RavenHawk

Don't mock! I actually like the Michael Bradley songs better.

All true. Of course, if we want to make this conversation REALLY entertaining, we can start bringing in some Graham Hancock (Fingerprints of the Gods) theories...

Yes, but all of the world's flood stories seem interrelated, with Gilgamesh appearing to be the oldest, thus may be the closest to an "original" story that we know of.

Well, except for Gilgamesh... maybe...

Very true. I just feel it is more direct here as we are talking about a manga about the Vietname War ripping off a graphic novel/comic book about World War II. Edit: To be fair, "Apocalypse Meow" may be a truly excellent manga. I don't know. I haven't read it. Just saying that the idea there isn't all that original.

Not a stroke of genius. A rip off of MAUS, which used mice for the Jews and cats for the Nazis during WWII.

Never seen this before. Does it kind of transform between a cycle mode and the wolf? Just been googling images, but all I can find are ones of this toy, which looks like at most the wheels tilt back a bit.

I had read the first volume of the RideBack manga, so expected good things of the anime, but wow, it's been completely blowing away my expectations. I love it, and look forward to each new episode. Viper's Creed, on the other hand, which I also enjoy and has been getting better, has come nowhere near my expectations.

Also better than Tom Cruise...

Plus there's a scale problem. Exoskeletons like ants and many other insects have work more and more poorly as scale increases, making giant bugs like in old scifi, horror, and Paul Verhoeven movies unlikely if not impossible.

So, is there some sort of summer to fair when we can ope to see the Yellow/Lancer prototype? Man, I'm so impatient...

While I do think animal mecha are pretty silly (except for dogs, of course, which are automatically awesome), tails in nature serve the purpose of balance and stabilization on quadrupeds during running. Presumably, it would be something similar in a mech.

I think that's the difference between designing a vehicle and then figuring out how to make it into a robot, and designing the robot first, then trying to figure out how to make it look like a vehicle.

Stealth was not that bad. Yes, cheesy, cliche, all of that. On the other hand, it's just a fun, entertaining, you get what you pay for kind of pure entertainment flick. My son and I watch it like once a year, and it always entertains, and that's all we look for from it. As for the mecha you just showed, how can you complain about that dog Gundam thing? I've never seen it before, and I'm not a Gundam fan, but come on, it's a big robot dog! Not liking that is like not thinking K-9 on Doctor Who was awesome when you were a kid! I think that all robot dogs are excused from the ugliest mecha comparison.

That's the same price, isn't it? The Beagles were $250, the Toynami versions of the Beagles were $200.

From the cutaways just above them, it does look like they flip around.

I said it before, but I love the color they picked for this one. MUCH better than the cartoony red of the CMs! And the headlights actually LOOK LIKE HEADLIGHTS! Nice.

Those all look to me like they were entries in some "design your own Gundam" contest for kids 4-12 or so, not something actually coming out of a professional studio.

I know I saw one somewhere on here in someone's pics of their toy collection, but can't find it now.

Haven't watched it in a while, but the pirates are a separate factor. The pirates unintentionally provide an opportunity for the Neosapiens to face less resistance, but also provide a reason for that one human force to be off planet when the Neosapien takeover occurs. The pirates, as much as I thought they were a cheesy idea at first, actually play a big part later on.

There's one kit where if you buy all the separate Appleseed characers, you get pieces to assemble a landmate.

Sorry, hope my comment didn't come across harshly.

All of those different time period ones were terrible story-wise, in my opinion (Hearts of Steel, Transformers/GI Joe during WWII) but all had (again, my opinion) gorgeous character designs.

I'd recommend keep watching. A few episodes into it they really start building on the resistance on Earth, and small groups of freedom fighters. This then becomes a parallel storyline to what goes on in space, with additional troops getting dropped from orbit (very Starship Troopers-esque, but in a good way). This freedom fighters part of the series, plus occassional supply drops from space, is what really appealed to me about this, much the same way MOSPEADA appeals to me.

That was actually the only Southern Cross design I liked. Sure, it's not great, but way better than anything else in Souther Cross, in my opinion.