On the subject of candy toy play-sets

There’s something really quite charming about a candy toy play-set. Perhaps it’s all of the cute little characters and set pieces, or perhaps it’s all of the clever play features, bringing back nostalgic memories of messing around with your new toys on a Christmas morning. Regardless, we can agree that they are loved by many collectors, and for good reason. For the less informed, a candy toy is, fairly simply, a small toy with a piece of candy in the box. They can be found all over in Japan, featuring little items from all sorts of brands and series. They’re also a particularly popular distribution choice for Kamen Rider and Super Sentai items. Whilst many individual pieces can be found, collections will be released in which you are required to purchase all of the separate toys to combine together and make a much bigger item. You’ll often find that these make a combining robot figure or similar, but once in a while a company will release a full on play-set, broken down in to individual collectible pieces. Of course, these all function on their own, put put together they often look fantastic and offer even more features. We’re going to look at three of my favourite sets and give a little overview of their features. Pokemon Wai Wai Island is a five part set that focuses on building a course for little figures to roll down in barrels. Each individual set acts as a miniature track for the included figure to use, with extra characters sprinkled around as 2-D cut-outs. Some of the sets have extra little play features, like a working gate or a switcher that allows you to send your Pokemon down an alternate route. The sets cover a number of environments from sandy beaches, to the top of a volcano. When all put together, the tracks all link and create one, much larger, route, and the island in entirety, and it really looks quite fantastic. Evangelion’s Welcome to NERV Base collection serves two functions. The first is to act as a great miniature recreation of the inside of the humongous NERV headquarters from the show. Each set represents and commonly seen location. We’ve got the entrance gates and escalators, the testing facility with Unit-00, Asuka’s Entry Plug, the Unit-01 viewing room, the Command Centre and the Central Dogma. Each of the locations have been as faithfully recreated as possible on such a miniature scale and all include play-features and moving parts. The second function is really quite impressive though. Once all of the sets are connected, you may fold up specific pieces and then the sets themselves to form the NERV pyramid itself. Having the two display options is a really nice touch, and you can keep things fresh by changing it up once in a while. There’s even a little fold-out piece near the back that recreates Kaji’s watermelon patch. What more could we ask for from a set such as this? The One-Piece Thousand Sunny set doesn’t offer as many play options, but is still a fantastic display piece. There are two notable play features though, an opening mouth cannon that fires a plastic missile, and a rotating drum in the hull of the boat containing a few smaller vessels. Different compartments of the boat can be opened up to reveal an assortment of furniture and detail, and there are numerous spots that the members of the Straw Hat crew can peg in for play and display. Candy toy sets are never massively expensive on release, but as they’re generally only produced for a short time, they can become really quite tricky to find as time passes. You very well may see individual pieces up for sale now and again, but it’s nowhere near as convenient as picking up a complete set. If you do come across any of these sets, or for that matter, any other sets you have an interest in, I would strongly recommend buying them whilst you have the chance. You will not regret it.

#toys