What happens if you Google yourself…

I just googled myself to see how many of my photos are used on other peoples web sites as I stumbled about a piece of personal history: My Tamagotchi Movies from 1997 AD! To my big surprise this page is still online with the comment “page last updated 13 October 1997″. Wow! I thought they were lost in time.

Back in 1997 I was a big fan of Bandai’s Tamagotchi, which was a huge success in Japan and also became very popular in Germany. Because I liked the cute characters so much, I decided to make some animations sporting these characters and send them to the maintainer of the CyberZoo movie web site.

The first one “Tamagotchi – The Movie” was more of a test and just shows all the possible characters in succession. Part II “Tamagotchi – Gone by the Wind” is influenced by a famous movie and the third and last “Tamagotchi – Making of Twins” was my adult version of the common rumor that if you press a certain key combination, you had 2 Tamagotchi at ones. It turned out that this rumor was not true, but my movie exists nonetheless.

In case the site ever disappears, here are local copies of the movies, so they end up in my backups:

Tamagotchi – The Movie (1997 by Juergen Specht)

Tamagotchi – Gone by the Wind (1997 by Juergen Specht)

Tamagotchi – Making of Twins (1997 by Juergen Specht)

I have another anecdote related to Tamagotchi…in the same year in 1997 I was about to make my first trip to Japan and hearing about the Tamagotchi craze I decided to cash in on it and asked a friend to print 100 high quality T-shirts with the final screen (a Tamagotchi angel and a grave stone with RIP on it) and the words “I killed my Tamagotchi” on the front and – knowing that German words are rather exotic in Japan – the total randomly choosen words “Eisbein Stillgestanden“(*) on the back.

To make a long story short, the Tamagotchi craze was already over as I arrived in Japan and I underestimated how complicated it is to sell T-shirts if they are already slightly crumpled from squeezing them in my luggage. I sold maybe 35 or so and gave another 35 to friends as gifts. After I left Japan with the remaining T-shirts I got email that somebody saw somebody wearing this T-shirt on the street in Tokyo and it became suddenly popular, allowing my friends to sell their own T-shirts for a hefty sum and asking for more, but I decided already that I am not in the T-shirt business anymore and so they became very unique collectors items.

Unfortunately I don’t even have any of it myself anymore and the Internet disappoints me with no photo of them. They were kind of cool, take my word for it!

Why “Eisbein Stillgestanden“? Practically all over the world they sell T-shirts with Japanese looking characters, which often are Chinese, mirrored or entirely made up, so I decided to do the same…some random very German sounding words did the trick and whenever I got asked what it means, I invented a different story. Fun!