Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, I think I feel a Mind-Bending Plush Week coming on. Or, you know, just a handful of Japanese-market dolls for sale in the eBay Store of anime plush/collectibles specialist Saltypear. I feel like we're just scratching the surface here, but already, it's clear that the bar for "Plush or Not?" is much, much lower in the Land of The Rising Sun:
Adorable corporate mascots come as no surprise, but I thought the walking, running, dancing, falling flat on its helmet robot Asimo was all the cuddly symbol Honda needed. Which makes the official plush Asimo doll an order of magnitude cutesier. Meta-cuddly. It's $25+7.50 shipping from Japan.
Should I be surprised that there are stumpy little versions of Godzilla and a few of his [her?] monster foes, like this c. 1995 Mothra larva plush toy, which "can be used as a curtain binder"? $35+shipping.
OK, but here's where the stuffed animal designers' imagination outstrips my own. a foot-wide plush version of the gigantic spider creature from Hayao Miyazaki's classic, Princess Mononoke?? That's gotta be one of the grossest monsters ever drawn onto the screen. Still, I guess if it were more common, it wouldn't be $60 buy-it-now + $20 shipping.
But here it is, the ultimate. I'd be blown away if there were just one plush version of Robert Patrick's remorseless T-1000 from T-2: Judgment Day. Apparently, there were at least two; the chrome crowbar hand one is sweet, but the mercury-morphing version is beyond. For the Schwarzenegger Terminator plush, though it's a tossup between the one with the sunglasses and the one with his arm torn off. If the phrase "collect'em all!" never meant anything to you until now, I'll totally understand. They're $25 apiece. I bet you can get combined shipping, too.
[note: it goes without saying that all these toys appear to be intended for adults or at least, older kids. Watch out for loose, chewable or swallowable parts. For me, the dolls with glued or tacked on felt in particular seem too vulnerable for a kid under 3. That said, constant supervised play seems like a small price to pay for a plush Terminator showdown.]
Check out "other anime plush" and "other Japanese plush" in Saltypear's eBay Store
