So, this is Sailor Moon's Sparkling Castle playset.

It's from Japan, one of the original Japanese Bandai toys. It's probably one of the biggest Sailor Moon items ever made. It's definitely one of the bigget playsets we've ever seen, just a little bit smaller than the GI Joe aircraft carrier, but still. It was scaled for the 12" scale dolls. It also lights up or speaks or something if you put the right doll on the stand, though we've never actually taken it out to see.

How did we get ours? Many years ago, our buddy, Darla, who lived in Japan, scored a couple of these, and at great personal inconvenience, shipped them all the way to the USA for her Moon-iac buddies. We've always considered it one of the crowning items of our collection - the playset that could kick the ass of all the other playsets. It's just big and wonderful and crazy and stupid. It's got a million zillion teensy parts, that you could never do in the USA because kids would choke and die.

But, we've recently relocated our anime dolls to make room for our Disneyana, and this, like everything else, was listed on eBay.





We just opened it up for pretty much the first time. As you can see, everything is still wrapped up in the plastic, no stickers applied. And, the box is in nice shape.

We put this up at a starting bid of $20. It cost us a lot more, even at retail, considering the shipping from Japan, but we figure it would make a kick-ass display unit for some collector. It didn't get any bids. At $20. It did get a lot of questions - probably more than any other item we currently have up. Maybe more questions than any other item we've ever put on eBay.

Just to be clear, I'm the only person I know for sure who has this particular piece in the USA. There might be someone else from our old group of Sailor Moon collector buddies, but really, you're not going to see this item for sale maybe ever again.

So, here are some of the questions we received:

• Can you guarantee this comes from a non-smoking home?
  
• Does this come with a set of instructions in English?
  
• Can you guarantee that it has never been opened?
  
• Can you guarantee that this playset contains every single small part?
  
• Are there any wrinkles or creases on the box?
  
• Does this come with a doll included?
  
• Can't you reduce the shipping cost?
  
• Won't you ship overseas?
  
• Why have you banned me from bidding? I only wrote you 4 times in two minutes!
  

So, what did we do? We yanked it. Obviously, listing this item was taken as an insult to Sailor Moon collector everywhere, who merely wish more and better Sailor Saturn dolls.

We think it's gonna stay here at Tiki Labs. We're going to break everything out of the plastic, and apply all the stickers, and use it as President Barack Obama's Sparkling Oval Office playset. Because we can. Bwa ha ha.