When we built our retail store in San Francisco's Japantown, Brian created an original flocked wallpaper design featuring some of the iconic villains of the Star Wars series. To cut the story down to size, the wallpaper caught the eye of Steve Sansweet, which led to our company being introduced to the Lucas Licensing staff. Brian then bombarded Lucasfilm with a number of product ideas, some which were not feasible due to competing licensing agreements already in place, and some which may become actual products in the future, but the first one approved and making its way to market is the Super Shogun. To be honest, there are some at LFL that were initially unaware of the Jumbo Machinder format, but they seemed to connect with our passion and trust our vision for the project.
Super7 began life as a toy magazine dedicated to the obscure oddities of the Japanese toy world – be it kaiju sofubi, mecha chogokin, or robotic Jumbo Machinders. We live and breathe (likely toxic) vintage Japanese toys. The mashup was generally born from the idea of daydreaming "if Star Wars were a Japanese originated property, what kind of toys would companies have made?" With the Jumbo Machinder/Shogun Warriors oversized figure format being the rage of the '70s , unquestionably there would have been Star Wars Jumbos on Tokyo toy store shelves in 1978 (hey, the flick was released a year later in Japan).
The even more obvious answer is just what toys we were playing with when we were 8 years old - if it wasn't Star Wars, it was Shogun Warriors. Our idea was like jamming chocolate into peanut butter, but with an extra dose of awesome.
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