Every first Sunday of the month they hold a little flea market in my town, and usually I go just for fun without expecting to find much because most people sell random antique trinkets rather than anything I might be interested in collecting (although i did find some hamtaro figures and LPS in the past) but this time I found a doll of Zakuro from Tokyo Mew Mew! She’s missing her socks and shoes but I paid literally 3€ for her so I am not complaining. She was wearing Mew Lettuce’s magical girl outfit boots too so if I ever come across a listing for that doll shoeless I will be set too lmao.
These dolls are very strange to me because they seem to have only (or mostly) been released in Italy, and I know from in-box listing pictures on Ebay that they were produced by Giochi Preziosi, but there’s very little information about them online. She’s the second doll of this kind that i’ve bought, the first was a fully complete out of box Mew Ichigo. Zakuro was honestly in really good condition too, her hair was crusty and disgusting but she was fine after a good wash and didn’t require any boil washes which I’m glad for.
I know that Tokyo Mew Mew characters got made into Takara dolls (Here’s visuals for what those look like, posted by twitter user leshitprince) at some point as well which seem to be on the same exact body as these (and they also share the same exact shoe sculpt), but the face, head sculpts and outfits are extremely different. I find that the Giochi Preziosi ones seem to have better outfits but much SCARIER faces, while the Takara ones have faces that are cuter and closer to the artwork but lower quality outfits. The construction quality on the GP ones’ maid apron is honestly kind of insane.
Anyway, here she is hanging out with Ichigo. These are sooo strange looking but they’re so uglycute to me I love them <3 I hope to be able to add more of them to my collection eventually
Awesome find! Congratulations! I remember seeing these in a toy store while I was on my way to school, it must have been… 2003?
Thank you!! And yeah, I don’t remember seeing these being sold in stores because i was probably too little to remember at the time so i figured they must be from the early 2000s ^_^