by sean bonner

NAKAJIMA wasn't the biggest company around. Popy was. And due to that, as we've mentioned elsewhere on the site, they couldn't afford all the expensive character licenses that many of the other companies could. But rather than just make anonymous characters and hope that kids would want to buy them, they created their own characters, and their own series to go with them. The threw comic books depicting the adventures of the characters into the packages of the toys. Well sort of comic books. OK, as you can see to the right, a 20 page comic book had 3 and a half pages of comics, and the rest were advertisements for Astro Mu as a whole, or the individual characters that just happened to be sold separately. This particular book came with Nakajima's Capsule Robo G Jumbo Machinder. Obviously taunting you to go out and pick up the rest of the figures. Five heroes, one villain. Endless adventures.

Another cool thing that was in the box was a flyer that continued this ultra hyping of the other figures in the series. That's not the cool part. The really cool thing about this flyer is that the picture of the Capsule Robo G JM is either a prototype or an amazing variation. I'm guessing on the prototype. Noticeable differences are the black body, rather than dark blue as on the production version, and the "A" on it's chest. As we all know, on the store bought version, this "A" is in a star on a circular sticker, stuck on the chest. In this photo, the "A" is on a molded plastic star attached to the chest. Very cool indeed.

As far as I know, all the packages for the other Astro Mu 5 characters contained similar propaganda, but sadly I don't have any of the figures or packages so I can't actually confirm that. As soon as I know for sure I'll amend this. Until then, enjoy the scans...