My Kitsch Collective friend Michelle finds the best stuff! She recently added this hilariously eerie little item to her booth at our local antique mall-- it's a fly with a human head screaming "Help me!" from within a petri dish shaped plastic container! Clearly in tribute to the classic 1958 sci-fi horror film classic, The Fly, this is one unique, and totally bugged-out, vintage collectable. I kind of feel the whole presentation would've benefitted a bit more from using an actual human looking head instead of the Japanese oni demon mask face, but it's still pretty awesome none the less, plus, somebody scored this at Gibbol's for only $9.95 (not sure about the date though-- 70's?)
3 comments:
Maybe this was intended for an anime version of The Fly that never got greenlit.
Yeah the Oni Mask is kind of ... random but I like it. It's a fun little sculpt. I wonder if they slapped two molds they had together to make this one and save some money?
This is plenty odd.
My half-baked theory is that it's a relabeled product Americanizing some playful yokai design. Obviously the oni face puts me in the mind of Japanese monsters, and there are several buggy Japanese spirits that come up in a quick search: ShinchÅ« looks like a flying insect (most often a silkworm moth, but Google turns up examples that skew towards houseflies, too) with a grotesque bug-eyed face; Ushi-oni looks like a six-legged spider with a horned ox head, but again, examples vary pretty widely--and he's actually and oni, so an oni mask makes natural sense. I am sure there are others, too; but it's probably more important to remember that hundreds of new yokai are conceptualized every year, formally and informally, and it's hard to know what is truly a spin on tradition (say a new design based on something collected in the Bakemono no e), and what was a brand new idea from the pen of somebody like Mizuki Shigeru or Morohoshi DaijirÅ. Or both? Probably could be both.
Anyway, I really like it. Whether its an off-model US thing or a retro-fitted Japanese monster--it's a bizarre east-meets-west oddity either way.
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