C-310 God Ginrai Giftset...Vintage!

I remember when I first learned about God Ginrai, it was during the first few months of college when I had a T1 internet line and was discovering the world beyond alt.toys.transformers. Powermaster Optimus Prime had been one of my favorite figures when I was little, mainly because of the gimmick of Prime combining with his trailer. When I discovered there was a second trailer that could be utilized as well I completely freaked out. After much searching, I was able to find a very grainy video of God Ginrai's first appearance in Masterforce, uploaded by some devoted Japanese transformer fan. Needless to say, at that moment I decided I needed a God Ginrai, no matter the cost.


Not more than two years after learning about that figure did fortune smile upon me in the form of a God Ginrai reissue! I remember when news of this figure being reissued hit the web I was ecstatic and immediately ordered it through BBTS. It turned out to be everything I had hoped for, like Prime 3.0. It is too bad they couldn't have incorporated the figure into the American show before it went off the air, it would have been awesome.

If you've been reading about any of my vintage purchases over the last year or so then you know what is coming next. That's right, I wasn't satisfied with the reissue; I wanted the original. I didn't care that they were virtually identical in every way, it was part of my mission. Unfortunately information on the vintage God Ginrai giftset is difficult to find. When doing my research I couldn't really find much information about the differences between the original and the reissue, so I had to take a chance. Until I got it in hand, the only difference I was sure of was that the vintage release used styrofoam (which can be seen through the windows) whereas the reissue uses molded plastic. But once I could compare them side by side, the differences became evident:

Do you see it yet? (vintage is on the left)

At first I was afraid maybe someone just inserted styrofoam into a reissue box, until...

Dun...dun...dunnnnnnnn! *cue dramatic music

The reissue has an extra black box after the character name! And as soon as I saw that, it was all over the place, which made me feel a lot better about my purchase. I have no idea what it says, I am just going to assume it means "reissue". But I thought because there wasn't really a resource out there showing the differences I would take the chance to do some of it now:

The differences are very apparent on the back, no tech specs for the reissue apparently.

The sides just feature the same black box again.

And then as I was looking at the box I thought it looked very familiar, so I pulled out another box that was laying around:

 So it is very obvious to me now these were meant to compliment each other. And they do it so well. I am somewhat surprised they weren't available in a giftset akin to VSX, but I'm sure that would have been prohibitively expensive at the time.

That's all for today, I'll follow up with some out-of-the-box comparison shots in the next installment. God Ginrai is so big he needs two posts!

See Also:

D-306 Darkwings Giftset
C-301 GoShooter