of two chicken burgers which would be sold in Ultraman boxes. AC sent me two of these boxes! Aren’t they beautiful 🙂

But it didn’t stop there! Inside the box was also three of the special Ultraman branded plastic cups, also from McDonald’s. These are even prettier than the burger box and have immediately become the stars of my ‘Ultraman fast food packaging’ sub-collection!

I don’t know any details behind the acquisition of these items – AC included limited commentary in the box – so I assume she went to McDonald’s herself and purchased a Shin Chicken Tatsuya burger with accompanying McFizz Aomori Fuji Apple beverage. And yet the burger boxes are absolutely spotless and look unused… did she have a black market connection? However she obtained these, I appreciate it.

If you’re not aware, these items are in collaboration with the brand new Shin Ultraman film that opened in Japan in May. I want to see this film more than any film that ever existed but it hasn’t yet been released outside of Japan so I continue to wait. I’m guessing Amber saw the movie, since the box also contained this extraordinary item:

I believe this is a cup purchased from a Japanese cinema! The side of the cup features the movie logo, and underneath it says ‘fantasy special effects film’ just in case you’re one of the handful of Japanese movie-goers that hasn’t heard of Ultraman! The cup is large and the Ultraman on top – in his Spacium Beam pose – is large and dynamic. This is an amazing item that will proudly be displayed on my shelf for ever!

And this wasn’t everything in the box. There were a few other Ultraman items, an extraordinary hand towel (that you’ll see in a future post), a clear file (how did AC know I was planning an upcoming clear file post?!?) and two more incredible Gotochi postcards including this one:

I need to go back to Japan so I can send some of these special postcards myself…

Thanks AC; this box was like Christmas coming early 🙂

Ramen 19: Stop In The Name Of Ramen

August 16, 2022

No soup this time, but a few more ramen-adjacent items I’ve acquired on my travels.

I bought the above in Australia. It was one of those things that come ‘free’ with a Japanese magazine, and is a Cup Noodle ‘purse’ (based on the photo of the girl using it as a purse). Naturally it’s an insane item to use as a purse, so I’m displaying it here as a ‘ramen carrier’. It’s a nifty thing, with nice printing in and out and a cute fork-shaped zipper pull. Of course I have no actual use for it 🙂

Here’s another ‘noodle stopper’, displayed in the intended position. This is now my second such figurine, and was a prize from a (type of) UFO machine in Sydney. Sue watched bemusedly as I loaded $1 coins into the machine at a good clip, and I’m sure she shared my joy when it only cost me $52 to ‘win’ it. Naturally I’ll never use it to steep noodles, and it will live happily on my shelf forever.

This last item was a surprise! I’d never seen a noodle stopper for sale here, so when I saw this double pack at Kino in NYC a couple of months ago I had to have it. Here’s a closer look at the contents:

A cute pair of noodle stoppers, and it even comes with a fake ‘cup noodle’ for them to sit on! These are of course sisters Ram and Rem from the anime Re:Zero (which I’ve never watched) and are amongst the most licensed characters in animation these days. The pair cost me less than the previous figure. So I have four noodle stoppers now, who sit on the edges of shelves. I think this is enough 🙂

Next installment some more chicken noodles. Stay tuned…

LEGO Dagobah

August 7, 2022

In the previous post I referred to a pile of unopened LEGO kits in our house; it was time to make one. This one:

For me, this is the best of the three Star Wars dioramas they have released and I bought it as soon as I saw it a few weeks ago. And apparently it jumped to the front of the line as far as assembling kits goes 🙂

Here’s what was inside:

Exactly 1000 pieces apparently. When I opened it I didn’t pay too much attention to bag #3, but more on that later…

As with most LEGO kits these days it is built in stages, and the pieces for each stage are collected together in the same bags. This makes the build easy and fairly fast (in total it took me about 3 hours).

For the first few steps it feels like building a mosaic, with a lot of small pieces going into the flat base. And then you reach bag 3 and this step in the manual:

Yep, place 177 flat 1×1 transparent green tiles! I think this must be the largest amount of pieces I’ve seen in a single LEGO step! Thankfully the bag contained exactly 177 tiles and it was easy:

The next step built most of Yoda’s house:

What you can’t see is a cute touch: there’s a lightsaber hidden in the ‘attic’. While this obviously wasn’t in the movie (The Empire Strikes Back) it’s reasonable to assume he had it with him when he fled to Dagobah!

After the final steps – adding trees and the X-Wing – the diorama is complete. And it looks great! Here’s a detail of Luke ‘do or do not-ing’:

What an amateur he was in those days… he couldn’t even lift an X-Wing 😉

This is the ideal sort of LEGO kit for someone like me that makes these and displays them on shelves. I like it even more than I thought I would and am now considering the other two. And with so many iconic scenes in the Star Wars films I expect there’ll be more dioramas on the way.

Robot Claw