JsARCLIGHT

OK, does anyone actually get the Anime Network? If the Anime Network is so hard to find how can this airing of Robotech be any different than say a UHF station dusting off their copies and putting them back up on the air? Seems to me no one will see it either way.

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Interesting. I'd buy them if I was a collector of the figures but it's just the mecha I love. ... anyway what is the deal with that mane? How does she fit all that in her helmet? I myself am "follically gifted" and I have a hard enough time wearing normal hats let alone a closed face helmet. Methinks someone got a little carried away with the hairbrush. I haven't seen hair that long since 1975.

I don't know about that... I thought they started Macrossworld to attract more 18 through 30 year old male virgins who live in Mom's basement... who they could then lure into their lair and kill for more hearts. Nothing brings them out into the sunlight like arguing about a good toy or TV show from the '80s that no one remembers anymore! ... oh and then they stuff the corpses full of pure columbian and ship them internationally (having got the idea from Diamonds Are Forever). Nothing clears customs faster than a bloated fat hairy corpse wearing a Dr. Who T-shirt with coffee stains stuffed with nose candy.

My cat eats Yamato 1/48 gunstraps and then urps them up on my carpet. She'll also get ahold of any small piece of anything and bat it around until it is taken from her amidst harsh complaint, be it a reactor bomb that has fallen off of a rack (which happens almost daily now) or a tiny piece of something she fished out of the trash can.

Does anyone else think the movie would have been much better if VH had just had a normal rapier and a flintlock pistol? I myself would have been more impressed by crazy fencing and shooting feats rather than the "Batman-esque" reliance on so many tools and special guns. The movie glorified the tools and not so much the man.

I was staying away from this thread but when I got back from an extended lunch today I had a big box waiting for me in my office... it was my Milia 1J. I opened her up, gave her lasers a quick hit of dark grey and placed her next to her husband on my basement entertainment system for a quick snapshot. Here are some of the things I noticed while goofing with her and her hubby (my teachers in school always said "say the nice things first before you rip something a new corn chute"): The GOOD: - They are Max and Milia, nuff said. - The colors are a bit nicer than the 1/60 versions, nicer red and blue hue - The accessories are varied and nice (you get a full loadout of weapons with the fast pack toys) - the white "Seam areas" add more neatness to the toys when in Battroid mode The BAD: - the painted stripes are abysmal, leaky leaky everywhere. Both Max and his wife appear to have been rushed through the paint process. Max's lines are a bit cleaner than Milia's and I mostly attribute that to the way the blue sort of "hides" the overdrool of the white better. Some of the areas on Milia that are solid fields of painted white almost have a milky quality to them rather than a nice smooth finish. - as people have said before the arm FAST pack armor is incapable of retaining the gunpod, but with me it appears to only be an issue in Battroid and Gerwalk. When the two arm halves are pressed together onto the gunpod in fighter mode they seem to hold it well enough for display purposes. My max sat with his attached in super fighter mode for weeks until his wife arrived with no droppage. Time will tell if his wife works out as well. - THE HEAD LASERS ARE BODY COLOR. This irks me to no end. I know it's "canon" and all but it looks like baboon ass so ZAP! Painted! - While people are complaining about loose parts not holding on let me once again voice my hatred of the Yamato 1/48 Reator Bomb twin rack design. Who designed this thing? Dropsy McOoops the stumble clown? I have yet to have a twin rack of Reactor Bombs stay on their rack without the use of glue. Talk all you want about gunpods these darn bombs are an even worse drop issue! Not Really Issues but I'd like to mention: - the now not so new cartoon hands seem to not be fitting as snug as they once did. Both Max and Milia's cartoon hands don't seat well in their peg holes, especially the gunpod grip hand and they seem to back themselves out micrometer by micrometer over time. - Milia is a MAN, man! I did not have any issues with crooked seats or different color plastic. I think, from staring at my Milia's air brake, the claim of different colored plastic comes from the slightly different finish on the air brake piece. It seems to have a more fuzzy look to the plastic rather than a nice smooth look like the chest plastic that surrounds it. In certain light conditions it appears to be a different color but it is actually the specular properties of the rough surface compared to the smooth one next to it that creates that look. I am not a giant Jenius family lover so my purchase of the Max and Milia set is more out of need to complete my Yamato collection rather than love of those two. Much like the Q-Rau these two currently are not in my top 5 favorite Yamato toys list. I think a few people have laid undue hate upon these two toys and some people have looked at them blindly with love... I myself think they are average mass-assembly line toys. Yes they have a few issues but nothing as serious as hips that snap when you remove them from the box. I think the biggest issue at hand for most people is not the quality level of the toy but the price that is being demanded for these two. Both together run you just under $390 for the set at most retailers in the US with shipping. You could almost buy all three current video game consoles for that price. Worth it? Only you can say for sure. Was it worth it to me? Not really. I feel kind of... empty. But hey, I've got a Max and Milia set. Yay!... I think... Edit: add a snapshot of those crazy kids on my old entertainment center downstairs before they head up into the hallowed Ikea shelves of nirvana.

I treated my pet team at work to a movie at lunch today... it was either Van Hellsing or Mean Girls. They picked Van Hellsing. ... I wish they had picked Mean Girls... I will not call this movie crap as I went into it before reading this thread, my only preconcieved notion of the film came from a review I read in the RFT (local independent newspaper) which raked the film over the coals but said "leave your brain at the door and you should like it". Well, I went in expecting nothing more than an empty popcorn summer FX bonanza and that is what I got. The movie was not good or bad to me, just very very "I've seen all this before". Nothing too new, nothing original really. Not worth the 7 bucks. Perhaps a rental would have been better. The best part of the movie: my employees and I riffing on the thing in an empty downtown theater and laughing at ourselves. The dialogue and scenes in this movie are soooooo easy to "MST3K".

No stand or VF-0 for me. Those stands need to be like $15 not $40 to get my attention and it's not that the VF-0 toy is small or plastic it is that I just don't like the designs from Macross Zero. Even if they make a ten foot tall super detail one I most likely won't buy it... the thing is just ugly in my eyes.

The only link there is really: Simunition's Home Page Follow the buttons to the FX page.

The problem is that the unit is for a handgun and they made it bend. If it did not bend and was for a carbine or rifle it would be the Land Warrior (which by all accounts is a much better and more stable system). Watching the screen should not be a problem with your team backing you up outside of a hostile area, say waiting to breach. The baddies should be inside the danger zone and not outside staring at you... if they are you are in deep poo, magic bendie screen or no. This very expensive tool seems to only have one use and if used for that use it would be a nice thing. Actually bending it and unbending it durring a takedown might be too much to ask, they did get a little carried away with the bendie feature in the "commercial". Like I said before I can see a fifth man in an ERT breaching team using it at a window entry or a doorway to scope the room before the team breaches... but ERT teams aleady use angle lookers, spotters and mirrors to do that sort of thing. The commercial is trying to make out the user to be a one man ERT squad what with all his "looking" and such... but if you watch closely you'll notice the rest of his team poking about... chances are if this was a real CA he'd just be spotting and they'd be doing the door dropping and perp stopping. I think the real drawback to this device is that it is not really all that useful in every tactical situation. It looks very expensive and expensive and used almost never are two words a purchasing agent does not want to hear. It is a purpose built toy designed to really only do one thing... an ERT team would use it mostly in training and maybe once in the field. I can name five or six special ERT tools they only use once in a blue moon but when they do use them they are worth their weight in gold... but those special tools don't cost all that much.

The notion behind that little guy is rather straightforward and very practical. It seems that unlike the military Land Warrior system this little bugger is intended for police ERT team use. In an ERT team you have a couple of guys rather than just the one holding the doohickey so the man operating the contraption does not really have to do much but focus on what he is doing, his teammates guard him from reverse angles while he works. The basic thrust of the camera system everyone seems to be using in today's world is to allow the shooter/officer to look around corners or obsticles with his weapon and not expose himself in any substantial way to enemy fire. The Land Warrior mounts the camera on the handguard of a normal M4A1 carbine but this, which seems to be a police varient, needs to use a pistol. Police, even ERT teams, rely the most on their handguns rather than the heavy stuff like SMGs and long rifles mainly due to the killing capacity those bigger weapons have. Remember that the goal of an ERT team is to defuse a hostile situation with no loss of life or with minimal casualties if violence is unavoidable. This little bendie pistol seems to give the ERT operator the advantages of the Land Warrior camera system without the penetrating power of the carbine. Yes it is a bit awkward looking but it has useful merit, and when used with the propper team ERT tactics a device like this could give yet another edge to the officers and take some advantage away from the perps.

Uhhhhhh... okay.... What exactly does this have to do with anything?

Awwww... it's a cute little mini-Land Warrior system! I dub thee: Baby Land Warrior!

Oh trust me I have more issues than National Geographic.

Not liking kids has nothing to do with who you hang out with, I hung out with older people to get away from the kids that I disliked. Why did I hate kids when I was kid? Simple. They made fun of my dad because he was handicapped, they stole things from me, they broke my few toys that I had, they called me names, they blamed me for the things they did wrong and they were generally very mean to me. I hung out with the older kids and teens because I rode home on the school bus with them and they were "on my wave length" and did none of the crap things kids my age were doing. In hindsight I was just either very mature for my age or I was raised propperly and had things like manners and respect that the little brats my age in the neighborhood did not. It was like asking a modern man to play with cavemen. To this day I choose to spend my time with older, more cultured and intelligent people rather than the SUV driving bar hopping social climbers in my age group. I should also mention that I was not really initially "wanted" as a kid. My parents had me only because my grandfather had this outdated notion of the family "needing a boy" to carry on the family name. My father defied my grandfather a lot in his life (like joining the army rather than going off to college like grandpa wanted) so I was sort of his one grace given to my grandfather. My father also needed my help to do a lot of things so from a very young age (what many today might consider too young) I had to do things like mow the lawn, fix things, clean the house and other "mature" chores that aged me mentally faster than kids my age. I had to be the "man of the house" from like age 8. My father gave me all the love he could manage but my grandfather treated me like a stock option, something he could turn into the transplant son he "lost to vietnam". I defied him too by not going into the family business instead to run off to my own terrible adventures and then art college of all things (he was reaaaally happy with that). The man did not speak to me again until he died. So you see, I have sort of been programmed from a young age to be older than I seem and from my life experiences I just hate children. Yes, on some levels I have more emotional baggage over children than anything else in my life. They are one item on a very short list of things that I "put my foot down" on and dislike with no seeming reason. Call it a prejudice if you will, but I only see negatives where others see positives. We all have our personal issues and beliefs on children and they are one of my sore points.

I've been watching the press on this one lately, I kind of want to see it. It looks "interesting", sort of retro meets flash gordon meets Big O meets Captain Midnight. The only other "retro" projects in recent memory that I can think of are the abysmal "Phantom" starring an overly assinine Billy Zane, the "Rocketeer" which has already been covered here, the non-pantone calibrated "Dick Tracy" featuring a lock-jawwed Warren Beaty and an airheaded bimbonic Madonna and the corn-job known as "The Shadow" starring a bloated and wooden Alec Baldwin. All those movies attempted to capture the retro look using different styles, none of which worked all that well. They where all going for the "comic book come to life" look using different strategies... all of which played out very, very stupidly. From the makeup and horrid colors in Dick Tracy to the grungy patina of Rocketqueer to the darkened skewed proportions of The Shadow they all tried to force themselves retro or bring the comics into the real world somehow... I'm avoiding the Phantom because it was just a big pile of suck. This movie at least has the "look" close to "right" in my mind for a retro flash-gordon-meets-captain-midnight kind of send up. And just like those old school black and white B reels I'm expecting terrible acting, horrid plot and science logic that a 5th grader with his Bill Cosby teaches you science! book can dispute. But those old B reels where about the adventure and the crazy action which it looks like this movie may pull off just right. As someone else said, leave your brain in the car when you see it and fill the hole with memories of old black and white B reel movies you watched on channel 8 on sunday mornings like I did and it should be a hoot. Then again I have yet to see something with Angelina Jolie that did not suck a golf ball through a garden hose... now there is something I'd like to see her star in.

I have only collected toys for the last 8 years or so... ... I have always hated children. Even when I was a kid I hated other children. I always hung out with people 4-6 years older than me and I still do. I was a 10 year old hanging out with the teens and I'm a 34 year old hanging out with middle-agers now.

Not Claymores. Direcitonal anti-person mines, they blow out and away from defended areas doing damage to soft targets with small ball berrings. Grisly things. But here is a trick you can do: pop the cover open with your M8 and remove the berring block, then take out the C4 detpack, cut it down to a third or a fourth of it's size and put it back in then return the berring block in place and don't put the cover back on too tight. Then when it is triggered it will go off with much less force and more or less scare everyone out of their minds rather than kill. (no I am not recommending anyone kill children to keep them away from toys, it is far more rewarding to yell at them and watch them cry)

You and me both. Damn lousy kids and their grubby little paws. My way of keeping toys from tiny hands: Claymores. ... no wait... must keep telling self that is illegal...

I buy everything SDF: Macross that comes out. I'm not keen on what I'm seeing with the Zero toys and the other lines but hey, they appear to be what the masses want. Like I said, we shall see what happens when the original show's toys vanish from the shelves. Will everyone be like me and stop buying or will they buy more? Time will tell.

Yikes. I might be stepping on a landmine here but this is my take on the situation: The 1/48's are boss and all but aren't they starting to wear out their welcome in Japan, the market of origin? To me, it would appear that Yamato's move to 1/100 scale and more plastic for the new Macross 0 toys may be their anticipation of the Japanese market. If you think about it, Yamato has released Macross toys at ramping price points and scales. They started small and sort of cheap (as far as Japanese toys go) and have worked their way up to large and, let's face it, borderline crazy expensive. I mean, $180 for just one of the Max/Milia pair? I think Yamato realized they are sizing and scaling themselves out of a greater market share Macross wise and have decided that the future might be small and cheap. Smaller and Cheaper means fans can buy more toys for less money. More toys for less money means they can produce more variations and unique molds without a substantial investment of time and capital. All this to me points to the death of the larger scale toys and the birth of a smaller scale army. Either that or the Macross Zero line is yet again another in Yamato's magical "pick a scale with the dartboard" marketing plan. ... And not to fan flames here but to a degree Ali Sama's logic may be correct. Look what happened with Star Wars. They released all the old school new school toys years before the new movies to build up a nice head of steam on the market. Then when the new movies came out they released the new toys into the grubby hands of the collectors and children alike. After the movie came out and frankly sucked it sank under the media blitz. Yamato can also be accused of the same thing. They struck when the iron was hot with the Macross Plus toys and then the fervor they created started a lust for the "old" toys so they came out with those. It has all sort of been building to this new plateu with the new OVA. If Yamato seriously intended to persue other variations on the Macross license I would think they would have done it sooner rather than later. I would have expected to see the non-VF-1 valks everyone is still clammoring for released before the 1/48s. The 1/48s are basically just a rehash of what has come before, just bigger. No real "line innovation". Yamato seems to be a company that plays it's cards close to it's chest and refuses to take many risks. I don't blame them, Macross is not an insant gold cash cow like Gundam where you can crap in a box, write Premium Grande Mocha Grade on the side and sell a gabillion. The future of Yamato Macross seems to teeter on the current release in some levels, they "test the waters" a lot and then make tracks when their stuff sells. So far it seems the fans have supported every move they have made with nothing really "bombing" or not taking off. The new 1/100 Macross Zero stuff seems to be yet another "test". I bet if it bombs you will see a downturn in macross the likes of which might kill the toy line off from Yamato. But we don't really know for sure until it happens... much like war things happen fast and sometimes without you really knowing what is going on. Yamato has clammed up tight and we get no real info or direction from them anymore... every move they make is like blind chess. We only see the piece when it hits the table whereas before we had a window to their mind and could get feelers for what was happening. I have no doubt that with continued high sales Macross will continue to be released and re-released for a while more but one good freeze to the orange crop could kill the harvest outright. Reading a lot of the recent posts it seems not many people are buying the latest 1/48 offerings as they did the previous ones, insisting instead to wait for "what may come". Sitting on your wallets waiting for some phantom toy may kill the line. All this is just my opinion and not meant to be taken as fact. <- asbestos underwear for the flames.

I'm not sure where you are trying to take your points, MSW. What you keep talking about is human nature and not in any way special to the past, present or future... man or boy alike. Taking one or two hideous examples out of days past in no way makes them "a sign of the times" and taking one or two of histories worst criminal children does not indicate that everyone from that period was like that or that that era did something to create them. If that is your argument applied to modern times then using that logic we can then look at modern incidents were two high school kids shot up Collumbine and killed several people... are they indicative of all modern youth? Are they then technically worse than Billy the Kid? In one day they killed more people and caused more mayhem than in all of William's short life. Remember that drug barron 12 year old that got killed in a drive by back in the early '90s? He was a drug lord at age 12, ruled blocks of inner city streets and made more money than I'll ever see in my lifetime. Then look at the recent incidents of children killing children that everyone forgets so quickly. Gang wars, hazing deaths, school shootings you name it. As for race riots we have those even today, remember the whole Rodney King mess? The random factor of violence is always present in any human being of any age of any time. Due to our nation's exploding population we are all now packed closer together and thus crime and violence will happen more often and with worse results. The point of my argument is that despite having much better education, cushy homes filled with rich luxuries and having almost all of their needs met modern children are still not living up to the achievements of the past generations. Wellfare and poverty are rising fast, debt is out of control, divorce is through the roof and drugs are everywhere (both legal and illegal). To me, that means modern kids are growing up unable to cope with the world and are falling apart in less violent ways. Their lives are washing out and they seem fine with that... or they are in the other camp that demands everything be handed to them on a silver platter because that is the way mommie and daddie raised them. Kids today are more vulgar, more rude, more arrogant and greedier than my generation ever was and from my point of view. The ones with bad parents are mindless consumers, driven by a need to fill their lives with things to replace the love they did not get. TV told them so. Edit: I'm going to back out of this thread because it is no longer about what Agent One wanted it to be about. We are debating semantics of time and era at this point rather than the influence of cartoons on children.

Sorry, I wasn't aware that I was writing a research paper here. Quoting sources on the internet IMHO is not usually needed unless people ask you for your sourses as most everyone does what you did: finds it for themselves. Actually it is funny you bring that up. To take MSW's lead back in the '20s and '30s everyone was packing heat. Why was society so polite and well mannered back then? Because you had no clue who was carrying a weapon and they would shoot you in the face let alone tollerate your assinine shenanigans. Society back then was not the raucus rampage like MSW is making it out, it was actually very orderly and cordial. "Billy the Kid", AKA William Bonnie was a wanted felon, murderer and outlaw. Comparing him to "kids" (12 to 14 year olds) of today's generation is like me comparing men of today to Ghengis Khan, Machine gun Kelly or Jack the Ripper. You have to compare apples to apples. Children and teens of the 1800's were very well mannered, they did their chores, minded their parents and did what society asked of them... mainly because there was not a lot to do other than that. It should also be noted that "kids" back then were not really kids. Children worked jobs back then, some even had families and supported them. The age a person was still considered a "child" then was very very low. Just one look at Civil War rosters and you will see many people we would call "children" today in the army. Even more "children" working in factories and mills. Back then kids did not get the "glowing childhood" they have today, they were born, had a few years to learn something and then were expected to get to work like the rest of us.