Battle of the Planets Kits from Entex

[ctc]

>OK I gotta check out this second season...

....er.... no, you don't. It's pretty bad. I've heard season 3 is good though. Haven't seen it.

>Zoltar is a he/she.

The original is kinda vague too (at least the ones I've seen) but I remember hearing that Berg Katse was actually a brother and sister team. And at one point they die, but Leader-X brings them back s a hybrid homonculus.

....and those "Message from Space" kits were pretty cool! We had tons of 'em 'cos at that time a lot of stores carried overstocked Japanese kits. I've only seen the movie once, and would love to see it again.

Don C.

[samurainoir]

I got to see Gatchaman Fighter when I visited Hong Kong as a kid and my head just about exploded. Especially seeing the latest incarnation of the Phoenix join together from the other vehicles, turn green with "Mark" riding on top and taking out the bad guys with his sword. At first no one believed me when I came back home and told all the kids at school about it. Luckily I also had a couple of small kids magazines i got from the Hong Kong newsstands featuring the Gatchaman II characters and gear that convinced them that there were episodes out there that they had never seen.

They also thought I was nuts when I told them that the "chinese" Spiderman had a car, a giant robot and fought Godzilla like monsters. (many years later I realized it was the Japanese show dubbed into cantonese)

Plus there were all the "Shogun Warriors" and "Micronauts" that I saw in Hong Kong (and Singapore and Macau) that I had never seen in the stores back home. I brought back one "Micronaut" that rode a helicopter that transformed into what looked like an audio cassette tape, and another that was a driver for a black vehicle that transformed into a Microscope. The latter was the basis for the Transformer named "Perceptor".

I WISH I could have brought back one of those "Jumbo Machinders" (sp?) that they didn't sell in North America.

[samurainoir]

The other was Force Five, which featured Grandizer.
I really liked Grandizer, who is called Grendizer in Japan.

I used to wake up at the crack of dawn to watch Force Five on the local multicultural station.

I used to argue with my Quebecois roommate at University about whether we should refer to him as "Grandizer" or "Goldorak". He also referred to Great Mazinga as "Tranzor Z".

I would have killed for Spaceketeers toys as a kid. I had to make do with the ones I made out of Lego.

[jwyblejr]

Actually Jason and Zoltar (Joe and Berg Katse in Japan) die at the end of season 1. Oh and there's a whole transgender thing only hinted at in BOTP, Zoltar is a he/she.

That last part I knew thanks to Toyfare. They once wondered if he pees sitting down or standing up.

[cjefferys]

I WISH I could have brought back one of those "Jumbo Machinders" (sp?) that they didn't sell in North America.

Now that would have been cool. So the Popy Jumbos were sold in Hong Kong back in the 70's too? I see Hong Kong based sellers with Jumbos on ebay sometimes, but I wasn't sure if they recently brought them back from Japan or if they were sold in HK back in the day.

[samurainoir]

Now that would have been cool. So the Popy Jumbos were sold in Hong Kong back in the 70's too? I see Hong Kong based sellers with Jumbos on ebay sometimes, but I wasn't sure if they recently brought them back from Japan or if they were sold in HK back in the day.

The area where my late Grandmother lived back in the 70's and 80's is called Causaway Bay, and there were (are still?) about a dozen Japanese Department stores in that district.

They were filled with Jumbo Machinders, 5" Inch die Cast "Shogun Warriors", Microman/"Micronauts", Transformers, Godaikins and all manner of Robot/Mecha/Kaiju toys that I had never seen in North America.

Kid-Culture in Hong Kong was dominated by Japanese imports... from the translated Manga and small format color magazines on the news-stands, to the animated and live action stuff on TV, to the toys that you saw even in the hole in the wall mom and pops stores.

You saw Hello Kitty, Doraeman (sp?), Ultraman, and Godzilla all over the place more than the occasional sightings of Superman and Batman.

Which makes sense given the ideological divide between Hong Kong and China at that point in history, culturally it was mostly language they shared (and even then the lines were drawn down Cantonese and Mandarin dialects). Despite the language barrier and old grudges around WW2, Hong Kong and Japan were both at least consumer cultures, although it might also have had something to do the manufacturing and imports around the region. Hong Kong was an international hub to the orient and had a very international flavour (it was still a British Colony then).