ewilen

I agree--in spite of whatever criticisms I might have for this particular mecha, there's a lot of great stuff on that web site.

About stats...aerospaceweb gives the F-4 a slightly higher service ceiling (58,750 vs. 56,000 ft.) and range (1720 nm vs. 1600). Of course, there are many F-4 variants and configurations (edit: and the web site could be just plain wrong). But I have no doubt that the F-14 is a better plane than the F-4 in virtually any dimension that matters. What I meant to convey was simply that from a sentimental perspective, the black bunny F-4 is the winner in many people's hearts. (There's even a group out there who are trying to restore it. Link 1 Link 2). I'll leave it up to the viewer which Vandy-1 they prefer: http://www.airliners.net/open.file/449147/M/ http://www.studenten.net/customasp/axl/pic...e=7&pte_id=2071 Added: I think they both look great, but I think the F-4 just looks "right" being "naughty" in a swinging 60's kind of way.

I dig the part about the color scheme, but mind you, a lot of people were equally if not more pissed when the black bunny F-4 was retired.

Expanding the term otaku slightly. No real argument, but I'd point out that "fictional worlds" have been a staple of fantasy and science fiction going back at least to Burroughs (Pellucidar, John Carter) and Howard (Conan), while Tolkien turned it into a sort of explicit theory with his concept of "sub-creation"--all before roleplaying games and (mostly before) SF anime. Since the 60's, though, with RPGs, Trekkies, and Star Wars, yes, I think that "subcreation" and otakudom have merged. It occurs to me that the phenomenon has older parallels--Cervantes parodied it, for example, in Don Quixote. It's interesting to think that the portrayal of the audience in M+ might refer to otakus, especially in light of some of the things Kawamori says in the Alles interview about the simulation of reality and experience. Anti-militarism--correct, I'm not saying that Macross expresses hate or distaste for the military. Rather, a common theme or approach in Macross (and some other anime) is the refusal to show violence as the ultimate solution to the conflict, and the refusal to portray an antagonist who is thorougly demonized. That's why I wouldn't put Nadia, Laputa, or Castle of Cagliostro in the same category as Macross. They all have villains who remain stock villains throughout the story; they have to be dealt with by "beating" them. Sorry, I don't fully understand. Translated literally, I assume this would be "Lt. Commander Char" ("Capitano di Corvetta", or "Maggiore" if you go by non-Naval ranks). Are you saying that "Shosa" was chosen essentially as a random officer rank in the original, but in the Italian version his rank is different simply because it sounds better that way in Italian? You wrote, "The key elements of Macross are three, and I think you know them." You may have meant to type "there" instead of "three"; as written, the sentence sounds like you're posing a riddle. Good points about how the love triangles are varied across series, but I disagree about mecha vs. mecha being a plot point. I suppose it can be, but in anime I would basically say it's part of the setting. It's generally established early in the story--either taken as a given, or explained in the first episode or so. Sometimes there's a good rationale (SDF Macross); in others it's somewhat contrived (SDC Southern Cross). Either way, they usually get it over with quickly and then move on to the real story. If anything I'd say that superhero movies suffer a greater problem, since they tend to dwell on hero and villain origins, which are nearly all essentially the same.

The LANTIRN/Nite Hawk issue is just a case of leapfrogging electronics, not airframe superiority. As the Super Hornets get ATFLIR, the advantage will likely swing the other way. And as usual, the range issue is a tradeoff with maintainability, not to mention stealth. All three would be factors in determining the pace of bombing operations. In a sustained bombing campaign, I'd give the advantage to the Super Hornet.

Minor quibble: the Nousjadeul-Ger isn't a variant of the Q-Rau as such--it's a completely different mecha. But both are forms of powered armor, with the Q-Rau only used by females and the N-Ger by males. Max is the exception to the rule. The reason he gets to pilot a Q-Rau is that, in the movie version of the original Macross story, he's a human who boards a ship crewed by female giants, teams up with them, and gets "macronized". Official info on the two mecha in question (mahq.net is good in my opinion, but contains some errors): http://macross.anime.net/mecha/zentradi/ae..._ger/index.html http://macross.anime.net/mecha/zentradi/ae...eadluunRau.html Also, not to muddy the waters, but while the Q-Rau is explicitly described as a "female division" suit, the other Zentradi (giant) mecha aren't explicitly described as male-only. While the movie version shows the male and female giants as having completely different equipment, in the TV version of Macross, male and female Zentradi are on the same side and have the same types of star ships. But we never see a male Zentradi pilot a Q-Rau, nor do we ever see a female Zentradi pilot a Nousjadeul-Ger. We do see a female pilot a Glaug at one point, although that may have been a special circumstance.

I think reverse-joint knees could be nice, but they'd need to be flexed more and the feet need to be bigger. Also, where does the pilot go?

About the key aspects of Macross... http://www.macrossworld.com/macross/transl...cedvalkyrie.htm Which basically confirms that SK sees things pretty much the way some of us do.

I think the point is that with some airplanes, you can hit your head on the canopy if you eject under the wrong conditions, but with the F-14 (I assume all production models) you can't, because of how the seats are designed. I remember playing the old mid-80's Spectrum Holobyte Falcon game (on a Mac Plus!), and in that one if you ejected without enough airspeed, you'd die. The canopy had to be pulled off quickly by the wind in order for you to be ejected safely. Nowadays, many/most fighters have zero/zero ejection systems, meaning you can eject safely even at zero speed/zero altitude. (Zero altitude would otherwise be a problem because you need some altitude for your parachute to deploy.) Of course, if you eject while your head is pointed down, you could still be in trouble.

Here's a bit of trivia: The Tomcat is the last of the Grumman "cats", Navy fighters with feline names: F4F Wildcat F6F Hellcat F7F Tigercat F8F Bearcat F9F(1-5) Panther F-9F(6- Cougar F10F Jaguar (prototype only; never went into production) F11F/F-11 Tiger F-14 Tomcat Here's a picture of several of them in flight together: http://www.visi.com/~jweeks/aircraft/cats.html

Google search turns up a site that must have just gone off the net and was (apparently) selling the VCDs. Here's the google cache: http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:X54fS...&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 And since it's going to expire eventually, here's the text: Based on the Taiwanese connection, I'm suspicious that it may be a bootleg. But you should also look at this Usenet post: http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&...om.sg&frame=off The poster is the person behind the now defunct orby.virtualave site and may have additional insights. It looks like he was selling a lot of stuff at that site, much of it "licensed" and subtitled by Dong Seng, though other items seem to have been licensed/distributed by other legitimate companies. Edit: I don't know if this helps, but the lower left logo on the front of the disk (sort of a diamond or parallelogram) is probably the Shogakukan logo.

I'm wondering--is there any video of a bat turn available either on the net or on VHS or DVD? Are there any drawings or mockups that show what this would have looked like? Hm....okay, found a couple at M.A.T.S. E.g. http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-history-f14a-303b.htm and more generally http://www.anft.net/f-14/f14-history-f14a.htm

Yup, I was a doubter. Looking at this picture, though, I think it was designed/drawn by Kawamori. The shape of the nose cone looks like an early version of his later Valks.

Cylons are at least as bad. Terrible shots...probably because their eyes are always bouncing back and forth.

Not Elaine, Erica Durance. Looks...hard to say. As for Lana (not necessarily Kristin Kreuk), I'd think after a while Clark might get tired of hearing about her dead parents and her identity crises.

FV, as usual, you've posted a thought-provoking article, if a bit hard to understand. BTW, the the Alles interview can still be found at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ex.../kawamori1.html even though the original URL no longer works. I'm handicapped by having only seen the first 12 or so episodes of M7; there's also the question (again) of "similar how?" Setting, storyline, theme, treatment...? I'm guessing all of the above. I.e., Setting: Interstellar War; city inside a huge space ship Storyline: Music proves key to resolving alien/human conflict (?); love triangle Theme: Culture, Destructiveness of War (?) Treatment: TV series, Mikimoto designs, juvenile appeal Now, the other part...I think you're saying that Kawamori's ideas and artistic fingerprint are more important than the "Macross universe". Kawamori certainly may feel this way--I seem to recall reading that he didn't originally intend to set M+ in the Macross universe; he only did so because it made it easier to get backing for the project. I get a general impression that Kawamori is less interested in creating a continuous epic, or even exploring/expanding his "world", than in using it as a convenient backdrop for certain stories he happens to feel like telling. That's fine, but if that's really what's going on, then in a sense there's no such thing as "Macross"--it's just Kawamori. There's nothing to argue one way or another about how the Macross universe could or should be developed. This isn't to say that Kawamori is dispensable, any more than you could have Middle Earth without Tolkien. (Substitute Dune/Herbert, etc. Although Leiber allowed other writers to use his Lankhmar, with good results and no doubts about "canonicity".) What I'm saying is that unless Kawamori creates stories that connect meaningfully to his world, he's using "Macross" as little more than a pen name. I'll take your word for it. I see a particular kind of antimilitarism portrayed via stick-in-the-mud characters like the UN Spacy leaders, Bodolza, the relief fleet in Mospeada, and the supreme commander in Southern Cross--people who believe that "the only language the enemy understands" (or "the only solution") is force. There's also a good bit of it in Nausicaa. It's not unique to Macross. But I don't recall seeing it in, say, Nadia. There are plenty of anime where the bad guys really are bad guys, and the solution is violence. So if antimilitarism isn't an identifying characteristic of Macross, I still think it's a category that Macross falls into as distinct from other anime. Are you being mysterious or is that a typo What are the three key elements? Love triangles, songs, and transforming airplanes? That's what we see in all the promotional art, isn't it? But are they indispensable? Maybe it's a cultural thing--that is, maybe the sameness of the Gundam stories (or all the Super Sentai shows) is more acceptable in Japan. Or rather, maybe the Japanese are more tuned to the differences that non-Japanese viewers don't pick up on. Perhaps the Japanese would consider a lot of American/Western forms of popular entertainment repetitive. But speaking as non-Japanese me, I regard the love triangle as a plot point, not as a theme. It doesn't become more meaningful through repetition, and its reappearance again and again seems forced. Perhaps the formula is so ingrained in Japanese culture (is it?) that it's no more obtrusive than boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl. But to me, after a point, it just feels recycled. Music is problematic in that it's hard to create new stories with music-as-the-key-to-everything, since it should rapidly dawn on the characters that music is indeed the key to everything; therefore, the fact that music is the key to everything should not be a surprise midway through the story. I'm guessing M7 gets away with it by expanding the nature and mechanism of how music works; M+ comes up with a completely novel complication involving music. I think M0 actually decentralizes music slightly by showing it more as an expression of Mayan spirituality than as a thing in itself. A wise move, in my opinion. Ah, thanks. I haven't read the stories and lost interest partway through the first movie, so I only caughts bits after that while my wife was watching Sorcer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets.

I don't think the information exists. Based on the pics, though, it doesn't look like the hand armaments draw power from the N-ger suit. VF's probably have smaller hands, but not much smaller. Look at this: http://www.sonic.net/~ewilen/Macross/scale..._mechascale.gif So I'll bet a VF could use the N-Ger's hand guns.

It's exactly like trying to match parts from a 1/3 scale model and a 1/4 scale model. The 1/3 (1/3000) is 1.33 times the size of the 1/4 (1/4000). Or viewed the other way, the 1/4 is 75% the size of the 1/3. (mslz22 made a slight rounding error.) I think you'd be better off scratchbuilding a pair of ARMDs using lineart and/or models as reference, the way that kishimoto does.

..... err.... They are Zjentohlauedy issue weapons. Apparently, not standard. I believe since it was a boarding party-they were given a heavier armament. The standard specifications for the Nousjadeul-Ger do specifically list a beam assault gun as a hand-mounted weapon. http://www.anime.net/macross/mecha/zentrad...nousjadeul_ger/ I.e., "short-range electron beam gun"? Related question: what is the standard color of the Nousjadeul-Ger in the TV series? I coulda sworn it was green (same as the standard TV Q-Rau), but that illustration is purple, and now I'm wondering if I may have seen some purple ones in the TV series.

Maybe on your DVD player/TV. On mine--neither of which I would call "top of the line", but reasonably good quality consumer grade--the glitch isn't that visible. Also, some DVD players have different settings for their video quality which may affect the visibility of the glitch. This may be why some people reported the glitch and some didn't, even though all indications are that the discs were identical.

I'm pretty sure I've read that HG has never rereleased Robotech: The Movie. This page has some info on it and suggests that it was released on video around the time of the original release (references to a PAL video); it also has a tantalizing tidbit about TP thinking about releasing DYRL in the US back then. The following url also says that the movie was only released in limited numbers of videos, in Europe (thus the PAL reference above, I guess): http://www.masterforce.org/macross/robotech.html More info. Cyc has a few comments over at RT.com. And this DVD set has some "rare animatics" from the movie. Whatever "animatics" are.

The jitter may be more noticeable to some people (and/or on some players) than others. Over at animeondvd, some people said it drove them crazy. I might not even have noticed it if I wasn't looking for it and if I didn't have the corrected version to compare. What I see is sort of a "flutter". I think of "jitter" as a picture that bounces up and down. What I remember seeing is more like each frame containing a superimposed "ghost" of the preceding/succeeding frame.

Okay, correction to the above. The "aged Bilbo" is not from RotK--it's from The Hobbit. You can tell, first of all, by the © date; secondly, I found this page, which shows that it was included in the package from the Hobbit soundtrack.

Bakshi directed a Lord of the Rings movie, but it only covered part of the original trilogy. I've always assumed the Return of the King cartoon probably picks up where that left off. The picture that Kingnor's friend sent looks like an aged version of the Bilbo from the Hobbit cartoon (which I hated), so it would make sense that it comes from the RotK cartoon. Here is more info on the RB RotK: http://pw1.netcom.com/~zmoq/pages/ROTK_RB.htm Looks like I was somewhat mistaken about the degree to which the Bakshi and RB cartoons dovetail. From other pages (searched Google on Rankin Bass and on Rankin Bass Hobbit) it's clear those are the only Tolkien stores that RB did.

I'm simply stating that unless a series under goes some drastic change, no matter what it's only a matter of time before it reaches some point where people will start complaining that something has already been done before. Am I wrong? We have the Gundam example here, The Simpson's is also a good example, so are the countless sitcoms out there. If Macross were to follow the same formula that SDF and Macross 7 follow, with an arrogent Earth government, and some alien race suseptible to culture shock, for the next few sequels. It won't be long before people complain about repetetiveness. He's saying that if you take out the distinctive Macross elements (whatever they may be--idol singers save the world, love triangles, antimilitarism) in an effort to avoid being stale, you're just going to turn Macross into a run-of-the-mill show. I can't say I agree with either of you. As I wrote earlier in the thread, I think it's possible to retain key themes and background elements without recycling plot elements. Also, unlike a traditional sitcom, if you wish you can allow the background to develop and change even though you keep each story more-or-less self-contained. Examples: Harry Potter (I think--haven't been exposed to enough to be able to tell for sure); many superhero movies; some other book series such as "The Black Stallion" and "The Black Tiger" (O'Connor).