Possible bootleg kits?

[Blade01]

The first bootleg Gunpla I ever saw was a really bad Korean copy of the original S Gundam, so it's not a new phenomenon.

South Korea produced most if not all of the bootlegs back in the day, and quite a few of them made their way into U.S. hobby shops. Academy used to make some pretty decent-quality Bandai knockoffs, but I don't think they do that anymore. A company called Hap Dong had its kits everywhere for a short while, including a 1/100 Alex that predated the MG by at least six years and some truly, uh, creative "full armor" versions of the Nu Gundam and others.

I'm kind of sorry I never picked up any of those, because they're impossible to find now. Terrible, terrible quality though.

ha ha. Well if the quality is that bad, then it was definitely not worth the purchase.

I used to buy Gundam X kits in Chinatown (NY), a few years back. I bought a few first grades, but the quality was just crap. The joints on the Leopard and X-Divider barely held together, and were completely unposeable. I know that first grades are poor in quality, but that was just TERRIBLE. This was when I first suspected about bootleg kits. However, it could have just been the cheapness of Bandai lol.

[James E. 'ZEE' Doyle]

It would have been so worth it. They didn't even try to make their packages look like Bandai kits for one thing, and the box art had this amazing, super-cheesy quality to it that was fairly unique. They weren't too particular about accuracy in the robot designs either: unlike other bootleg manufacturers, Hap Dong apparently created their own molds from scratch, which resulted in some fairly unusual renditions of familiar subjects. And I actively tried to track down the Alex for years, since it was the only 1/100 version of that MS available until the MG came out.

It's kind of a moot point for me, since I've been selling off my collection anyway, but the Hap Dong kits are probably the most collectible and interesting bootlegs out there.

[Kiggz]

not so surprising a Yahoo Japan seller sold me a PG Wing Zero for 70$ but it came out to about 130 in S&H fees still real parts and everything was fine.

I would recommend buying cheep kits like these in PG form only if you see pictures of the parts I was a little worried myself but it turned out to be real!

[Jak Crow]

The only bootleg "brand" I've seen "Bendi" that a local model store was trying to pimp as saying they were really Bandai models from China and that Bandai uses a "different" name there. The store had some of these models on display, and they were all the wrong colors and badly molded as is the case of most knock offs.

[Dufaeth]

I remember Bendi! The name was very appropriate.

[valkyriepilot]

Yes, Bendi bootlegs have proliferated here in the Philippines for quite some time before, most of the kits they "pirated" were from the Gundam Wing series, although I think they also had some from Gundam X.

There's another brand here, I think it's "Mogadishu" something, can't remember the name. I bought one for my nephew since he's been pestering me to give him one of my models at home. The mold is horrible, proportions are off, and apparently it's just one color (white) but they prepainted some parts with this thick lacquer-like paint that's just as horrible looking. Man, I pitited my nephew just looking at him build the thing, but he doesn't seem to mind, plays happily with it.

Kids.. hehe.