jenius

Yes, only Yamato is allowed in the Macross Toys section... everything else isn't Macross, it's "other." At least the mods are pretty blatant about it. Personally, I don't care, the search feature works the same either way.

What kind of contact do you have? If you have a buddy at either company who is in the accounting department that ought to settle this outright. Typically though, in private companies, the only people who know who is investing where are upper management and the accountant's responsible for those transactions. Also, in the typical private company scenario, nobody is free to discuss such investments so all we can do is look at the big picture and guess at it. We can convolute things further by having a parent company or subsidiary invest in one or the other, especially if you're trying to achieve better tax leverage, but that's for a discussion on a much less exciting board.. Really though, it's all a moot point, the fact that HG gave Toynami an exclusive license means HG has a vested interest in Toynami's success if not on the same level as also owning a percentage of Toynami. Why go with *exclusive* licensing at all though if there isn't some money changing hands on the back end?

It's the best I could do with the chunkies...

Unfortunately, both companies are private, so I should rephrase it from "my understanding" to "I was told" which certainly means the information may be incorrect. However, given their quick pairing and the quick growth of Toynami it seems to be a plausible, if not likely, scenario.

Izzy, the 1/55 goes in the "classics" thread. This thread was started as an homage to Yamato. No harm of course, nice pic

Every pic I've ever posted has been taken at night. It's all about having the proper lighting and something that can act as a tripod (I don't own a tripod but a box on the desk will usually suffice). I'm in the same boat, currently working lik 14 hour days so if I wanna take pics it's late. Anyway, my lighting needs improvement but even with the crappy lighting you can get things to turn out pretty nice with an adjustable digital camera (I'm using a Canon A620, like $200). Here's a sample (also note, I don't own and have never used any photo editing software).

This reminds me of a point from the show, weren't they all supposed to repopulate third Earth and didn't it seem like Cheetara was the only female capable of reproduction (I never understood wiley cat and wiley kitten... who logically must be much older even though they appear young). I seriously hope thundercats produced large litters but either way it seemed like Cheetara was going to be spending a lot of time keeping her ankles elevated. You're right, I was forgetting the ghost guy. It does seem like they just completely merged him with Snarf though... no, i couldn't guess why.

You know Carl, I don't know why you didn't just ask LordKungFu about this, I hear he has 100 of these in a warehouse in a super secret Southern California location next to his imported Italian marble. Just joshin' of course. It's too bad there aren't "rare collectible groupies" 'cause man, you'd be swimmin' in it. That's my way of expressing jealousy. Congratulations, any plans for what will become your next holy grail?

I wasn't a HUGE Thundercats fan but I enjoyed it if nothing else was on. It sounds to me like they've tried to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles it up a bit. Snarf is going to be Splinter and Mumra will be Shredder. The rock band angle is new... but the turtles always had the intense desire to be out in public and it sounds like they're just going to let the Thundercats live out that desire.

If my understanding is correct, HG gave Toynami the license and is a significant investor in Toynami. It's impossible to tell how the two companies are structured since they're both private. Indeed, HG may own such a stake in Toynami that they really could be the culprit for not simply telling Toynami that they HAVE to make the Beta. If HG doesn't own that much of a stake though then they're in a better boat than the rest of us but still not a good one. They definitely would want to recoup their investment in Toynami though so that would prohibit them yanking the license (and I'm sure there's legal reasons for that also). There are infiniti other investment/ownership possibilities... that's why for simplicity's sake, I say just blame Toynami (on this particular subject). Truth is though, Toynami has probably done a good amount of market research, come up with some decent figures based on the sales of the first two MPCs, and has calculated what it would take to make a Beta profitable. They have probably showed that to all major investors and all major investors have agreed that the original proposal for the Beta is not a prudent action. So, maybe the people we should hate are the Gamestops and other vendors that won't be carrying MPCs anymore... but they'd blame the lack of demand... so maybe we should hate the people who don't buy Toynami products... but Toynami products didn't sell well because they weren't that good, so, in the end, we should hate Toynami.

While the "Screw HG" sentiment is perfectly acceptable your blame would more aptly be put on Toynami.

I swear if we look back on like page three I said "Why doesn't Yamato just used a collapsible landing gear to get rid of that gut?" and the average response was like "No, that's dumb, I'd rather have a big gull gut on this thing because I don't think Yamato can sensibly engineer a collapsing landing gear that would work." (yes, I'm paraphrasing and using hyperbole to make my argument sound better:)) It's funny to see the idea pop back up again but good to see it's drawing the same reaction. Personally, I think the idea that Yamato couldn't make a collapsing landing gear that'd work to be pretty... um, strange.

Man... the list of things to look forward to when I get this thing seem truly daunting.

Sure you could! You'd just have to use strings "Look, none of the parts are ever completely removed... they're always attached to each other." Remember Gakken's small ride armor effort? They're pretty hilarious. In an effort to achieve "perfect transformation" they incorporated a giant black hook to the rider that can swing around to keep it attached to the bike at all times. Edit - Silverdragon's email just goes to show us, you can never tell if something is dead at Toynami or if that's just their normal rate of producing a new toy. Only time will tell.

LOL, Toynami fanboys? Who would that be? The way I see it there are two types of people with Toynami right now, those who haven't completely written them off, and those who have. For those of you in the super premium toys only category, your writing them off is pretty sensible. As a GCM fan, I can't ever write Toynami off (at least until the GCM license goes elsewhere) so I'll always be willing to give their stuff a shot. I also love varied scale displays so that only makes sense. Really though, speculating over the Ride Armor toys at this point seems about as premature as planning for a newborn's retirement. If one ever does get made, and by some miracle it truly kicks butt, I'm sure all you "no Toynami ever again" people will change your tune. Chances are though it'll never come out, or if it does it'll suck, and you guys will be happy with your "I told you so"s. Ideally Toynami will grow, become much much better, and compete with Yamato. Then we'll be able to have two companies surprising us with great toys and potentially having much more reasonable prices. In the meantime, they have a crappy track record but Voltron shows there's a potential for improvement. PS - Toynami has let everyone down exactly TWICE. Let's not blow things out of proportion and act like they've released ten toys and all have sucked (obviously I'm not counting color variations... and if you feel burned because you didn't like the toy and bought every volume I would suggest you should think long and hard about whose fault that was).

If someone is reissuing the old kits then there's a good bet that Toynami did not purchase the ride armor model molds. They did go that route with the Legioss but maybe they learned their lesson and realised 1) anything made in the 80s can probably be improved upon by starting from scratch with modern technology, and 2) models do not make good toys. EDIT - you know what would be exciting? If we got news that they purchased the old Gakken molds for the large ride armor.

$12.95 for all three?? $12.95 for one would be pretty outrageous. There's not a whole lot to them, doesn't look like they have removeable panels or anything.

I love the YF-19 and I'll be buying at least one but I must say that battloid mode looks very anorexic. It has this giant cod piece and then scrawny legs and chest. It still looks fantastic but it doesn't look quite as rough as the vehicle we saw in the anime. I think having the flat shoulders makes the "more refined, less rough" look even more prominent. GERWALK on the YF-19 has always been horrible for every toy rendition, I'll definitely hold off judgement until I have one in my hands. I think previous incarnations were best summed up with "Ooh look, big floppy mess between modes." It's not really the toy manufacturers faults entirely, I think the mode is a total afterthought in the design also.

Well Effect, I think you just summed up nicely exactly what I was trying to imply with the "but I guess that was to be expected line." Then again, if we're going to put any trust in any of the reviews we've seen from any site they should all be tempered accordingly. It'd also be amazing to see how true your words would ring of a new Macross project on this site. We're all guilty of our occasional moments of fanboyism... especially if we're hanging out on forum boards. The fun thing so far about RT.com reviews is how contradictory they are. Example: "Story was so-so but the animation rocked!" "Animation rocked but the story was so-so." The only thing everyone is unanimous on is the soundtrack.

I would love to help but I think I need you to post some pics so I can get a better feel for what might be in an off position. It sounds like your problem is more likely in the chest intakes than in the nose of the craft. There's not a lot to the nose but if the connectors on the intakes aren't in exactly in the right spot it throws the whole front end off. Then again, I did say that the vast majority of people who have problems with fighter mode just have something out of place... that still leaves a significant minority that just have Alphas that all the love and gentle adjusting in the world won't ever look right.

The people at RT.com that have seen it seem to like it... but I guess that was to expected.

Ask and you shall receive! Please note in the first pic the two tabs that stick down next to the VTOL vent (aka the crotch): So the trick is to keep the feet open a little bit and just don't worry about them and pinch the legs as collapsed as humanly possible and butting up on those tabs as high as they can ride. Once you get them there adjust the feet but watch out because the tolerances in the leg are so tight that by adjusting the feet you may enact a process that pulls the leg off that crotch tab or lower down it.

Does anyone else think Toynami kind of got it wrong when it came to the three packs? I agree with the first set of three, it lets the selling power of Roy's VF-1S also move some slower product (Hikaru's VF-1A and Max's VF-1A). Now that's not to say Max & Hik's valks are stinkers but they're certainly not as popular as Roy's VF-1S so people see the Roy, they think "Wow, I gotta have that one" and then they opt to buy the other two because they get them at such a discount. Then we have the Hikaru, Max, Milia VF-1J three pack. Now this one I seriously think was done poorly. First, I think the Max & Milia VF-1Js are strong enough to support a third, weaker selling performer. Second, I think the Hikaru VF-1J is also a very strong seller and could support less popular valks. Here's what I think should have happened: Set 2 Vermillion Squad: Hikaru VF-1J Hayao TV VF-1A Max TV VF-1A Set 3 Reconstruction Squad: Max VF-1J Milia VF-1J Cannon Fodder I'm not sure how the rest would be grouped but there's lots of good potential (VF-1D, VT-1, VE-1, VF-1S Max, VF-1A Hayao DYRL, Angelbirds, Alaska Base, etc.)

Please see the first two pages, I changed the pics up a bit and included the chunkies in the comparison this time around. I'm not really happy about how my chunky pics came out, but I'll have much more chunky goodness in the future. Edit - I continue to apologize to Banpresto fans, I know my pics don't do them justice.

Aww but they suck! Drifand's pics though, definitely do not suck, those are sweet. Posing 1/60s actually is a lot of fun, even with as much as I don't like the 1/60s as toys, I've always had fun doing photo shoots for them... especially if you're not using glass or a slippery surface to stand them on.