The last part of this little series is the “Japanese Mascots” category. We’ve done Ronald McDonald / Colonel Sanders, Mickey / Hello Kitty, Food Mascots, and American Children Shows. Today, we focus on well known Japanese characters. There was a lot of Mario and Luigi out there, so I thought we’d start with that.
Apparently this is what a Koopa Troopa would look like in real life. Here’s a little Mario factoid: In Japan, Bowser is known as Kupa King. The shelled dudes are just Kupas. Oh man, Luigi is kicking some Kupa shell.
This one is kind of along the same line, but a little different. It’s a more realistic version of Super Smash Bros. I love how the Ice Climber is smoking a cig. Kirby? Just leaves me speechless.
Does everyone know Rirakkuma? It’s a combination of “relax” and “kuma” (bear). He’s a super relaxed bear. Now we know why he’s so relaxed.
Gachapin is a young dinosaur (I always thought he looked like a caterpillar) who goes on adventures with his young sasquatch friend.
There’s a bunch of these. He’s going on more adventures, it looks like. There’s one where he battles Darth Vader, Predator, and above, Alien. Never mess with a dinosaur.
Doraemon is one of the most popular characters in japan. He’s a little robotic cat from the future that pulls inventions out of his special pocket. The show works out quite a bit better than I’m making it sound. There’s a ton of Doraemon parodies.
Doraemon can fly, but it didn’t quite look as creepy (or as speedy, I suppose) as this. And the person riding Doraemon? Looks kind of old. Things really got creepy between those two over the years…
Nova is kind of old news since they went out of business, but they have a super well-known mascot. It’s supposed to be a rabbit… though, for some reason it has a beak. There’s all sorts of fun you can do with something like this. For example…
Here’s what the Nova Usagi should really look like. I’m trying to think of what this reminds me of. Maybe you can help.
Then, of course, there’s the super muscly parody. For some reason all character parodies always seem to have a very muscly version. Oh, and the “Can you Speak English” refers to the fact that Nova was (is?) an English teaching company (a really crummy one, though).
Want to see more? Here’s some links:
Want to check out all the parodies? Click here.
So, there you have it. That was the last part of the series. I hope you enjoyed it (or at least didn’t get too irritated by it), and now we’ll try to get back to normal (or at least as normal as we can get). If you enjoyed, and look forward to see more, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!