Ancient Web: Squished Kept Tarepanda Merchandise in Three Galleries

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Long before every piece of character merchandise could be collected on a social feed, someone had to scan it, sort the images, and make a little fan page.

Visit Squished, the Tarepanda gallery

Squished is dedicated to Tarepanda, San-X's famously flattened, droopy panda character. It is not an encyclopedia or an official merchandise catalogue. Its creator says the pictures were personally scanned from Tarepanda goods, then divided into three compact galleries: colored scans, world costumes, and lightly colored pictures.

That modest organization is the whole appeal. The color gallery presents pictures largely without accompanying prose. The light gallery is similarly spare. The site offers visitors an assortment of little character illustrations rather than trying to make the visitor read an essay before seeing a panda.

The front page asks people to link back if they use the scans and not simply transplant the entire collection into another gallery. That request is one of the clearest signs of the old fan-web economy: enthusiasts circulated pictures freely, but they also wanted acknowledgement for the tedious scanning and curation that made those pictures findable.

A little shrine that moved house

The gallery retains the original link it wanted visitors to credit: witch-hunter.net/tarepanda/. It now lives under Michiru.org, which identifies itself as a collective of Japanese anime and manga shrines and fanlistings. The collective's homepage says it moved from Witch-Hunter.net in December 2019, bringing the older projects together under a new layout.

That distinction matters. A newer hostname does not mean the artwork archive is a newly invented retro page. This is an older fan-page collection surviving through a move to a new domain, although the gallery itself does not publish a definitive founding date.

The footer acknowledges Tarepanda's owner, San-X, and specifies that the page is a fan project, not an attempt to claim the underlying character. It is a reminder of the informal copyright etiquette on personal fandom sites, where preservation depended on both affection and a willingness to maintain one's own links.

There is nothing massive here. Three little galleries and a clear explanation of where the images came from are enough to preserve a very specific kind of web culture: the fan who made a tiny room on the Internet for one beloved character.

Browse all three Tarepanda galleries.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.