IDEON KEYCHAIN

After the Ideon films were released, the character faded into obscurity (as I've bitterly mentioned wherever possible). However, like many robots from anime past, the Ideon was resurrected for Banpresto's popular Super Robot Wars series of strategy video games. Fittingly, in the game Ideon was incredibly powerful but also volatile. It first appeared in 1997's Super Robot Wars Final F, featuring the super-deformed sprites that are the series' trademark.

As a division of Bandai, Banpresto produced many items of merchandise to tie in with the video games. In 1997, one of their lines was a series of keychains featuring 2.5" super-deformed versions of the robots involved.

Their Ideon keychain is rather darling. Made of PVC, there's no articulation, but plenty of paint applications. Like most insane robot death machines, Ideon looks cute when you muck around with his proportions. The amount of detail on a tiny, cheap cash-in like this is actually wonderful, and all of Ideon's major features are faithfully reproduced.