One thing that draws me to the subject of garage kit history is how much of it remains unrecorded or poorly documented. As a young anime fan I was entranced by what seemed like–at the time–an endless world of new stuff to discover, something made all the more exciting in the earliest days of the internet when we still mostly had to rely on word of mouth or magazines. Thanks to the sheer number of garage kits with limited production runs and small shops that traded in resin and soft vinyl kits during the boom years of the ’80s and ’90s, there’s similar juice and the possibility of discovering rediscovering something on an auction site or in a dusty old magazine.
What’s got me thinking about this subject is Akira Toriyama’s German Infantry Woman Lisa model kit. Now, you’re probably asking, “Didn’t you just write about this a couple of months ago?” I sure did, but then I came across a variant I’d never seen or heard of. A variant of a well-known resin kit isn’t an earth-shattering discovery, but this kind of find is interesting and can shed some light on the history of garage kits and independent model shops long gone.
Before finding this kit I had taken it as common knowledge that Mugen’s Lisa kit came in two versions; the regular and very common version with Lisa and a PZB-39 anti-tank rifle and a rarer limited edition with an extra weapon sprue and Toriyama’s signature on the box. That limited edition version isn’t too hard to find today, but it can go for some silly prices and no doubt became even more desirable with Toriyama’s passing.
But it turns out, there was a third version.
This third version looks mostly the same as the others aside from a couple of stickers on the front of the box. One says “RED BARON SPECIAL. LISA & Animal Soldiers” and the other bears the logo and address of Red Baron, a model shop located in Nagoya. It seems that this version was a limited edition only available via Red Baron, although I haven’t been able to turn up any particulars and couldn’t guess how many were sold. I will say that I’ve been looking at the Lisa kit on the secondhand market for more than a few years and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this version pop up before I found this example.
Inside you’ll find the same stuff as the normal Lisa kit, but there’s an extra sheet of paper titled “The Animal Soldiers” with some Toriyama illustrations of anthropomorphic animals in World War II gear; a bear dressed as a Russian infantryman, a hippo dressed as a U.S. sailor, and an ape dressed as a German paratrooper. Alongside Lisa and her PZB-39, you’ll also find three small 1/35 scale resin figures based on those illustrations. While the illustrations of the Russian and German soldiers show weapons, the resin figures don’t include them because modelers were expected to grab guns (and other accessories) from appropriate military kits. That was similar to how the folks at Mugen imagined modelers customizing the Lisa figure with equipment from 1/9 scale models.
It’s a bit odd that these figures are completely out of scale with the much larger Lisa, but intentional or not, they happen to be the same scale as a later Mugen resin kit called the Tong Poo Type 8 hovercraft. That was a resin kit Mugen produced—with Toriyama’s involvement—that looked very much like vehicles seen in the early volumes of Dragonball. While Toriyama’s box art for the Tong Poo shows a couple of wolves flying the thing, it didn’t come with any sort of figures. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but assuming I ever get around to building any of these kits it’s a coincidence I’ll probably take advantage of.
Hobby Plaza Red Baron
Cursory internet searches for the hobby shop that sold this limited version don’t turn up much information aside from a similarly named motorcycle dealership. As a result, I had to turn to perhaps the best resource on garage kit shops of the mid-’80s, the ‘85~’86 Garage Kit Guide Map sold by General Products. Comments in the book say that the shop focused on aircraft models (not a surprise given the name of the place), but also mention that Red Baron had recently started carrying more garage kits and simulation (tabletop strategy) games. The shop also produced their own garage kits, focused largely on custom parts for World War II aircraft and, oddly, a couple of resin kits based on the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
As you’d expect, a shop of this age that no longer exists doesn’t have much of a footprint online, but at least two sources online say that the shop shut down in the ‘90s due to the owner’s poor health. One of these, a blog post about the author’s discovery of Western tabletop role-playing games at the shop, also suggests that Red Baron carried overseas gaming miniatures and Japanese-translated roleplaying games, so they must have expanded a bit beyond military subjects at some point. Neither the blog post nor the Garage Kit Guide Map provide tons of detail, but together they paint a picture of a local hobby shop that tried to keep up with the trends, embracing both the garage kit wave of the mid-’80s and the later tabletop gaming trend.
I can only speculate on the connection between Mugen and Red Baron, but the former was located in Toyohashi City, which isn’t too far from Nagoya. Despite their collaboration with Toriyama and later expansion into sci-fi subjects under the more recognizable name Fine Molds, Mugen was focused on military subjects with a big emphasis on aircraft (something still visible on Fine Mold’s website), so it’s likely the two entities had some sort of relationship forged from a common interest.
The Garage Kit Boom
The 1980s saw a lot of hobby shops transition from stores that sold exclusively plastic models (fueled by the gunpla boom of the early ‘80s) into shops either stocking garage kits or getting into the production of garage kits themselves. Shops like General Products and later Lark (which turned into Wave Co. Ltd.) split the difference and sold garage kits and plastic kits from other manufacturers alongside products they made themselves.
The aforementioned Garage Kit Guide Map (which, if you’re curious, I talk a little about in our Hobby Shopping ‘zine) highlights how many of these smaller hobby shops were starting to produce their own kits, typically focused on their respective niche or the interests of their owners. It’s tough to say how many of these shops stopped producing their own stuff once the garage kit boom cooled off or rising production values increased consumer expectations beyond what most small shops were capable of, but I think by the early ‘90s most shops had either decided on pursuing production as a primary focus (a la Wave, Kaiyodo, Volks) or just went back to running a normal hobby shop.
The Garage Kit Guide Map listed over 70 shops spread out across Japan and that number, when combined with an ever-increasing dealer count at the bi-annual Wonder Festival, hints at a staggering number of garage kits being produced during the latter half of the 1980s. Many of these may have been recorded in the pages of hobby magazines or seen in event coverage, but largely these were ephemeral objects. They popped up in limited numbers at one-day events and then disappeared, never to be seen again.
All of this begs the question: what else is out there?
