Facebook is always selling to me.
It knows the weird stupid crap I like, and flaunts it shamelessly before me. It’s a cavalcade of things I don’t need and would never have had the urge to own had Facebook not been pimping them out to me. Like a Frank Sinatra watch. I didn’t need one. I didn’t know such a thing existed. Then Facebook said “Hey! Spunky! Check out this Frank Sinatra watch!”
Now, I have pretty good sales resistance. I could fill a month of blogs with the things I don’t buy. But today I’m going to talk about a thing I did buy, and show it to you. There’s a company in Japan called Re-Ment and they appear to specialize in tiny little miniature playsets. And they have the Peanuts/Snoopy license. And they are doing incredibly odd things with it.
Like “Snoopy’s Vintage Writing Room”, which is en route to my apartment from Japan.
I love this for so many reasons. Snoopy was a noted (and sometimes frustrated) writer in the comic strip, always trying to find the perfect story to follow “It was a dark and stormy night.” So it’s very much in character, but at the same time it’s so completely not something you would see in a toy store in America. Can you imagine a fedora being a Happy Meal toy accessory? Or a typewriter? I honestly don’t know enough about Japanese culture to say for certain if this is designed and aimed at the adult collector…but honestly, I can’t picture Japanese kids (or any kids) getting excited about miniature desks and office chairs.
There are 8 different boxes of miniatures that together, create Snoopy’s Vintage Writing Room. And these aren’t just random miniatures with a Snoopy toy thrown in. The characters are all over the accessories, from Snoopy and Woodstock in a ship-in-a-bottle to a framed portrait of Snoopy with “the round-headed kid.”
Oh, and the “writing room” is one of many such Snoopy sets. And it’s far from the most quizzical.
Anyway, there’s a mess of these and I think I chose the best one. Unlike Pez dispensers, which sell for 2 bucks a throw, these guys are not something you collect in mass quantities. Here in America, whether you buy from an “Asian food and merchandise” site or eBay, you’re getting marked up out the ying yang, plus the shipping from a foreign country. But based on the sheer number of these little playsets (there are lots of others besides Snoopy) they’re obviously very popular in Japan. With whom, I have no idea.