The expert answers:
You can find many Hello Kitty items at Sanrio Store www.sanrio.com. Here is a great web site where you can find Hello Kitty printable pages to make party gift bags, invitations and fun and easy craft projects.
www.sanrio.com
Hello Kitty, the most often licensed cat in the universe, turns another gadget into a pink, little girls dream device (see other Hello Kitty Gadgets below).
This time its the NHJ Che-ez! v:u2 Camcorder. The Che-ez! v:u2 is a 3.0MP MP4 camcorder. The digital camcorder can record video in 320 x 240 pixel (max. 20 frames/s) and 640 x 480 pixel (max. 12 frames/s) recording sizes. It has a 4x digital zoom and uses SD-Cards (max. 256MB).
The preview screen is 1.4" in size. The v:u2 has a TV out to view video directly on TVs. NHJ states that the Hello Kitty camcorder comes soon.
More details on the Che-ez!
http://www.che-ez.com/vu2_sanrio/index.html
For some reason, millions of people love Hello Kitty (my girlfriend among them), but there's never really been a Hello Kitty video game in America. Namco plans to change that. Working with Hello Kitty's creator, Sanrio, Namco will be publishing Hello Kitty Roller Rescue this August.
Prepare yourself, because the story gets a little wild. Block-O, a horrible blockheaded alien, has invaded Sanriotown. He sees that Hello Kitty and her friends give gifts to each other and then they throw away the block shaped boxes. Block-O will not stand for this, so he attacks Sanriotown to save his cardboard brothers. Oh no!
Hello Kitty laces up her roller skates along with Badtz-Maru, Mimmy, Keroppi and 17 other Sanrio characters to take back Sanriotown!
I'm not sure quite exactly how that will happen yet because Namco hasn't really released any gameplay details beyond "it's a 3D adventure". But they do plan to include five difficulty settings with many different ways to beat the game so that Hello Kitty fans of all ages can enjoy it.
Review from Amazon.com:
Cute! not entire collection cataloged but still good buy
As previous reviewers stated, this book does not have "everything" that's ever been Hello Kittied but still it's okay and a nice coffee table piece. My guests always reach for it when they wait for me on my couch and they enjoy looking at the cute pictures and are surprised to learn all the paraphenilia created by Sanrio. So it's quite entertaining and my friends and I have looked through it more than once even though we are not hardcore HK devotees. I did learn something about Hello Kitty's origins in the first few pages and the names of her friends so it's not a total loss. The items in the book need more organization - some are arbitrarily placed and there's no real sense of chronology in terms of dates (the years of the items emergence are all mixed up). The pages are nicely laid out but it did leave a feeling of wanting to see "more" from the collection because there are things I own that are HK that are not in the book. They can't include everything so maybe the name should be changed to "Hello Kitty Hello Something" lol. Nevertheless, it's really cute and eye catching and entertaining for guests (mostly female) and I'm happy to own it.
Hello Kitty's Tea Party is run by two people who do it for fun in their spare time (when they have some). We aren't some big corporation, and we don't get rich from Hello Kitty by having various ads around the site. The site has been running since February 96. The ads pay for the hosting costs. If it gets too expensive to run, we will take the site down, but because of the enormous traffic we get (thousands of people a day) and all the positive email we get, we figure people like it and so we'd like to keep it running. If you click on the ads on the site, we paid a little bit, which encourages us to update the site more often and make it better.
http://www.groovygames.com/kitty/
Hello Kitty is a cute kitsch Japanese cartoon cat that can be found on everything from coffee makers, toasters and TV's to jewelry and clothing. She even has her own theme park "Harmonyland" in Japan!
To celebrate Hello Kitty's 30th anniversary Sanrio the company behind the cat asked artists and designers from all over the world to create artworks to celebrate her birthday. They will be shown at an exhibition called "Kitty Ex" to be held in Japan later this year (2004). We were asked to create a 200ft cereal portrait of her in a wheat field at Yatesbury in Wiltshire.
Hello Kitty has a blog. It looks like she's been blogging since July. Unfortunately, it's in Japanese. The press release says that it is a joint project between Sanrio and NTT Data, but according to the blog, Hello Kitty is writing it herself. She asserts that this moblog picture was taken herself. Maybe that's why she's a bit out of focus. She should have had someone take the picture for her. Anyway, welcome to Blogging Kitty-chan.
Here is the link: http://diary.hellokitty.ne.jp/
This black flight bag has a felt image of punk Hello Kitty. It features an adjustable shoulder strap, two zippered compartments, cell phone and credit card pockets and a front zip pocket. Measures 11" x 11" x 3 1/2". 100% polyester.
Hello Kitty Punk Comfort Mat
Get your day off to a rockin' good start! Put this mat next to your bed, and you've got a soft place to stand when you first get up. When you start this soft and comfy, the rest of your day will be a breeze!
Felt covered rubber comfort mat measures approximately 26 by 16 inches. Mat is black, with an image of Rocker Hello Kitty playing guitar. Newspaper-cutout-style letters read: "Hello Kitty punk".
Seriously, the only thing surprising about the Hello Kitty phone is that nobody had done one already. The phone, which looks like a modded version of the Nokia 3595, is due out from Cingular’s pay-as-you-go service sometime around now and will come with “exclusive” Hello Kitty games, wallpapers, and ringtones. We’d say it’d go great with your Hello Kitty Bluetooth headset (teen girls are dying to walk around with headsets), but the 3595 doesn’t have Bluetooth, so it’s a moot point.
For an expressionless little white fur ball, Japan's Hello Kitty puts up a mean fight in the cultural jungle.
Once the defining measure of girls' craze for cuteness within Japan, the pop feline today can be found staring out from the handbags, sweat shirts, notebooks, and now debit cards of children and night-clubbing art students alike around the globe. And as she marks her 30th anniversary, Hello Kitty's combination of Mona Lisa mystery and saccharine sweetness has become an unlikely symbol of the shift in Japan's global reach from cars to culture.
Hello Kitty - which earns $1 billion a year for its owner, Sanrio Co. - isn't alone among Japanese cultural creations in finding an audience in the West. In recent years, Japanese characters such as Pokémon and the fantasy series Yu-Gi-Oh! have become staples of children's entertainment. Japanese horror films - think "The Ring" - are international hits. Anime - animated flicks - and "manga" comics have made inroads, appealing to global audiences with their Dickensian plots and appealing style.
Nobuyoshi Kurita, a professor of sociology and pop media at Musashi University in Tokyo, says the newfound yen for all things Japanese underscores a global move from a materialistic to an information culture. "Stereos and cars used to be considered symbolic of modern Japanese culture," he says. "But now it's animation."
Hello Kitty makes her way on to the PlayStation with Hello Kitty's Cube Frenzy. The adorable kitty, whose popularity among little girls came in the form of plush toys, pencils, backpacks and other merchandise. Are you ready to help her solve puzzles in her first PlayStation title?
As Hello Kitty, the popular Japanese character, you move her by making cubes disappear or piling them up in order to get her to collect prizes. After clearing a land, you get to choose where you want to go, changing the story.
The story begins when Hello Kitty falls asleep at a beach resort. When she wakes up she finds herself on a strange island surrounded by the smell of flowers. She realizes that her archenemy, Badtz-Maru has played a trick on her and she has been transported to another world. To get back home she has to make it through eleven different lands, each consisting of three stages.
There are three modes including: the Story mode; the Extra mode, which appears after you clear all the lands; and the Free Play mode, which allows you to play whatever levels you want either alone, with a partner or against a partner. The game also features a bonus round and cute illustrations of Hello Kitty.
Hello Kitty's Cube Frenzy is also available on the Game Boy Color, but this PlayStation version uses one block of memory and has vibration feedback compatibility.
Hello Kitty is a global, billion-dollar enterprise, but where did it come from? Hello Kitty is the biggest selling brand of the Sanrio Company Ltd, which was founded is 1960 by Shintaro Tsuji.
Hello Kitty is part of the Japanese pop culture of "kawaii" (cute). It all started in the early '70s. Sanrio was trying to develop its own in-house design department. The president, Shintaro Tsuji told his group to draw animals. In 1974, a young designer named Yuko Shimizu came up with the design for Kitty, which Tsuji said left him with a "not too bad" impression. The first product produced was a small clear vinyl coin purse. The products quickly caught on and dwarfed the rest of the company’s sales with in a year or two.
Unlike most American characters, whose use and design is tightly controlled, Kitty changes constantly. Each year, the designers come up with a new theme for Kitty, plaid one year, in pink another, a princess with a tiara in other years, always giving the obsessed collectors something to want.
There are currently about 22,000 Hello Kitty products on the market. Sanrio produces and markets more than half of them, but about one-third are made under license by hundreds of other companies. Each month, Sanrio takes 600 products off the market and replaces them with another 600 items. Some are shuffled for seasonal reasons. Beach sandals in summer, down quilts in winter, back-to-school bags in autumn. But many are taken off because they don’t sell and to keep the lineup fresh.
"Hello Kitty was born in London, England where she lives with her twin sister, Mimi. Both Hello Kitty and Mimi are in the third grade. They have many friends at school and, together, they share many adventures. When school's out, Hello Kitty travels the world making friends. Her generosity and kindness endear her to everyone she meets. Her hobbies include music, reading, eating the cookies her sister makes, and best of all, making new friends. "After all, she says, 'You can never make too many friends.'"
Hello Kitty is a cute little cat with an extremely large head, usually pictured with her sister or her teddy bears, and usually dressed in a cute little red romper, although she often is seen in other outfits during the course of her many adventures. She usually does not have a mouth, although in video appearances she does. She was first brought into the world by Sanrio Co. in 1974, and made her international debut two years later. Her birthday is November 1st.
Yes, it’s true. It was only a matter of time until Hello Kitty worked her evil magic upon this particular gadget, as she has on oh so many others. The Hello Kitty Crystal Xbox Console takes that definitively non-pink Xbox and converts it to its long-latent color scheme. During the promotional period the entire bundle comes with a Helly Kitty Crystal Controller and Hello Kitty Mission Rescue Game for $99 with the purchase of selected Samsung LCD TVs, but if you’re not anywhere near Singapore you’re gonna be relegated to shelling out a fortune on eBay someday to get your paws on one.