jenius

Is 'yamaturd' a new term for Yamato fans? I'm not sure I like it. Anyway, take a look at Yamato's GNU pics. Those things are painted and posed but we keep hearing they're roughs that don't accurately reflect the final product. I think we all need to take a breath when it comes to condemning this Bandai effort.

Lancer's Blowsuperior (mark my words, one day someone will correct this and label it a Brosuperior on their packaging!) doesn't have arm mounted weapons per se' so they compensated by giving him chest missiles. As you can imagine, the arm "swords" aren't really effective for most combat situations... just sneaking up and stabbing people. Without those missiles every time Lancer was in a bike fight he would have had no weapon to return fire with.

So the original concept must have almost nothing in common with the end product except the armor huh? It's amazing how much these ideas get tweaked on their way to actually being animated. It's like every guy who gets to approve funding also gets to put his own twist on the show without anyone being able to veto it. "I like it, but take it out of Japan and put it in Space!" "I like it, but make it so the bad guys are actually just trying to get home!" "I like it, but we've never seen helicopters or tanks in space, try that!" "I like it, but horses on a space colony don't make sense, give 'em hover cycles!"

those pictures aren't new I'm afraid... I couldn't tell you how old they are, but I know I've seen them before.

Really, I don't think this toy is all that hideous. Looking at the battroid, the chest looks a little chunky, the pelvis looks mistransformed (it needs to be angled), it needs to have the head lasers shrunk a tad and flared out, but otherwise I'd say it looks pretty solid. It's light years ahead of anything Bandai ever accomplished before (for Macross) and this is from a sagging resin prototype. I suspect many people who hate it at this point will have it grow on them if just some slight imperfections in sculpt are its worst problems.

I will second your "oh so very 80s" line... but I always hated the notion of robot horses. Everyone knows the motorcycle is the modern day horse!

Aw c'mon, that steals the fun of it. Logistically that raises an interesting question... how would you get horses to some outpost planet (and in some feasible manner)? Were they indigenous horse-like creatures? If they were real horses with armor then I imagine they'd wear armor similar to their rider's. Ooh, did the marine ride a seahorse??

I might have to buy one of these while I'm in Japan... That'd be sweet. I'll still have to have it shipped home though since the box is undoubtedly a bit unwieldly for carry-on.

Stig Bernard will DOMINATE Ken.

How much did the one you're talking about end up going for? I thought it was $200-$275 for a minty Matchbox SDF-1 and $500ish for a minty Takatoku were about the going rates. I've sold a couple mint SDF-1s for less than $300, I know that.

Oh wow, the fact is your opinion? What happened to this thread? Let's talk about Macross F and not Japanese culture or whether or not a valk has afterburners (although I was with it at first when it pertained to subtitles).

A robot horse? Did the robot horses transform? Do we have prototype drawings of robot horses? Were there different types of robot horses to go with different types of robot armors? What did the bad guys have to attack these samurai on their robot horses?

They opted with a mass release of the red one after originally thought was that it would be a TRU exclusive. So the red shouldn't be any harder to get at the moment than the blue but in the long run I'd guess they made fewer reds than blues so it may turn out to be more collectible.

I think that gives us a pretty clear pic as to why Toynami is having such a hard time with the cockpit. The drawing shows the cockpit just folds downward... but that's pretty much impossible if you want it to look good in soldier mode.

Wow... that kinda sucks (unless you like both variants equally). Did they just not slap the sticker on the box or something?

MOSPEADA MOSPEADA MOSPEADA!

Seconded on both counts (although I think MW is pretty good considering some other forums I view).

My legioss/tread family portrait:

Inflammatory aspects aside, I think there's an interesting question there to ask. I know the creators of Mospeada occasionally sound a bit tepid about the series and seem to express some disatisfaction with the sponsor involvement. I wonder if the Southern Cross creators also feel like they had put something decent together only to have the sponsors mold it into a failure.

Yeah, Brera is definitely not friendly. He intently watches as he expects Alto to die. Then when Alto manages to get away and try to help Luca he definitely plays with the two by shooting the gun out of Luca's VF-25's hands. He's not dag-nasty evil yet though, he really has several opportunities to kill Alto and Luca but chooses instead to play with them. Whatever his vehicle is, the VF-27 or whatever, it looks like it's fully capable of folding without a foldildo which seems pretty impressive. It also looks like the long expected "embryonic sack that cancels G-forces" maybe employed here also although I guess this is all better discussed in the "technology thread." What I'm really curious about is why would the Varja capture someone? It seems the idea is there's a greater intelligence controlling them, a brain bug if you will, but would it really need to research humans and their mecha at this point (it did, after all, decimate a run of the humans 20 years ago). Since Brera blasts his way into their ship it seems he has nothing to do with those controlling them so yeah, I'd say we've set the table for a three-way battle. I'm excited. My criticism of this episode: they laid the ranka/sheryl oddness (protrusion, glowing light, Sorji/Aisha moment) on a little too thick for my liking. I was left scratching my head a bit during the mecha porn. At least this isn't like MacZero where it will end on that strange note, I look forward to having what's going on there revealed.

Thanks everyone. If I find a cache of weathered VF-1s toys I'll buy 'em all and offer them up here... not really expecting that to happen but still -

Complete and utter BS should score way worse than that!

Hey everyone, I'll be in Japan from June 15th-29th. Not a long stay to see a whole country to be sure. My girlfriend has no idea I run a website for Robotech toys, in fact, she invited me to Japan because her little brother is there doing a semester abroad. Her only clue that I even know of anime is the fact I sat her down to watch Do You Remember Love? once telling her it was "an awesome import movie from the 80s." We fly into Osaka (the 16th) for two nights, visit Miyajima for one night, Koyasan for one night, then go back to Osaka for one night, Kyoto for 2 or 3 nights, and move onto Tokyo until we leave on the 29th. Anyway, if there are any members in Japan during these dates I think it'd be fun to make the girlfriend aware of my anime-craze by introducing her to people there and taking her Macross shopping in between all our shrine visiting. Since we're spending most our time in Tokyo that'd be best. Of course, any advice on visiting Japan is welcome! If this is too self-gratifying I will totally understand if the thread gets locked down.

Alright, it's not fair for me just to blame Toynami without illustrating a scenario for how Toynami can claim it's not their fault and still be completely to blame... so let me elaborate on what I think really happened: 1) Aoshima agrees to release the MPC to the Japanese with some changes. Aoshima asks to have all production molds by 4/30 so they can release the toys four months later. 2) On 5/31 Aoshima politely requests Toynami get them everything they need to make the toys because the molds are one month late... no word back from Toynami. 3) On 6/30 Aoshima calls George Sohn who says he thought they had the molds on 4/30 and he'll look into it. 4) On 7/31 Toynami calls Aoshima to say they screwed up and shipped the molds to Macau instead of somewhere else and they'll correct this. 5) Aoshima sticks to their proposed release date and has everyone and their mother make toys for 31 days straight so they can release the toys on 8/31. 6) The toys are complete crap. Aoshima calls and tells Toynami as much and Toynami says "Wow, why'd you try to sell them so soon?" Now this is COMPLETE and UTTER BS fiction I'm making up but something I wouldn't be at ALL surprised is close to the truth. Aoshima made a best faith effort to do what they said they would only to be completely screwed by Toynami in such a way where Toynami could completely blame Aoshima.... in a way that actually works since Aoshima should have just delayed their product four months instead of letting unproven factories slap everything together.

Why would a company with an otherwise solid reputation make absolute crap toys when they paired with Toynami? I don't care what George Sohn or his goonies tell Roger... I suspect Toynami deserves a bit of culpability here.