{"id":457,"date":"2007-05-15T23:14:02","date_gmt":"2007-05-15T14:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-05-15\/457"},"modified":"2007-05-15T23:14:02","modified_gmt":"2007-05-15T14:14:02","slug":"little-toy-cars-and-big-toy-hype","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2007-05-15\/457","title":{"rendered":"Little Toy Cars and Big Toy Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
A small<\/span> subset of Anthony's Tomika<\/i> collection<\/b>(Sorry for the fuzziness; it's a tiny<\/span> crop from thebackground of a much larger photo)<\/small><\/center><\/div>\n\n

Today was Kyoto's Aoi\nMatsuri<\/a> festival, but instead of enjoying that, Anthony and I went<\/span> to\nthe store to look at (but not buy) toys.<\/p>\n\n

The most popular little toy cars in Japan are a line<\/span> called\ntomika<\/i> from the Tomy company (“tomika” sounds like the\nway a Japanese<\/span> would say “Tomy Car”). They're about two inches\nlong and well made, and at only 378 yen (about $3.15) each, they're a good<\/span>\nvalue. They've been around approximately forever.<\/p>\n\n

Over the years, Anthony has accumulated many. He has all<\/span> manner of\ncranes, police cars, ambulances, busses, construction equipment, garbage\ntrucks, dump trucks, etc. etc. etc. Some are shown in the snippet at right,\nand you can see two Tomika fire engines in the photos of his construction site<\/a> from\nthe other day.<\/p>\n\n

The company keeps things interesting by releasing a few<\/span> new cars each month.\n(In case you'd like to see, the current offerings are on their site over three pages:\none<\/a>,\ntwo<\/a>,\nthree<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n

So anyway, today I noticed that one of the new releases for the month\nwas a car\nfrom the Disney movie “Cars”<\/a>. I recognized<\/span> it because we watched that\nmovie in our own car, while parked and waiting to board the ferry from Hokkaido<\/a> two\nweeks ago.<\/p>\n\n

I noticed that this particular Tomika was different from the others in\ntwo ways:<\/p>\n

  1. it had no moving doors, windows, hoods, leavers, booms, buckets,\nmasts, or any of the other moving parts that kids immediately search for\nand love.<\/li>\n
  2. it was double the normal price.<\/li><\/ol>\n\n

    That movie had been heavily<\/b> hyped in Japan, even before it was released some long time ago,\n so I'm sure Disney is just raking in the cash. I've held a minor<\/span> amount of Disney stock for more than 10 years, so I guess<\/span> I should<\/span> be happy,\n but this kind of thing makes the parent in me (and the human in me,\nfor that matter) just roll my eyes and vow to never buy one of these\nultra-hyped spinoff products.<\/p>\n\n

    I may buy the movie — we'd only rented it earlier — but\nthat's a different<\/span> issue.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Today was Kyoto's Aoi Matsuri festival, but instead of enjoying that, Anthony and I went to the store to look at (but not buy) toys.<\/p>

    The most popular little toy cars in Japan are a line called tomika from the Tomy company (\"tomika\" sounds like the way a Japanese would say \"Tomy Car\"). They're about two inches long and well made, and at only 378 yen (about $3.15) each, they're a good value. They've been around approximately forever.<\/p>

    Over the years, Anthony has accumulated many. He has all manner of cranes, police cars, ambulances, busses, construction equipment, garbage trucks, dump [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}