The Mighty Bowser VERSUS The Bootleg Bowser

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Imagine getting a bootleg for a gift.

In these tough economic times, maybe you can't afford to blow your organisational or personal budget on a $270 2,807-piece The Mighty Bowser LEGO set like KoopaTV's staff did; click this for our review of it. (Click here for the official set.) Your choices are then to find alternate ways of entertainment and challenge-tackling, or to turn to bootlegged versions of The Mighty Bowser. Fortunately (???), there are multiple options out there that are significantly cheaper.

Of course, since they're bootlegs, they might not be at the same quality or feature levels you'd get from buying the official $270 LEGO set. For example, no interaction with the LEGO Super Mario stuff. But maybe you just want Bowser. Perhaps this DG Dreams 1358-piece set for only $80 (currently 25% off at $60) would be of... interest? It's about the same size as the real The Mighty Bowser, and it comes with the stand with two towers. Here is a comparison of DG Dreams Bowser versus LEGO Bowser using official product photos:

Left: The Bootleg Bowser
Right: The Mighty Bowser

Who is DG Dreams? It's unclear; there isn't any information about them on their seller page or on other pages on the Internet. However, one review on another one of their bootlegged LEGO products states that the packaging on the box they received is in Chinese, which suggests that they are not just any bootleggers, but Chinese bootleggers. The Dreames storefront also states its business name is Beijing Shengdaxun Technology Co., Ltd, in China. Perhaps that's why King Bowser looks... decidedly less mighty.

Left: The Bootleg Bowser
Right: The Mighty Bowser
(But you could probably figure that out for yourself by now.)

Reviews suggest that sometimes pieces are missing from the box, don't fit well, or are just poor quality and flimsy. If there is something I can say about LEGO it's that their products are of very good physical quality, even if our own construction of The Mighty Bowser was halted by getting into an impossible to fix situation thanks to vague instructions. My request for free replacement pieces did arrive, however. I haven't yet opened them, but I'm pleased by LEGO's customer service. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like these Chinese bootleggers have any kind of customer service aspect, so you are on your own if you get screwed by them. (Which seems likely.) Perhaps their lower profit margins means they can't afford customer service. ...Especially not an English-speaking one.

LEGO Peach would rather see The Mighty Bowser than Bootleg Bowser.
If you're buying a set as a gift for someone else, I'm quite positive they would also rather receive an authentic set than a bootleg.
Shows how much you care, really.

DG Dreams isn't the only mysterious Chinese bootleg company out there of LEGO products. A similar Chinese bootleg company, MOCREAR, also has a Mighty Bowser set. (Their business name is listed as “cheng du xin wang hu dong ruan jian you xian gong” in China.) Theirs is $90 for 1342 pieces, but their product dimensions are also smaller than LEGO's and DG Dreams's sets. The quality is substantially worse than LEGO's, and MOCREAR's marketing is very... strange. They claim that their bootleg is a great gift for Super Mario game fans and they are suggesting some kind of authentic experience to the videogames, but this is their marketing screenshot.

Uh... classic game setting... And what classic game is this screenshot from, exactly?
It's Bowser from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door with the Google Chrome black pixel dinosaur,
with 1-1 from Super Mario Bros. and the crewmates of Among Us with high-power weaponry?

If the memes weren't clear (and I also wanted to point out that there are several meme formats that all express the same concept), there is a pretty clear quality difference between the normal The Mighty Bowser and the inferior The Bootleg Bowser, and you should spend your money accordingly. We at KoopaTV would, of course, never advocate for anything less than the best for the King of Koopa Kingdom!

You should take after Master Bowser, too!

KoopaTV isn't normally into meme formats, but Ludwig uncharacteristically thought these would be hilarious to make due to the contrast between The Mighty Bowser and The Bootleg Bowser. What do you think? Do you find the price-quality trade-off in favour of the bootlegs? Or would you rather have the quality and feature-filled experience the real deal brings (as well as twice as many pieces)? Do you think it is a Chinese Communist Party conspiracy against a much better leader than what they have to show their depiction of King Bowser as weak and feeble-looking?