More Shirokuma Cafe Merchandise!

Continuing on with more Shirokuma Cafe goods again, got in a bunch of random merchandise from the series…

…okay, maybe not so random since a few of them I had been planning to buy for some time but never bothered until now.

Pictures can be enlarged by right-clicking “View Image”

I rarely buy any soft toys or plushies from anime series but these ones made for the Shirokuma Cafe were too good to resist. Made by Banpresto, these super deluxe dolls of Shirokuma and Panda were prize toys in those crane/UFO catcher games in Japan that were available for play starting back in November last year. You won’t find them available to buy from the usual anime hobby shops like AmiAmi and Hobby Japan so if you want to get these then your best chances are on Yahoo Japan Auctions or possibly Mandarake.

According to Banpresto’s listing for these on their site, more deluxe soft toy prizes of Panda and Penguin will be put in those machines for play starting in March as well as mini mascot soft toys of Shirokuma, Panda, Penguin, Grizzly and Llama for the bags to attach to! I’ll probably end up getting all those too to complete the set but the llama and penguin ones stand out to me the most. In the meantime, here are a few photos of the first two deluxe soft toys of Shirokuma and Panda.

Shirokuma is made in his regular attire of wearing a black apron and a tied blue cloth around his neck and stands at 36cm tall.

Panda stands at 30cm tall and includes the bag he often wears whenever travelling around.

Next is the first press limited edition CD single of the series 1st opening theme “Boku ni Invitation” sung by American/Hawaiian artist JP.

 It’s been quite some time since I last bought any anime CDs and this was one I had been planning on getting ever since I first heard the song. Originally looked up the listing for this CD single on CDJapan to find that it had a first press bonus containing an original letter set and slipcase for the CD, but had already sold out there which kinda put me off from buying since I’m the type who always goes for those first press bonuses. It wasn’t til a few months later that I looked this up on Amazon Japan to see they still had a few more copies of the limited edition in stock and decided to buy it anyway regardless whether they had the first press bonus or not. To my surprise, it did have them when I checked the sticker on the CD where it mentioned both the letter set and slipcase. Guess that both of those bonuses were probably part of the default items automatically included in all the limited edition types of the single and not a first press limited bonus.

The bonus letter set containing six unique letter shaped in the style of the three main characters standing in front of each other and 3 envelopes that has Shirokuma’s face on the front.

There are 5 tracks on the CD. Three of them are remixes to the title track while the last one is an instrumental version. I actually like all three remixes of the song to be honest, particularly the “Mahalo Remix” version which gives the song a Hawaiian feel and great relaxing tone in slight contrast to the fun and upbeat original version.

The bonus DVD contains the creditless 1st opening animation to the anime series to the TV edit of the song and also a special music video using the full song to various clips early in the show. It was kinda funny to see the music video repeatedly show the clip of Shirokuma belly-dancing with Llama-san standing next to him every time the chorus came up XD.

Now onto photos of the original soundtrack release for the series called the “Shirokuma Cafe Music Playlist”. Kinda surprising there’s 53 tracks on this release, and all on one disc! Would’ve thought they’d have to split it into two discs with that many tracks on it but many of them have pretty short durations of less than two minutes, which explains why.

Animate had their own store exclusive bonus for this CD release where a mini clearfile was included for those who bought it from their store. I ended up using this to store all the obi-strips that comes with their LE BD volumes since they wouldn’t fit in the normal cases for the discs.

So another loot post done! Won’t be surprised if I somehow purchase more Shirokuma Cafe goods in the future though (besides their next set of prize toys from Banpresto lol).

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