Thursday, June 27, 2013

Singapore's McDonald's Fairy Tale 2013 Scandal

I stand by this: Manipulation and Manufactured Hype of Singapore's McDonald's Fairy Tale series plushes. In order for Hello Kitty fans to buy at a higher price, these "sellers" are doing whatever they can do to manipulate the hype that surrounds this "Fairy Tales" incident. If you think about it-- 10 years from now, the McDonald plushes won't be much of value because a lot of sellers will eventually realize that there are not a lot of collectors willing to shell out thousands of dollars for a toy. It's a lost cause. A hopeless gimmick. Poor them. Well, not really, but you get my point.

These sellers have tainted the word, "fan." Now, whenever a franchise company promotes a campaign with Sanrio, in the back of the minds of fans, they will ask: "Is that person ahead of me in line a true collector fan or a scalper who wants to profit from a fan's obsession?"


McDonald's urges public to stop profiteering from Hello Kitty plush toys

By Rachel Tan

The McDonald's Hello Kitty plush toy craze has translated into a opportunities for online sellers to capitalise on the fad.
Several advertisements selling the toy were seen just hours after they went on sale early Thursday morning. In one posting on eBay. there were 125 bids for the "Singing Bone" model.
News of the online transactions have reached McDonald's headquarters in Singapore - and the management is not happy about it. "We do not support people buying the Kitties for resale, and we have been regularly removing posts offering such services from our page. We take the conduct of our staff very seriously and if any of them are found to have misappropriated the Kitties for personal gain, we will not hesitate to take appropriate action," the fast-food chain posted on their official Facebook page.
The toy has also resulted in a number of confrontations among consumers. According to Stomp, at McDonald's Bukit Batok Central outlet, a policeman was asked to clear a dispute over people jumping queues.

Source: Straits Times

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Guinness World Record HK Fan 2011: Asako Kanda

We all aspire to have a great collection like Asako Kanda, the Guinness World's Record of the Biggest Hello Kitty fan of 2011. For me personally, it's not about the amount of things that you can own on one type of collection, it's about the quality of your collection that matters. I hope 25 years down the road, I can look back and just be content and be proud of my collection like Asako Kanda is with her's.

Asako Kanda, Crazy Hello Kity Girl

By Amanda Deviana

Hello Kitty has millions of fans around the world, but none are more in love with Sanrio’s iconic character than Asako Kanda. The 39-year-old receptionist from Japan has amassed a fantastic collection of over 4,500 Hello Kitty items.

Like many other girls of her generation, Asako’s fascination with Hello Kitty began during her elementary school days. At first, she just bought little things like pencils and erasers featuring the popular kitty, but by the time she turned 11 she was so obsessed with Sanrio’s creation that she made a Hello Kitty mug in her pottery class, and an embroided Hello Kitty apron for her home economics course. But she can’t be the only girl in the world who did this kind of stuff while growing up. But that’s the thing, while most other girls move on to idolizing boy bands or movie actors, Asako Kanda remained faithful to her childhood friend. “Kitty has always been with me, almost subconsciously,” she said in an interview a few years back. Some people call her infantile, other laugh at her bad taste, but none of this has ever affected her long-term love affair with Hello Kitty. She now holds the Guinness World Record for most Hello Kitty items, 4,519, as of August 2011.

As you can imagine, almost everything in the house of the world’s biggest Hello Kitty fan is pink. Apart from the thousands of fluffy toys she has lying around everywhere, and the hundreds of posters, Kanda even has Kitty-themed appliances,  including a Hello Kitty toaster, a Hello Kitty electric fan and a Hello Kitty frying pan. She also has Hello Kitty costumes and hats, pillows, curtains, even handkerchiefs. Put simply, whatever an average person owns, Asako Kanda probably has a Hello Kitty version of. Truth be told, Sanrio, the company that created Hello Kitty, has made it pretty easy for her, releasing countless Hello Kitty themed products, from cheap marshmallows to a diamond-studded statue worth ¥10 million ($125,000). So does she ever feel tricked into buying all this stuff by Sanrio? ”Well, I sometimes feel like that,” she said, but also admitted she starts to feel antsy when she’s not surrounded by Hello Kitty stuff.

Luckily, Asako’s husband, Hiroyuki, keeps her in check so she doesn’t overspend on Hello Kitty items, but he can only do so much. For their wedding, in 2000, the dedicated collector asked her mother to make cuddly-toy versions of a Hello Kitty bride and groom for their wedding reception, because at the time Sanrio wasn’t into kitty-themed nuptial gear. Since then, Sanrio realized it was missing out on even more money so it entered this segment as well. Knowing for passion for Hello Kitty, many of their friends sent them kitty-themed telegrams of congratulations.

So, with over 4,500 Hello Kitty items under her roof, does Asako Kanda thing she has enough? Definitely not, in fact she has much bigger plans. Her biggest dream is to live in a Hello Kitty house with two giant ears sticking out of the roof, and her final wish will be to have a Hello Kitty-style funeral and a tombstone to match.

Source: here

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Pop Matters Review of Pink Globalization

The review below is very well written and most importantly, from an objective perspective.

Hello Kitty's Silent March toward World Domination: 'Pink Globalization'

 By Scott Elingburg


Here’s the truth: I never gave much thought to Hello Kitty until my young daughter became aware of her. Then, without warning, I was buying Hello Kitty t-shirts, bedroom slippers, band-aids, toothbrushes, and almost any thing else that bore her cherubic face and yellow nose. Then, and only then, did I realize that Hello Kitty was so ubiquitous, so unavoidable in popular culture, that she rivaled the pinnacle of Western culture in presence: Disney.

Despite her omni-presence, however, I still don’t see her in public; Hello Kitty has melted into the background, another part of the landscape of our culture along with Walmart and Nike. And I’m no closer to understanding how that happened than when I first began reading Christine Yano’s Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific.

The fanaticism that surrounds Hello Kitty on all sides, from blind hatred to unquestioning loyalty, is unfathomable. Yano, for all of her meticulous research and personal communications with fans, Sanrio employees, authors, and others, does an exceptional job of mining the Hello Kitty multiverse. Despite her persistence, however, by the end of the book, the surface has only been scratched. Yano, too, gets sucked into the gravitational pull of the kitty and explores areas of lesser interest or importance. For example, while it’s hilariously unsettling to read about the Facebook user group, “I hate Hello Kitty”, and a few outlying Christian churches that believe Hello Kitty is influencing young children to deliberately disobey their parents, it hardly moves the discourse of Hello Kitty’s worldly domination into a new light.

In other respects, Yano, has moved Hello Kitty into a new light by digging below the surface and giving the pop culture icon her full academic due. If popular culture is prone to disposable (mostly Eastern) heroes and fads (e.g., Pokemon, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, etc.), Hello Kitty is the exception to the rule. She has dominated from East to West, in her native home of Japan all the way to Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Integrated as part of Japan’s “cute” culture (kawaii), Hello Kitty has a history all her own.

Her changes have been minuscule—the removal of black outline, the addition of a red bow—and Sanrio has basically kept with a formula of non-branding: they don’t make waves, but consistently keep Hello Kitty at the forefront with new items, they adopt a publicity model where “finding out that a punk group has begun sporting Hello Kitty paraphernalia does not necessarily cause excessive handwringing at Sanrio; rather this maybe the cause for celebration, generating product lines that build and extend Sanrio’s brand,” and they maintain that happiness is what Hello Kitty is all about. Their mantra is their slogan, “Small gift, big smile.” It’s almost enough to believe that Hello Kitty isn’t actually consumer product, but a self-defining icon with real feelings. Almost.

At her core, Hello Kitty is still a product on various levels—a product of the “cute-cool” Japanese culture that borders eerily on the realm of pedophilia, a product of innocence and appeal to sex workers and children alike, and a product in the absolute literal sense, where collectors and fans obsess over new Hello Kitty merchandise because “it makes [them] feel happy.” (Much to Sanrio’s delight, because happy customers spend money.) Yano hears the “happy” mantra over and over from personal interviews she conducts, which, it should be noted, she transcribes and includes rather than piecing them together in an academic jumble. The personal interviews give Pink Globalization an intimate feel, mimicking the personal connection that fans speak of, instead of the cold, distance that academic theory brings to such an intimate subject.

All of which point to one undeniable fact about Hello Kitty: no one can articulate exactly what it is about Hello Kitty that they are drawn to. Her’s is an unconscious connection, a subversive draw.

With any force as strong as Hello Kitty, this subversion is both celebrated and reviled—a theme that Yano examines over and over, in a multitude of examples. And yet, Yano’s book hits a big stride when she explores the ripple effects of Hello Kitty among cultures and groups rather than individuals. The positive and negative effects on cultures—especially Asian-Americans and the gay community—are almost palpable and expressed in outrageous ways. The ways that Hello Kitty empowers and subverts the identities of others is an exploration that deserves wider attention. And Yano, a chair of anthropology at University of Hawai’i, Manoa, is in comfortable terrain to be our guide to Hello Kitty’s effect (and affect) across her lovers and detractors alike.

There are quibbles that I have with Yano’s book. It has a 40 page introduction that can tedious. Though it’s a question of audience that I don’t feel academia has successfully addressed: the net of popular culture is cast wider than on insular academic topics, but its appeal is made more narrow by stuffy elements of the text (i.e., academic theory). Additionally, some of Yano’s personal communications with Hello Kitty fans seem superfluous, not advancing the discussion beyond collective recollections of personal experiences with Hello Kitty. And the beginning and ending chapters of her book are the ones that sink beneath their own queries, not the middle chapters that can be glossed over for intro and conclusive punch.

Pink Globalization isn’t a primer for Hello Kitty lovers, it’s a deep dive into the tale of the small feline that has dominated culture from East to West—all without saying a word or making a sound. Not every icon can make that claim, but, then again, not every icon is Hello Kitty. 

Source: here

Friday, June 14, 2013

Lyn's Social Network

Social Media

FACEBOOK
It is like my own playground and diary entry. If you'd like to be FB friends, friend me on HK Junkie and let me know via in the message note. I will send you a FB invite. I am more picky who follows me here than my twitter account. The only requirement that I ask is that you are a Hello Kitty Junkie for more than 3 months with an active activity and are socially active on FB.

I like to interact with my FB followers, who won't have a hidden agenda being there to spy on me. I value my friendships that I have made on Facebook, but I don't take it personal if someone unfollows me first because truthfully, we are strangers online sharing our lives. That being said, I unfollow a person if I deem it a fake or game account. No interactions with me or signs of activity, I unfollow.

***  If you are the type to offend easily, please save both our time and don't follow me. If you do decide to follow me, remember to not take things what I said personally. It's not about you. Most times, I generalize things. These are my opinions. Take it or leave it. I am looking to make friends who value friendships despite our different backgrounds and beliefs. Example: Your family loves you unconditionally even if you differ in opinions. They won't ignore you or whatnot. They're family. 



INSTAGRAM, FLICKr, and PHOTOBUCKET
Most will be pictures of Sanrio with an added touch of my life


GOOGLE+ and YOUTUBE
My Sanrio Addict Tube that showcases my overseas mail hauls


TWITTER
My Sanrio ramblings and promoting Sims 4: Sanrio patterns for the game that I create


TUMBLR
This tumblr account is called Sanrio Luver Lane, where I post and reblog other Sanrio lovers' collection. Plus, you get more of my sassy ramblings to enjoy as well. ;)

Thursday, June 13, 2013

May Haul 2013


Focus: My Melody & LTS

This haul video consists of items that were bought to further continue my Kittifying Makeover Project. My favorite part of the video are a pair of Hello Kitty Car Floor Mats and my very pink LTS window curtains.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Lyn's Kittified Diary

Sanrio Room

It’s been a long journey in my Kittifying Makeover Project, but I’m making a huge headway that I am set in my future plans. I’ve always thought my addiction to Sanrio would not influence the design of my kitchen. I believed that a Kitchen should be void of any cuteness and be normal. Let me warn you when you start fancying after a pink My Melody die cut face bowl and it’s matching soup spoon, then you’re in trouble. You tell yourself you’ll buy only the Little Twin Stars tea kettle and no more, but then your eye catches sight of the cutest pink Hello Kitty ladle and spatula. Next, I had myself convinced that since I now had a Sanrio themed Kitchen, then it was only fitting that I would need Sanrio themed beverage/soup canisters. In the end, I am resigned to the fact that I am going to have a Sanrio themed home. If you didn’t guess my plans already, my future bathroom will be decked out by a Sanrio character (the usual 5 suspects, of course ;p ) each month. In a way (after my Sanrio Rehab of 2 yrs), my brother was hoping that I got rid of my obsession over Sanrio. Now, I can confess that my obsession has gotten even worse. Poor enabler… nah!