There was a game for the Sega CD in 1992, known as Wonderdog. For a picture just to clarify, here's what he looked like: Anyways, whenever I saw what he looked like, I immediately remembered something from earlier on in my childhood. My grandfather has a VHS head cleaner that features this same character, and he runs across the screen with a brush as it shows him supposedly cleaning the VHS player, while a Japanese woman says during the cleaning, "When Wonder Dog with stop mark plate appears, push stop button", or something of that nature. Just how rare is this object? I've looked up information about this head cleaner all over the place, and I can only find very few results that feature anyone acknowledging it exists, but alas there is no video footage or snapshots of this thing in action, let alone for sale on eBay or anything like that. I'm not sure what to think about it, but I have a slight feeling that such an obscure Sega CD character on such a (supposedly) rare VHS head cleaner can be of some good collector's worth. Does anyone else seem to have this exact same thing I'm talking about?
Wouldn't surprise me. The character was used (I think) to advertise the Wondermega in Japan, which leads me to believe it's a Victor/JVC creation. Would the VHS cleaner in question be one from JVC? At some point, along with the other hundreds of other Sega games, I'll end up making a page for Wonder Dog at Sega Retro. Unless someone wants to beat me to it (HINT HINT). But it's not a character that's directly tied to Sega - there's an Amiga port of that game IIRC.
Yes, indeed it was a Victor creation, and yes it was a JVC tape I'm pretty sure. In fact, I even think the box had Japanese all over it, including the tape itself. Wonder how my grandfather got it. I'd get to it, but I don't actually have the Wonderdog game. =P I still wonder just how rare this really is, though. I decided to ask you guys before I try to sell it to someone, to see if it's of any given worth. Knowing how obscure it is, it could be worth more than I thought. Or not, I don't know.
Not sure about the VCR cleaner, but Victor made at least two other Wonder Dog-related merchandise — two Mega CD programs that came on Mega Drive cartridges: Wonder Library (which we have a dump of), which is an audiobook(?) reader that supposedly works with some Sony format, and Wonder MIDI (which is ridiculously rare and undumped), which does music-related stuff. There might be more Wonder Dog merchandise... Though as far as I know, only the Wonder Dog game was released outside Japan.
Just to clarify, the Amiga version of Wonderdog was made first, as happened with many Core Design games. The Mega-CD version was much better in terms of graphics, sound, and even included the subterranean level that was in the Amiga demo, but not in the final version. And for even more trivia, at least the PAL version had a sound bug where you'd hear a continous very high pitched sound on one side, during the whole game. It wasn't too noticeable when using old TVs, fortunately.
UPDATE: I have the VHS cleaner with me now. Ends up my memory failed me, and it is indeed in English. Must remember something else of this sort in a foreign language. Here are some pictures of what it looks like. From what I'm seeing, this is on the JVC website. Seems like it isn't of much worth, considering that websites sell it for about $12-20. The reason I seemed to have not been able to find it is because they never mentioned his name as Wonderdog in any information on the box; instead saying "head cleaner with on screen cartoon", and "a dog appears when the head is being cleaned". Shows how much JVC cared for their once-mascot! It still can be considered a highly ignored peice of Wonderdog memorabilia, especially since it hasn't really been recorded in-motion (the American version, at least), and there are no known screencaps of it either. At least trying to record it secondhand and getting snapshots via iPhone would be a good enough contribution to archive into Sega Retro, wouldn't it? In the meantime, I found the Japanese Victor variant on Youtube. Like said, would be nice for archival purposes for me to put up the US one, right? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO2gzJ_iKHQ[/youtube]
I may sound stupid, but are 30 seconds really enough to clean VHS heads? I'm pretty sure I needed to do it for much longer when my VHS needed cleaning... though that was after I slammed it with a shitload of old tapes that were collecting dust for like a decade >.>
I've just noticed that the music that can be heard sounds like something made by the Core Design guy that made the Wolfchild soundtrack. That would make sense... even though I still can't make any out of JVC/Victor reaching Core for using a character from an Amiga game as their mascot.
