ToyCyte: Toy Culture Collected

The 49th International Model and Toys Super Festival was held this past weekend in Tokyo. This show is a bizarre combination of flea market and exhibition held a number of times each year. It provides a great opportunity for the local toy makers, dealers, producers and fans to mingle and gaze longingly at a lot of figures they probably can’t afford. Not that everything here is expensive. Far from it. A lot of the offerings here are of the Halo Master Chief action figure and Nightmare Before Christmas variety but there are many other things as well. There are plenty of Japanese toys from the 70s and 80s to induce fits of nostalgia for the locals, and the kaiju figures are particularly well represented at these shows.

This year, the guest of honor was Matt Walker of Dead Presidents. He swooped in and out of Tokyo in 3 days, so he didn’t really get a chance to take in the local sites but hopefully he had a good time at the show. His booth featured a number of pieces by local artists such as Itokin Park and Sunguts. The Sunguts Uranames and Itokin Park Lucha Bears really stood out for me. I had a chance to talk with Matt for a bit, and help translate some of conversation he had with some of the local artists. Really, you couldn’t meet a nicer guy.

Other notables at the show included kaiju mainstays such as Ilanena with his Dai Kaiju Card Monsters and BLObPuS with a new Docross variant and Velocitron with his Larvagon. Velocitron had five Larvagons on hand which had been hand painted by LASH over at the Mutant Vinyl Hardcore studio.

One of the real attractions to the Super Festival series of events is the chance to chat and hang out with the toy designers themselves. Most of these guys man their own booths, and occasionally they’ll ask a well known collector to take over for a while why they go out to wander around the show floor. Pretty cool eh?