Lucky dip
we love our egg-shaped surprises...
Dear word explorer,
After I titled this newsletter I wondered how many people are familiar with the term ‘lucky dip’? I thought it originated in the UK, but it was first recorded in 1878 in the Manaro Mercury, a local newspaper in New South Wales, Australia. A lucky dip refers to a simple game of chance, where contestants are presented with a jumble of concealed prizes in a container, and must blindly ‘dip’ and wonder what treasure they will seize.
In the era of corner sweet shops, which sold a kaleidoscopic range of boiled sweets and jellies from giant jars, you could also buy pre-packaged bags of assorted sweets (sometimes with a toy) for a few pennies which were hugely popular with children. They were often referred to as ‘Lucky’ bags, and perhaps lucky dips.
There are many variations on this, including a classic gumball machine, where you put in a coin, flip the handle, and discover what junk toy might pop from a concealing plastic egg.
My Irish childhood memory of this underwhelming dispenser of sad trinkets bears no resemblance to its equivalent in Japan, where it has been elevated to a hugely popular pastime.
Gachapon1 is an onomatopoetic portmanteau derived from a sounds made by spinning the handle of the machine — gacha — and — pon — for the noise of the capsule bouncing into the chute.
Japanese entrepreneur Ryūzō Shigeta created them in the 1960s. He was inspired by American vending machines that sold gum and candy, but Shigeta realised that by encasing toys in capsules he could deliver them easily to customers eager for a zing of gambler’s anticipation. They are a ubiquitous part of the scenery in Japan, easily spotted in shopping malls, train stations, arcades and speciality stores. Gachapon’s popularity over the decades means it has been exported far beyond Japan’s shores.
There is a massive variety of Gachapon prizes. Some machines specialise in themed sets based on anime, manga, video games, weirdly cute animals, or pop culture franchises, and determined collectors must repeatedly use the machines to complete their sets.2
Premium Gachapon machines tempt the user with high-value items such as PS5 consoles, an entire set of anime/manga, expensive jewellery, or limited edition gear. These prizes are usually stored in lockers that can only be opened via keys that are won via the capsules. Those Gachapons can be quite pricey.
The largest Gachapon machine ever made appeared in the Marina Square shopping mall in Singapore to celebrate Pop Mart’s Sweet Bean toy collection during Christmas 2023. In order to take your chances with the giant machine you had to obtain a token by proving you’d spent at least $180 in the mall! The dial was the size of a cartwheel and each plastic sphere was the size of a small child’s head. Limited edition gifts waited for those who shopped the most. Exclusivity combined with mystery, of course it was popular!
Since we’re heading into Easter, it’s worth noting that this shares a similarity with the Kinder ‘Surprise’ eggs. Whenever I think of Kinder Surprise I recall the funny observation from comedian/musician, Bill Bailey on the phenomenon:
“I’m English, and as such I crave disappointment. That’s why I buy Kinder Surprise. Horrible chocolate; nasty little toy: a double-whammy of disillusionment! Sometimes I eat the toy out of sheer despair.”
His humorous comment reminds me of the warning that Kinder Surprise should not be given to children under the age of three years old, as the wee gifts are a choking hazard for babes who are wont to place anything they observe into their mouths.
Kinder Surprise eggs are banned from sale in the USA thanks to a 1938 law that prohibits the sale of food products containing non-edible objects, such as toys. Therefore, in the USA you can purchase the alternative, Kinder Joy, which is a plastic egg shape made of two halves: in one is a sickly treat, and in the other the surprise toy, so there is a strict separation!
Check out this amazing DIY build of a Kinder Joy dispenser out of cardboard and a few other items, produced by YouTube maker, Mini Gear. It would be a nifty craft project for the children (and some adults) in your household.
The blurb about the genesis of the Kinder eggs claims that it’s based on an Italian tradition of giving children chocolate eggs with a toy inside, but there appears to be little evidence for the claim. Chocolate eggs only appeared in the nineteenth century in France and Germany, and they were initially solid. Prior to that hard-boiled eggs were painted and decorated and given as gifts during Easter to celebrate the end of Lent. It wasn’t until 1873 that that Fry’s chocolate company in England started using moulds to fashion hollow chocolate eggs. It was an instant hit with customers, and thus copied by all the confectioners.
Kinder Surprise was first produced in 1974 by Michele Ferrero, the founder of the Italian Ferrero Candy Company, and since then the company is estimated to have sold approximately 30 billion Kinder Surprises globally.3
The association of eggs with Easter is very strong, although the origins of it as a mythic symbol of creation are far older and represented in cultures throughout the world. Known as the ‘Cosmic Egg’, variations include it breaking apart to birth the world, or being laid by unknown force to hatch the first deities, who then begin the process of creation.
The egg is the original seed from which life springs. Its smooth shell conceals, forcing us to wonder what will emerge.
Today, we continue to celebrate the approach of the season of renewal and the bursting forth of seeds with a gift-giving tradition that aligns with our oldest sense of first cellular life.
Today I received lovely news via my pal Stephen Downey of Outsider Games in Belfast. Jennifer Wilde: Unlikely Revolutionaries, the point-and-click video game I wrote for Outsider Games based on the comic book I wrote for Atomic Diner Comics, is going to be available for the Nintendo Switch (but you can buy it on Steam for other platforms right now).
It’s available for pre-order at the Nintendo Switch store, and will be ready to play on 27 March, 2025!
Here’s the blurb:
In 1921, young French artist Jennifer Chevalier becomes embroiled in death, espionage and revolution, assisted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde. A hand-drawn Point & Click adventure with a unique comic book inventory design.
Also known as gashapon or gacha-gacha — the latter seems right to me as it almost sounds like ‘gotcha gotcha’. Technically, Gashapon is the brand name for the machines registered to Bandai Namco.
The ‘luck’ aspect is the basis of all collectible series, such as Baseball cards, Yu-Gi-Oh or Magic: The Gathering, and a reliable source of income for these companies.
It’s called Kinder Sorpresa in Italy. Kinder is the common denominator in the title in most territories, even though kinder is German for children.