Your Free Door Prize: PYGMON GROWTH CHART

Hello friends.
It’s been a very long time. It’s good to see you. I hope you’re holding up well in this world-wide wildness. 

I come to you bearing a gift: a Pygmon metric growth chart. This beautiful bit of ephemera was included as a fold-out insert in a Japanese children’s magazine in the early 70s. (The artist behind the wonderful painted image is, sadly, unknown to me.) Several years ago, after some long searching, I obtained a copy in good condition, and engaged the services of a professional archivist to make a top-quality scan of the image at full size. 

At last, I offer this chart as a (huge) .psd file for your downloading pleasure here.

My sincere wish is that many of you will download it and have it printed to scale on some sturdy paper or cardstock, to actually be used for its intended purpose by your own family, or a family you know and love and would like to gift it to. (Or several families! Makes a great baby shower gift!) In this way, we will carry the magic of Garamon, Pygmon, and Ultra-kaiju in general, into the future.

IMAGINATION! CREATION! GROWTH! MONSTERS! FOR THE CHILDREN!

Peace!!

Takahashi inside!

Oh my god... how cool is this?!?!?
Atelier G-1 Garamon kit build-up painted with beauteous B&W tones... and a Minoru Takahashi head under the Gara-mask!!

Found here... GREAT work, love it!

The X-Plus "Big Garamon" statue...

... is one of the most badass representations of The Spiny One out there, and one of the best things X-Plus has ever done.  We know this.  Let us take a moment to once again bask in the glory of its hefty, monstrously menacing presence, with this great series of snaps (from here):

 "BEHOLD, humans!
The engine of your DOOOOOOOM!!"

Custom Gary wind-ups

Big thanks to Grumble Toy for pointing this one out!

Too freakin' great!

From here; wish the person behind it would post a vid of them hoppin'!

Garabeada!

From here (check out the awesome Alien Cool,  too).

Pygmonchild is creepadelic...

eeeeewww.....

Chillin'

SnowPyg!

 From here.

Final 8 minutes of Ultra Q episode 16, "The Revenge of Garamon"

Finally...

... made the cover of Natural Geography!

From here.

HA! Says it all.

This funny lil' line drawing comes across like a some-years-later, hazily partial memory of the Gara-events scrawled on a paper napkin by a member of the Science Patrol, trying to relate the story to a grandkid.
From here.

Coooool Bandai dio pics...

... from here.

Ultra Qewl

I'm really excited to share these pics; I had stumbled across this page a long while back, and then completely lost track of it, much to my chagrin. Found it again last week! This person's heavy-hitter line-up of original sculpts of Ultra Q beasties is superb:



The Garamon is terrific and, quite interestingly, resembles nothing so much as a slightly softened version of Eye Scream's 12" toy (to be honest, I prefer this to that toy; this sculpt has a bit more heart... well, the great paint-up helps, too).


Could this page belong to Ken Yokota, and perhaps this sculpt was a less refined take that he later developed into the ES release? I'm almost inclined to think so. The post is dated 12/24/06, so the timing would be right... if I recall correctly, I think the 12"-ers hit in late '07. Also, poke through the other posts- this person sculpts a lot (all of it phenomenal), and much of it ends up in resin... I know that Yokota sculpted gk's for Vice before hooking up with Eye Scream...

Tranlslation tools are not helping at all; if anybody has info, please chime in!

Kool kovers

Found here.

Round-up: Interesting Gara-auction pics

Nice little SD resin kit... never seen this one before:



A deleted scene from LaChapelle's Rize:



Pygmon's totally pumped:

Scans from 1979 Ultra Q mag

Herr Ragone sent over some great scans from this mag, which he's owned from the time of its original release in '79:

First up, we have a couple of interesting snaps taken at promotional appearances. Not sure if there was actually someone in the suit or not at these events; my guess would be not.

Here's an appearance at the Mukougaoka Playgrounds in Kawasaki (just southwest of Tokyo):


... and here's one at an unnamed department store:


Then we have these great color shots taken on the set of Ultra Q episode 16, "Garamon Strikes Back".




Very cool!

The Gara-fashion-conscious... what do they wear?

I have been inundated with such queries since the blog began- tens of thousands* of new converts to Garamania, wondering how they can best represent in the street- how they can fly the colors, as it were.

Well, let's do a brief survey of some of the recent commercially available options...

I think this shirt was an M-78 Shop release, and came in three different colors. This is the best of the bunch, a long-gone purple exclusive for Atmos.

Next, a relatively new one from Bandai, with art by Yoshito Sugawara:

I want to love this one; really, I think it would rule the roost...but for the inclusion of not one, not two, but four lines of charmless, titular/copyright-related text right next to Gary's head.
Wtf?!?

Now, look, I'm just an unfrozen Garamon collector... the mysterious decisions of t-shirt designers frighten and confuse me... but I DO know that this was a mistake... akin to the ruining of a great joke by poor delivery.

""GARAMON" is GARADAMA monster."

Ooooof......

Hell, the whole block of text could've been kept, moved to a sleeve or the back, and the end product would've been worlds better.

Here's what I'm sayin':

Right??

Anyway... let's look at a similar but superior design. Here's M-78's exclusive (and recently sold out) Pygmon shirt, produced for the 40th Ultra-anniversary in 2006:

This is a great shirt. I wish it came in another color besides white (say, pink or tan or a very light green), but that's a minor nitpick. I also wish they'd re-release it, as I slept on it for too long and missed out.

Finally... take a look (though it's a bit hard to see, I know) at Takashi Miike's outfit on the set of Ultraman Max, in this pic taken from August Ragone's ultra-essential Eiji Tsuburaya: Master Of Monsters:

Miike in a Garamaniac stylee!

I have actually seen this shirt come up for auction on YJA a couple of times. The design is kinda cool, in a lazy way: basically, it's a shot of a built-up Kaiyodo Garamon kit.

Now, to take it further, into the realm of accessories... you're really too cool for school if you finish things off with this smart pendant:

...or this handsome watch:

*Okay, six.**

**Okay, none.