How Rhydon’s Sofubi Figure Fits Into Pokemon’s 1997 Boom

Rhydon Pokemon Kids Sofubi Figure (Bandai, 1997)

A Pocket Monster Built Into the Foundation

Rhydon — Pokedex entry No. 112 — is a Rock/Ground-type Pokemon and one of the earliest designs in the franchise’s history. Its silhouette is unmistakable: a powerfully built bipedal creature with a spiral drill horn on its nose, bony spines running down its back, and a segmented tail, all rendered in grey-white tones that naturally read as rock and earth. Rhydon evolves from Rhyhorn (No. 111), and when the original 151 Pokemon debuted in Pocket Monsters Red and Green in Japan on February 27, 1996, it was already the final form in its evolutionary line.

Game Freak designer Ken Sugimori has mentioned on several occasions that Rhydon ranks among the earliest Pokemon ever conceived, placing it close to the very beginning of the franchise’s creative history. The precise order in which those first designs were finalized remains a subject of some debate, but Rhydon’s presence from the opening chapter of Pokemon is widely acknowledged among enthusiasts. Within the original games, it also carried high base stats for its generation, making it a recognized presence in competitive play from the start.

Sofubi and the Shokugan Tradition Behind Pokemon Kids

The Pokemon Kids line is a Bandai product: a series of small character figures sold as shokugan — literally “food toys” — bundled with candy, typically ramune-style sweets, and distributed through convenience stores, candy shops, and toy retailers across Japan. The line launched in 1997, coinciding directly with the debut of the Pokemon anime on TV Tokyo on April 1 of that year, placing it among the first wave of Pokemon merchandise to reach Japanese children.

The figures are made from sofubi, or soft vinyl — a manufacturing tradition with deep roots in Japanese toy culture. Sofubi figures became a staple in the 1960s during Japan’s kaiju boom, when Ultraman and Godzilla characters were produced using this same method: soft vinyl poured into molds, yielding figures with a pliable, slightly warm texture that hard plastics cannot replicate. When Bandai applied this craft to Pokemon in 1997, a brand-new franchise inherited a toy-making lineage stretching back decades.

The light yellowing that appears over time on the horn, ears, and tail tip of older examples is a natural result of soft vinyl aging across roughly three decades — a visible sign of genuine vintage production.

What First-Generation Pokemon Fans Find Here

Rhydon occupies an interesting place within the original 151 Pokemon. It lacks the immediate name recognition of Pikachu or Eevee, but among collectors and enthusiasts with deeper knowledge of the franchise’s design history, its status as one of the earliest-conceived Pokemon carries its own kind of weight. That design history, combined with strong first-generation stats, meant Rhydon was never a peripheral character in the original games.

The Pokemon Kids series has continued expanding for nearly three decades, with new waves of figures released alongside every successive generation of games. A figure from the 1997 launch window — tied to the same year the anime began broadcasting and Japan’s original Pokemon boom reached its peak — sits at an early and specific point in that long history. For anyone drawn to the period when the franchise was still finding its global footing, a sofubi from that first wave connects directly to where it all began.