Tweet
I came across these recently, and thought they might be of interest to Big Jim fans. The first image is of a rarely seen Japanese carded outfit. There don't seem to be any images of these in the western Big Jim collecting world, and even in Japan this stuff is very obscure and poorly documented. The Japanese text on the bottom left describes Big Jim as an "adventure and sports action fighter" and lists some of the other available outfits. I've seen a few others not listed on the card, so it seems that a majority of the '72-'74 sports/outdoorsman outfits did get a Japanese release.
The second image is perhaps the more interesting of the two, taken from the side-panel of the Japan-exclusive "Kaidanji Ken Karate Set". Kaidanji basically just means "nice guy" and he's described as "Big Jim's friend", so basically a martial-arts themed version of Big Josh, etc. He seems to be the only other figure (aside from the basic Big Jim) released in Japan, but he came in at least a couple of different varieties, all seemingly packaged with re-purposed stuff from the Karate Studio playset. Now, the interesting thing is that the boxes for these list a number of different sets or outfits (it's not really clear which), none of which are confirmed to have ever been seen, at least as far as I can tell. The coolest looking one is found in this image, called "Surounin Ken", a surounin being a type of independent, masterless samurai.
This is my first try at uploading images here, so please let me know if they don't show up properly.
The second image is perhaps the more interesting of the two, taken from the side-panel of the Japan-exclusive "Kaidanji Ken Karate Set". Kaidanji basically just means "nice guy" and he's described as "Big Jim's friend", so basically a martial-arts themed version of Big Josh, etc. He seems to be the only other figure (aside from the basic Big Jim) released in Japan, but he came in at least a couple of different varieties, all seemingly packaged with re-purposed stuff from the Karate Studio playset. Now, the interesting thing is that the boxes for these list a number of different sets or outfits (it's not really clear which), none of which are confirmed to have ever been seen, at least as far as I can tell. The coolest looking one is found in this image, called "Surounin Ken", a surounin being a type of independent, masterless samurai.
This is my first try at uploading images here, so please let me know if they don't show up properly.
Comment