jenius

That looks like a way early prototype.. it's even missing a fin. I'm surprised they put it out there already. The big downside right now that I can see is that it doesn't have an integrated heatshield but if it's a 1/100 I hope they give us the ability to swap.

Impressive collection. I used to have so many more Toynami products but I think I'm down to one of each now... I had to sell the duplicates to make mone so I could afford all the CMs stuff.

This is the same back and forth we see with the 1/100 valks. "OMG, they don't look as good as 1/60 toys. OMG, they're not built as good as 1/60 toys." Yeah... the people who PLAY with these smaller scale toys and pay a tiny fraction of the price know that. They enjoy the fun factor and relief of knowing it's essentially a disposable toy and breaking it wouldn't be the end of the world. If you're cool dropping lots more money on bigger toys and you don't mind the durability issues of those bigger toys then pass on these.

No, demand is FINITE, not inFINITE. Think about water, you need it to live but you don't spend your entire day drinking it. As with every commodity there comes a point where it over-saturates and people don't want it any more. Even hot women... what's the joke? "For every hot woman out there there's one guy who is sick of f**king her." None of this really has anything to do with Robotech production though. So, now onto the more relevant stuff. Sentinels got slammed by the value of the Yen shooting up dramatically. Would it have mattered if demand was through the roof? Not so much. Unfortunately, Matchbox had the rights to Robotech merchandise and they weren't exactly experts in the field. Since Matchbox was footing the bill it was up to them to produce a product that would stoke demand but they failed to do this. Imagine if the toys for Transformers were just as bad as Matchbox's non-transforming VF-1S toy. So, Matchbox made crappy toys, they sold poorly (which doesn't tell you much about the demand for GOOD toys), and then Robotech was no longer a hot enough property for them to stick through funding the next season. That's not really HG's fault, all indications were that Robotech was intensely popular for a short while.

Wow... this thread got all sorts of crazy. I don't understand where the racism and Stonehenge talks came in. It doesn't work because Stonehenge isn't as overtly spectacular as the pyramids so it's much easier to dismiss as the work of some really determined early men. Not only is Stonehenge itself no where near as impressive as the pyramids but it also isn't surrounded by similar seemingly miraculous feats. That's why people don't rush to the "aliens did it" conclusion, not because people believe early Englanders were more industrious. Want more proof? Look at crop circles. Those happened over really large areas with frequency in England and Europe and people thought they were alien events and didn't chalk it up to "those industrious white folks." There is evidence of massive ramps in Egypt related to pyramid construction. There are plenty of unanswered questions but as was pointed out earlier, there's more than enough evidence to rule out aliens... sorry. PS - I have two conspiracy theories I like. 1) The Sphinx was possibly constructed by a civilization prior to the Egyptian civilization its largely credited to (and probably a civilization that birthed those later Egyptians). 2) Under the Sphinx is a room of some sort.

The cases don't appear to have any repeats in them so the chance of you getting one you want, if you bought a full case, is 12 in 17 (although, if the one you want is not the chase the odds are closer to 12 in 16).

I find that highly unlikely since the movie version was just released. If fixes were coming you'd probably see some tweaks there.

Agreed, Razor (I watched the extended version) is VERY good.

The Plan sucked balls. I finally finished BSG and watched The Plan so I figure it's safe to go to this thread. The Plan could have been really good, instead it's a lame clip show for the most part. To make things worse... at the end you can still ask yourself "Wait, so what exactly was The Plan?" Cylons apparently don't come up with very good plans.

The 1/48 line is dead. Yamato just offers exclusives for it to the diehards that still love it. It's like Microsoft still servicing the XP crowd even as they roll out 7. You can think of it as a question of demand but really it was by Yamato's design. They released a new product, they wanted people to buy the new product, they pimped the new product as hard as possible and shut down the old product. Companies do it every day.

I can't click on your links because I'm at work but I suspect that both of the toys you are looking for info on are at www.anymoon.com. There are categories for Alpha/Legioss and Cyclone/Ride Armor so I'd start there.

Uh no... that's not what he said at all. He said the 1/48s (TV Max and TV Hayao) were made to order so it's doubtful they would appear on HLJ. Money does funny things though so if Yamato sees there's money to be made by giving some extra stock to HLJ than it might still happen.

I believe this is a response to my questions and I believe you misread them. I asked if they were a similar size to the 1/100s and requested a picture of it with something we'd be familiar with so we can see how it scales to that item. I was not asking what fixed scale this line was in. Yes, your measurement is helpful, as is ff95gj's newest pic.

I need something for scale... they look tiny. Are they 1/100 size?

I personally like my fighter mode only stuff in gashapon so I think what Bandai did with their 1/250 stuff was great. In the VF100 line I would have liked it to be less anime perfect but be a toy that could be disassembled and reassembled into different modes (but no completely new parts or very very few). The real reason for this is the thought of having transformable versions of all those obscure valks like the VF-4 and VF-2SS. In the end it seems none of us got what we were hoping for.

Note to self: Say more sexist things on this forum... the bar isn't set nearly high enough.

[ref]What's a Nubian?[/ref]

If the VF100 line is dead I don't really know if it could be pinned entirely on bad marketing. The product didn't seem like it knew what it was trying to be so I don't know if Bandai knew how to sell it. It was far too much a kit for a toy and far too pricey of a toy to be a kit. They either needed to knock the price way down and let it be sort of a prepainted snap together model with parts for every mode (like it was but even less assembled) or it needed to have far fewer parts and be more of a toy. If this were truly a toy they should have made it imperfect transformation in the sense that it had to be pulled apart and put back together again... not entirely new parts for different modes (the price could have been kept the same but obviously the toy wouldn't look as nice). As it is I think it really only appeals to a very narrow spectrum of the population... and I think those people it does appeal to wouldn't have minded having it be more like a model at more of a model's cost.

Since the 1/48 VF-1J Hikaru is a relatively new weathering release hopefully this means that in the future we'll know about HLJ being an alternative to the Yamato webshop exclusive in time to purchase through them. If they put the GBP with launching effect up I might have to make a preorder...

I love my two weathered destroids and it sucks to see I could have got them for a lot less if I was patient... but that's the case with 95% of Macross toys.

Man... I feel like i jinxed you... The replacement parts were NOT improved. Wait until the new Roy 1S is released later this year and then order your replacement parts and hope for the best.

This board is not owned by Yamato. Yamato bought ad space on the board and hooks Graham up with the inside scoop but there's a big difference there.

C'mon, it's "Unacceptable"? I think you meant just "disappointing"

I don't think it was a case of "couldn't make this happen" but, being an accountant, probably more likely a case where the accountants won. I imagine they did up their prototype, it was super awesome, and some of the cooler heads thought "A lot of people want SDF-1 toys and this is going to be too big and too expensive for them." So, the cooler heads probably started designing a smaller scale SDF-1 toy that would be more in line of the cost of Yamato's ordinary releases ($100-$200). The camp working on the super scale super expensive toy seem to have then run into problems where they over-designed the toy and would need to be made with more but smaller pieces and the expense kept escalating. In the meantime, the camp working on the smaller scale toy probably made great progress and started showing a really promising toy that would work for a ton of people. Suddenly the huge SDF-1 didn't seem at all worth the additional cost and the accountants said "profit margin x units sold = yay". Rather than scrap the 1/2000 they said "Hey, for our folks who worked on it and those few who it did appeal to, we'll make some available rather than leaving it as a one-off display piece for our corporate headquarters."

The shoulders on the Roy VF-1S toy were VERY fragile (the original release with strike parts). Both my shoulders broke and even the replacement shoulders I was sent were broken before I could put them on the toy. There was a thread on MW dedicated to just how bad the initial shoulders were on these toys. The problem seems to have been solved around the release of Hikaru's VF-1J.