Vintage Japanese Bootleg Packaging Variants

In general, toy packaging from the 1970s is an interesting area to learn about. A cool subset is bootleg figures. I guess they figured that in order to attract kids, they'd need to put together nice header cards, and sometimes even backing cards.

This is a collection of bootleg Inazuman figures from the 1970s. The sculpts are nearly identical, but in addition to paint variants (which is an interesting area in its own right), a variety of header cards were used.

Here are close-up looks at each figure and its header:

The header says "Transparent Kaiju Series" which is a riff on the Bullmark Ultraman kaiju series.

 More after the jump:

"Kaiju New Series"

Now there's a random header design!

Much about the history of bootleg toys has either been lost in the sands of time or is waiting to be discovered somewhere. Hopefully in a small way this post can help fill in part of the picture - at least to show that even identical toys (though, in this instance, featuring different colorways) were packaged using different types of header cards.