Firstly, the biggest news is that Bandai's
end of March re-release of the 1/65 scale VF-19Kai and VF-17S will come
in completely new boxes with the toys displayed in fighter mode instead
of the battroid mode of the original 1995 release. The toys will
retail for ¥6,800. Does this new box design justify the ¥1,820 price
increase over the original 1995 release? I don't think so and from the
picture it does not look as if any changes have been made to these toys.
Also, my sources tell me that quantities of these toys will be fairly
limited so grab them while you can.
Hasegawa VF-1S Super Box Art
Here is a small color pic of the CG box art
for the upcoming Hasegawa VF-1A Super 1/72 scale plastic model kit.
Unfortunately, it looks like the kit will not come with any missiles.
Nice box art though!
And here's a larger black and white advertisement
of the Hasegawa VF-1S Super. Looks like the kit will be released in
May 2001.
And here's a new line-art pic of the Hasegawa
VF-1A Super, for those of you who like that sort of thing.
Monthly Japanese Model Magazines
The May 2001 issues of Hobby Japan and Dengeki
Hobby magazine have just been released. For once I recommend buying
Hobby Japan as it has a 17 page feature on the Hasegawa Macross models
including a building guide and some beautiful photos of finished
models including a fan built fully variable conversion of the Hasegawa
VF-1J.
The new Dengeki Hobby features just 4 pages
of Macross stuff, mostly focusing on the Hasegawa models. A fan made
non-variable conversion to battroid mode of the Hasegawa DYRL type VF-1A/S
is also featured.
It seems to be very popular to try to convert
the Hasegawa fighter mode kits to either battroid mode or to fully variable.
Here is a picture of the VF-1J fully variable
conversion in battroid and Gerwalk modes.
Compare the picture of the leg transformation
of the Hasegawa variable VF-1J conversion below with the line-art picture
from the 1984 'Do You Remember Love?: Special Preview' book and
notice the way the legs transform is incredibly accurate to the anime.
Japanese Macross 7 DVD
Lastly here is the box art pic of the upcoming
Japanese release of Macross 7 on DVD.
One final word of news, I've heard from a
fairly reliable source that both Macross TV and Macross 7 may be released
fairly soon on pirate DVD with both Chinese and English subtitles. For
those of you that don't know pirate (or bootleg) anime DVDs are
very common here in HK and recently many have been released with English
subtitles.
One word of warning, although the visual
quality of these DVDs is very good, the subtitles are often full of
spelling and grammatical errors or just plain nonsensical. However, to be fair the most recent pirate DVD releases such as Jin-Roh
and Spriggan have seen much improvement in the accuracy of the subtitles.
This may be the only way most of us will
ever see a Macross 7 DVD with English subtitles as I'm sure HG would
try their best to block a legitimate release.
That's all for now.
