Did you ever dream of super ugly cufflinks made in slight resemblance to one of your favorite video game heroes? Nothing spices up a festive tuxedo, like these rubber abominations do.
I have no clue,...
…where they are from. It was an ebay listing and the seller had no clue either. There are no manufacturing or licensing infos on the things themselves, which leads me to believe, that they are bootleg products. But, man, are they glorious.
They are not painted. The way they are made is by pouring differently colored rubber into a mold. This method is of course super imprecise, leading to astounding production mistakes and off-model colors. Also, since the sculpting needed to provide individual molding compartments for each color – instead of painting the different colors onto an cohesive mold later – the details are really lacking.
But small mistakes, like a blue colored button here or a skin colored mutton chop there are nothing compared to some of the more weird deviations.
Some seriously lazy sculpting going on here.
Muigi?
These three pieces are my absolute favorite. The mold is decent, fairly on-model considering the size of the cufflinks. But the you have a Mario color scheme in which a pale skin color is used for his skin and his gloves and emblem. The second one is amongst the best pieces concerning production quality, it uses a lot of different colors and is colored fairly cleanly. But it Luigi’s color scheme. I love it.
To me as a collector, finding those bootleg type pieces is always super great. There is friction to those goodies, a story behind it and they somehow expand the universe of the franchise they knock off.
Cool gift idea for mario games lovers.