Next we go to the automobile-based figurines. One of the most successful series is Takara's "Panzer Tales World Tank Museum" which as successfully spawned 6 series so far. Takara has also come out with a series of World's Battleship. Meanwhile Konami has produced a series of "Out of Production Famous Car" series (10 + 2 secret) which featured some classic Japan-made cars that are already out of manufacture production such as Toyota Celica 1600GT, Nissan Sunny Coupe 1200GX-5 and Mazda Savanna GT. Furuta has also produced 2 chocoeggs line for a "SL & Blue trains" (1 series with 19 + 1 secret) and a "World's Fighter Planes" (3 series of 20 planes each). Yujin has also done a few "Tomica" series (for Initial D cars) and train series.  Bandai also came out with a series of Shinkansen (Japanese bullet trains) trading figures known as "Star Train" (3 series now) and "Wing Club" (2 series) featuring on classic fighter planes. I have also seen series for buses and motorbikes done by Epoch. Beside normal vehicles, famous vehicles from shows like "Thunderbirds", "Alien" and "UFO" (by Konami"; "Ultraman" (by Popy); & Star Trek (by Furuta) have also been molded into trading figurines (see bottom). Last but not least Takara has also came out with a series called "Out of this World Fantasy Weapons" which features some fantastic artillery purely came out of fantasy.

UFO and Thunderbirds spaceships by Konami

Star Trek spaceships by Furuta

     When come to talk about nature based figurines, I have really nowhere to start because there's where too many sets to mention. Perhaps on the top of the list is Kaiyodo's "Nihon no Doubutsu (Animals of Japan)" series. It started with a crossover with an education magazine in Japan known as (loosely translated) "Japan's Nature Momento Weekly magazine~ animal series" which started from 6th June 2002 and span a year to 1st June 2003, thus there's a total of 50 animals to collect. ChocoQ animals The series comes hand in hand with the Chocoegg series collaborated between Kaiyodo and Furuta, however the collaboration ended at series 5; fortunately Takara took over with their Choco-Q line and has produced till series 8 of "Nihon no doubutsu" so far. Takara also picked up another Kaiyodo-produced "Pet animals" which ended with Furuta at series 3.

Furuta still comes out with a few animal based Chocoegg series like the "Birds in Flight" and "Omoshiroi Doubutsu (Interesting animals)" series. Meanwhile another company Kabaya has also came out with a few animal series such as "Nihon no Kotori (Birds of Japan), "Wild Bird Vignette" (with sound chip inside), "Animals of Amazon", "Insect Vignette", "Pet Dogs collection" etc.

Bandai has also come out with 2 hugely popular cats-based shokugans while they had also a couple of "Nature Zone"Yujin's Cats gashapon series based on animals of the Galapagos and Australian Tasmania respectively. Yujin had their fair share of animal series in their gashapons line. Firstly would be the pets (cats and dogs) series which featured pedigree cats and dogs with their young. My favourite Yujin series have to be their SR cats since the cats were put in an everyday scenario which we would frequently see. Last but not least they had produced a pretty impressive reptiles, amphibians and fish showcase (around 20 varieties in each series).

Epoch had also joined in wildlife series called the "World's Life Records" which has covered some soon to extinct whales, sharks, crabs, prawns and even fossils. Recently the series also cover some world's poisonous organisms. Not all series are based on animals, there's a series covering famous mushrooms of the world but I could not recall the manufacturer.

Dinosaurs are also very popular figurines in which UHA, Furuta, Epoch and even Coca Cola had been producing some of them.

Lastly I'll conclude this segment with a few famous Kaiyodo collaborations for this genre. They had a hugely popular Dinotales series with UHA. Collaborating with an on-going underwater project by famous mineral water, MIU by Dydo (see left), Aquatales Kaiyodo has produced a series of underwater wildlife. With Glico, they had also done 2 series of "Black Wave Komeko". In the recently-passed Wonderfest Winter 2004, Kaiyodo also unleashed 3 future projects: "Zoorasia" by Horacio based on the Yokohama Zoo; "Birdtales" bottlecap figurines with Suntory natural water; and an Enoshima Aquarium exclusive series.

 

 

 

These nature-based series are going from strength to strength as the Japanese are a bunch of nature loving people and they would want to instill the love of nature to their future generations.

© Copyright KK Heng 2004