AcroRay

Nice update! Thanks for sharing your techniques! It also adds a lot of meaning to the kit IMHO to see all the work that went into its development. Bravo!

Gorgeous! A real inspiration, too. (My two little girls have gotten hold of a fragile toy or two, but never any models, thank goodness - I feel for ya!)

Well, as far as 'prefect transformation' kits are concerned, the old-style (Imai, and later Bandai) 1/72 and 1/100 scale kits require parts swapping. I haven't built any of the 1/100 scale kits, but I do believe they - as well as the 1./72 kits, which I have built - require removing the legs & head and replacing the entire cockpit/fuselage area with a shorter, closed-canopy version that has pegs for the legs to mount to i n Battroid mode. (That way fighter mode and Battroid mode are as close as possible to the anime-magic of their line art.) The 1/72's hands retract into the forearms, but if you have any of the non-fist option hands on it you'll have to take the hand off. I would suggest that with picking up the variable 1/72 scale VF-1S and using its white body parts and Skull Squadron insignia and buying a 1/72 VF-1A for the head you should be able to just do a little bit of painting to make a Max special - TV or Movie versions. There's little basic difference in the designs between TV and Movie except some additional attention to mechanical details and textures in the movie versions, and the movie Valkyries' unique "Square Hands" (replacing the TV versions' more traditional super robot styled "Round Hands"), which you should be able to create well enough with a little carving and panel-line painting from the kits' fists. (And if you buy more than one kit, you'll have ample material to experiment with.) I don't believe any conventional mass-market company has produced any Macross TV or Movie variable Valkyrie kits. Also, I don't believe I've seen any original resin kits of them as well.

I'd add that eBay seems to be a good source for various editions of all of those at decent prices - especially the 1/72 variable kits, so you should have ample potential materials to work with. In many cases the variable kits are simple listed by scale, with no notation of their transformable feature. The 1/72 variable kit heads are interchangeable and secured with a post/poly-cap combination. If you're looking to build a variable Max 1A using as little painting as possible (making it more toy-like and easier to build), you could combine the 1S kit - which is molded almost completely in while, with the head from the 1A and have a whole other Valk's worth of parts to experiment with, resell or trade off to make up the difference. I don't have one of the recent re-issues of the 1/72 variable, but the 80s ones did feature metal landing gear with rubber tires, some metal parts in the shoulder transformation elements, lots of poly caps for secure joints & accessories, and detailed cockpits with pilots. So the kits are really very nice and extremely well engineered even by toyday's standard.

VERY nice. The aztec patterning is really excellent!

Probably intern or 'volunteer'.... Thanks for the great pics!

There's a Roadbuster in an dual-language box on eBay right now that has the silver & red foil "AP" licensing decal on the box (to the right of the character's name). Now that Ginrai mentions it, I do also recall seeing the Tatsunoko seahorse seal on the box of the Jetfire I had back in high school, and thinking to myself bitterly "Why do we always get recolored & repackaged versions of Japanese toys all the time? Why can't they just leave them as-is and sell them without always having to screw around with them...?"

They're so CUTE, and very toy-like! I love it! So many replicas, models, DX stuff. Sometimes its nice to just have a "toy" of something... you know? They'll look so nice with my 1/100 Macross kits, Toynami Valks and my 1/100 Imai factory (whenever I get around to restoring it...)

Just one for me! Can't wait!

Wow, that's really unusual. Is Macross a cash cow for anyone other than Bandai and Harmony Gold?

That's rather odd, I think, because Toynami has released a fair number of genuine Macross-branded products. And they had to get HG's permission to do so. So both companies had finally relented to the source segment of the property - owning it rather than burying it. Sohn's goal had always been to release real Macross items.

Not splitting hairs at all. The finer details are always important! But yeah, that's what I was trying to get across. Hasbro and Matsushiro were were the players at the time. It was a unique situation that I don't expect anyone will be interested in trying to re-create today. Tatsunoko & the other Japanese stakeholders will make their money from Bandai's overall sales (of which Toynami's will be a part) of the products they manufacture. That probably works better for them in the long run, rather than working the round-way trying to get money from Harmony Gold? I wonder how much of this is small-potatoes, paving the way for a bigger payoff for everyone later with Macross Frontier licensing and products? [Common, Josh! Where's the dirt? I've been refreshing all day!]

Most probably not ever. The only reason Hasbro/Takara are re-releasing the Diaclone-based G1 Transformer toys is because they still have tooling on-hand & in-house to manufacture them. I'd venture to say they'd never go to a third party - Bandai, TomyTakara's single major competitor at that - and license a product from them to simply redeco into their own. Hasbro had acquired a license for the Takatoku Super VF-1S design from Matsushiro (as well as 2 similarly scaled Dorvack toys) - the design firm that developed the toy for Takatoku and held the patent on the design - in the lull between Takatoku's and Bandai's use of it. That was an unusual situation that gave birth to the Jetfire toy. However, if the Super 1S becomes more readily available in North America via Toynami I wonder if we'll find Transformers fans repainting them into custom reproduction Jetfires, rather than the reverse by Macross fans as had been the case for so many years.

Japanese companies typically won't deal with a foreign company unless that company has a well-proven track record and a history with related products. Toynami has gotten to the point where Bandai will finally deal with them. I'm happy to see it!

He'd have to figure out exactly what's inside the canopy first, though. I'm cool with the solid canopy, myself.

F*ck yeah, man! Gonna be a good year, and next year, too... Even if they don't do Elint, VT or GBPS, I'm still a happy man!

Count me in. I'll be saving my pennies! What's the scale & approximate size of this kit, BTW?

Thanks! Yeah, I just love the nostalgia of these. I'm a sentimental guy! (Or maybe just mental...) The dirt cheap price helps, too. I've got a build-up of the original 80s VF-1S from this kit, and the seams actually aren't bad at all. This thing is far worse. Maybe the old editions had some bad de-mold QC. Anyway, I did just snap it together. But as they always say, the best way to build a snap kit is to cut off all the pegs and glue it together.

Built another one of those knockoff 1/170 "Super Space-Time Models" this weekend - the Battroid VF-1S: There's no Jolly Roger on him because there wasn't one included in the stickers. I decided to just leave it as-is, since this is supposed to be part of my Valkyrie knockoff collection anyway. They're so cheap, molded in their base color, and have paper decals, that they make for a couple of hours of guiltless old-school 1980s Macross model building fun! No puttying, sanding or primer-coating - nope. A couple of colors of paint (mostly water-washup types), followed by a quick touch up with grey & black Gundam panel line markers, and a sharp X-acto knife to cut out genuine sticky paper decals - and this is the result! Seriously, since they're the size of a gaming miniature and because they look positively prehistoric compared to modern stuff, there's really only so much you have to do to make them look as nice as they're going to get! I remember trying to build these little b4st4rds "back in the day", and trying to get a decent coat of white over that weird greenish white plastic Arii always cast them in. I even have my old factory module to put them in! Here in vintage 1/170 Armored Factory: VF-1A knockoff kit in the same Factory: A couple of fun hours reliving my childhood with these guys. I've got a fighter & a GERWALK on the way.

I built the VF-1S Battroid kit from the set this past weekend: Note that there's no Jolly Roger on the canopy armor. There wasn't one included with the kit's decals. I considered digging out an old decal from my files, but I thought I'd instead just leave it as is, since the point was to have it as an example of a knockoff rather than to 'upgrade' its authenticity. The kit is exactly the same tooling as the VF-1A seen earlier in the thread. In fact, each kit has both heads. They're just cast in different plastic colors - tan for the 1A, gray for the 1S - and have different decal sets and instructions. Here it is in a vintage 1/170 Armored Factory kit:

That's really nice. The color combo gives it much more 'presence' and brings out a lot more of its geometry. Nice work, man. Excellent markings! (Gotta get me one of those someday...)

I do hope its owner sees fit to share it at one of the Macrossworld Rapidshare accounts....

Ooh, there's my old Storm Attacker hanken cel. Gawd, I miss that thing! Its nice to see it with some of its mates, though. Someone reprint those as posters already, dammit!

Ooh -Wicked! Steam-punk Grandizer! Nice work, Captain!

Probably a great deal had evaporated. I'm assuming the City was pretty deep to have gone unnoticed until that point, and didn't raise itself. That level of evaporation probably isn't scientifically accurate, but more for dramatic effect - especially so, perhaps, for an audience in an 'island nation' like Japan. [Recall the film "Japan Sinks"]