Saw this in the mall a few days ago, a bootleg Puzzle of a mecha that surprisingly looks a lot like a Gundam. Initially I thought that it was Freedom Gundam from Gundam Seed Destiny, turns out that the knee and head antenna design are different.

Wanted to try out another type of paint because the Pylox brand I was using was starting to get expensive. The local hardware store I bought it from had raised their prices by a staggering 60%. Plus of course I wanted to try out some other colors which Pylox didn’t have. Once again my test subject was the Bootleg Gundam Dynames.

Here’s photos of the finished bootleg 1/100 Gundam Dynames that I had bought out of curiosity. Don’t worry Bandai, I had already offset it and proved my loyalty by ordering a genuine 1/100 Gundam Dynames. Sorry, but I can’t seem to get some good shots with my camera on this model. It must be my subconscious that’s resisting, hehehe.

The model will come out as ugly because I used this model to test some paints, markers and techniques, hence no effort was really made to make it look good. One other thing that I can say about this bootleg made by TT Hongli is that the copy comes close but the quality of the plastic is cheap and reflects really on the model.

Yet another example of how childhood memories are massacred by makers of counterfeit toys… hehehe… Found this in the mall again. I’ve realized that there are two types of piracy when it comes to cartoon related merchandising. There is the blatant copying and then there is the trying to pass it off as part of the franchise. The picture above it more of the latter.

Update 11/08/2009: Finished model pictures can be found here.

I went back to the mall and bought a bootleg GN-002 Gundam Dynames to review in this site from a stack of bootleg gundams that I had seen. It cost me about 1078 yen. At Hobby Link Japan (HLJ) this was selling for about 2300 yen. I’ll probably buy this from HLJ in a couple of months in order to better differentiate the quality of the pirated versus the original.

Judging from the box shots you can see that they had copied everything down to a T except for the pilot which was visible in the original Bandai product. Instead of the red Bandai mark, it was replaced with a “TT Hong Li” tag. Also they missed out on the “Gundam” tag. I am shooting at the dark here, but assuming that Bandai has already trademarked the term “Gundam” in China. This could be some sort of a defensive tactic by the Chinese bootleggers to circumvent it since when they get caught they could always say that its not a “Gundam”. This way Bandai will have to start suing in the individual product level for copyright infringement.

Went back to the mall again and found this in the stack of Bootleg Gundams I had seen previously. I guess if you have no conscience to prevent you from pirating Bandai’s Gundams, what’s to stop you from counterfeiting its other accessories? They are actually copying now the Action Base Stands sold by Bandai to help display Gunpla’s. This particular one was molded with the color red, it costs about 350 yen . Once again it is branded as “Hong Li” and definitely looks ugly because the plastic looks cheap. It was also renamed to “All-Purpose Bracket”, instead of branding it as an Action-Base.

Was surprised to see this in a Mall, a whole rack of counterfeit (Bootleg) Gundams. I found this when I went scrounging for some modelling paint for the 1/72 VF-25G I was planning to assemble.

I confess, that I keep my 23 year old 1/55 VF-1S Strike Valkyrie from Bandai on my home work table to inspire me. Along with that is his baby brother, a bootleg VF-1S that I inherited from my brother (he tossed it away) that he got for Christmas from a relative. With them also is a Mospeada motorcycle made by Matchbox from the Robotech series. I have a GBP armor kit for the VF-1S that I make it wear occasionally. I should get shots of that in the future.