jenius

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.

Nice mods to that chunky. I'll have to post some unmodded chunky pics in the coolest poses I could manage when I have a chance.

Protoculture?

While I do enjoy seeing everyone's pics, we currently have a bit of mayhem going on in the managing of them. How many threads do we have? We have the "Display your Collections", "Strike a Pose", "1/60, 1/72, 1/48 Gallery", and then we have other threads for vintage stuff and jokemachines. It is a bit much at times. That's just an observation though, I certainly wouldn't want to discourage anyone. It shall be done! Afraid that even if I wanted to rush I couldn't though Too much work mixed with vacations, friends weddings, and CPA cramming. I appreciate the enthusiasm though! I love the "ugliest" thread.

The vast majority of it is just clips taken straight from the series. To my knowledge it hasn't been subtitled either but the dialogue isn't very important. The whole show consists of Yellow remembering what happened in between glimpses of him performing a show and what Sorji is doing back at home. Then, Yellow goes to meet her at home and the rest of the crew meets him there. IIRC they simply made the entire cast couples now so Jim is dating Mint, Rei is with Houquet, and Stig is with Aisha. It's been a while since I've seen it so I might not be dead on.

While I think Haterist wanted us to avoid consideration of these kinds of issues when making the decision of which toy offered the best rendition of each mode, I totally feel your pain. The legs tend to be a bit loose and the top a bit heavy... eventually the thing tries to do the splits or topples forward or back. With some patience and a surface with some decent grip though you can still pull off some nice poses.

I fully support everyone who is upset about the stand. I think it sucks. Sure, I'm not using my stand at the moment, but I could totally see where that'd be way lame. I also agree, I prefer these to the MPCs. I'll go a step further, when considering price, I think I'm prefering them now to Bandai chunky reissues and Yamato 1/60s also... I'm not sure... it's honestly a tough decision. If the legs and arms were more solidly attached I think the 1/100 would be an easy choice.

I don't get how anyone could like the 1/60 in battloid mode from the chest down. Sure, the head (not 1S), shoulders, and arms are nice... but everything else is lame. No knees, the legs rotate at the calf, the crotch is pointy, and the hip mechanisms are ugly. Look at the gaps and seams on the legs... yuck. To each their own I suppose.

I'm not endorsing this method but, since it'll never get a US release I don't frown upon it too much either. LLA can be found fairly easily for download and I imagine there's lots of freeware out there that'd let you convert it to a DVD. I absolutely suck with computers and I managed to download it.

Danth, I see what you're talking about now and yes, my fighter mode pic for the 1/100 is a bit sloppy. Thanks for the heads-up. When I get the others in I'll be taking more pics so hopefully i'll have better reference pics then. In the meantime, thanks again to the member that pointed out the Banpresto legs and the A stance in GERWALK, I put an example of this in my Banpresto review on my site. I've been so dreading doing the monkey shoots... when I do a shoot I take 40 +/- shots of each toy. Since there are 5 monkeys that's 200 pics I'll be taking. When you throw in the unpacking, transforming, posing, putting back away that's a large investment of time... but it'll be happening soon If I do two a week over the next few weeks it shouldn't be so bad. The whole process really helps me out when it comes to putting my little blurbs about the toys online too.

Sidearms, i'll check mine out momentarily and see if I can't correct that gun droop. In the meantime I finally added a Banpresto review on might site if someone wants to check out this toy's closest competition. Yes, this post is a shameless plug. Sidearms, I just checked, yes, I could have improved the angle of the gun.

Well, here's the thing, I'm sitting here playing with one on my desk and I still can't understand where your problem is with the swing bar. It's locked in place in battloid mode without any bumps or whatever so is the problem for you in one of the other modes? Are you sure you didn't hold a Banpresto? On those I could totally see what you're talking about (I also have one of those on my desk) and yes, in battloid mode the swingarms do slop about on Banprestos.

Wow, you are awesome. "Just 'cause I don't like to nitpick toys doesn't mean I'm not a complete ass." Go you, you really bring a lot to a conversation.