Category: Toys

Shellfish Mermaid and Suicide Gudetama

January 11, 2022

We recently obtained three examples of toys that expand in water. Have you ever had one of these? Do they work as advertised? Let’s see…

First was this shell that contained a cute anime mermaid! Here’s the instructions, handily translated by google:

Couldn’t be easier: submerge the shell in water and wait a few days. So we did, and here’s what happened:

That’s about 72 hours in those photos (and the weird lighting is because our kitchen light broke in the middle). As you can see it worked exactly as advertised, however the… creature that birthed from the shell is quite different from the packaging!

Oh well, maybe this one will be better:

What’s this? A Gudetama comes out of the shell and there’s a chance for a gold one?!! What do the instructions say:

Oh my god there seems to be a clause that requires the user to kill themselves – by hand no less – if something unexpected happens! It also seems to suggest we’d need 81 containers of water and there was something about mold collapsing! It was with no small trepidation therefore that we submerged the egg and waited a few days:

And out popped Gudetama! This one also worked exactly as advertised and the reward was much better than the weird mermaid. He was bigger than the egg as well, so he definitely grew.

If you’ve had one of these you know the instructions say if you dry them out they’ll return to their shrunken size and can be grown over and over. While it’s true they shrink, it’s never to the original size. After a week out of water for instance the (cute anime) mermaid would never fit back into her shell:

We even had a third one, which came as a Christmas gift:

Up to four times his size you say? I’ll spare the montage of growing photos, since it’s hard to appreciate the difference, and instead present this pair of photos:

On the left is immediately before the water, and on the right is after about five days of soaking. Four times the size? I’ll let you be the judge 🙂

Labo Miku

January 2, 2022

Time for another model kit post, this time another Miku. Are you keeping count how many figures of this character I have made?

I bought the above in Tokyo in January 2019. I was stopping in to the Yodobashi Camera near my hotel every evening and one day I was surprised to see pallets of the above set out with a strict limit of one per person. Naturally, I hastily picked one up!

It’s a plastic model kit that makes a posed figure with no articulation. This allows for fewer pieces and a bit more style in the pose and finish. The kit includes the gimmick of layered injection:

It’s remarkable to see how sophisticated the injection molding has become. Only a decade or so ago I was astonished at two-colour molded pieces, now we have four or more and pieces that have multiple layers including transparencies!

The kit also included dry-rub decals, which in my opinion are a big upgrade from wet decals and were both easy to attach and added a lot to the detail of the finished product.

Even Loppi was amazed!

The finished kit looks great, and hardly looks like something I assembled (rather than a premade figure). It’s quite voluminous with her hair, but fits nicely on this Miku shelf:

I’m not a fanatical fan Hatsune Miku by any means, it’s just that she’s so popular that manufacturers know kits of her will sell better than most other characters. And if they continue to be as high quality as these, I daresay this won’t be the last time I assemble a Miku plastic model.

LEGO Rollercoaster

December 11, 2021

I got this for Christmas last year, and I wanted to build it before this Christmas. So I did!

It wasn’t a difficult build, but it was very time consuming. Much of the build was the framework to support the track, and it’s very strong, with the white cylindrical pillars reinforced with axle pieces. Breaking this thing down is going to be a significant challenge.

Even in the early stages, it was clear this was going to be a big kit once finished. For some reason the photos on the box didn’t suggest it was overly large, but as you can see here it scaled up quickly!

The coaster is built in two halves, and the above photo shows it at approximately the halfway point. I’d estimate this was about 6 hours of work at this point.

The second half took longer since it also included most of the mechanics and the kiosks such as the ticket booth. By the time I got to the above step, where I had to connect 203 tiny track pieces (for the winch system to lift the car) my fingers were in agony 🙂

The final kit is enormous, and can’t realistically be displayed in this house. After my trip I’ll have to separate it and store it away. But it’s an extraordinary piece of engineering, because it actually works! The coaster includes a hand-wound winch system that raises the car to the top, and when the car is released it traverses the entire track at an unexpected speed!

I’m particularly impressed with the carriage design, since it’s very flexible and also grabs the track like a real car. I imagine a lot of analysis went into working out the friction involved so it could navigate the track.

And of course this is still a LEGO kit, and part of an increasing series of amusement park rides. As such it is minifig scale, and includes a wonderfully designed ticket booth, drink vendor and even post-ride photo station. All of this fills the space at ground level and – for kids – would give this great play level.

I can only imagine if kits like this existed when I was a kid. I would have sent my LEGO spacemen and knight figures around this coaster all day long 🙂

Robot Claw