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JB0

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Everything posted by JB0

  1. JB0
    NOT MY PRIME. Seriously, they may be popular, but there's no room on my shelf for ugly robots, unless I REALLY like them. And if I really dislike them, all the cool-looking in the world won't overcome that.
  2. JB0
    I disagree that a sequel should do the opposite of the first movie. If the first movie didn't have something to it, you wouldn't be making a sequel. (I also disagree about how good or bad Pacific Rim was, but that isn't really material to my argument.) If you don't want to make something kind of like the first movie, then why are you doing a sequel at all? Do your own thing, not beholden to any prior expectations. Don't slap the name of something else onto your thing while completely ignoring everything that original thing did. It just makes people mad. It is like making another Fast and the Furious movie, but this time it is about building model cars, or racing boats. Not that I advocate making another F&F movie. The first was an act of cinematic terrorism, and I remain baffled that it did well enough for a second, much less however many there are now. But I'm clearly missing something, since the damn things keep raking in the cash. A common problem with big-budget sequels. The first movie does something interesting, and does really well for it. The sequel gets more corporate attention, and as the higher-ups attempt to polish it to perfect mainstream appeal, they buff out every facet of the original that ever endeared it to anyone. I noticed a very long time ago that Hollywood doesn't actually understand WHY movies are successful, and their attempts to make them better tend to backfire horribly. The two examples that really made me notice it... After The Matrix came out, everything had a "bullet-time" sequence, no matter what was actually going on. Often very awkwardly. Because that was what Hollywood took from The Matrix's success, that slow-mo action shots are a guaranteed get-rich-quick scheme(which I guess they were, if you' happened to be selling cameras...). After Spiderman came out and broke records, alongside a bunch of movies with R ratings that bombed because they were absolute dreck, the suits in charge concluded that people didn't want to see R-rated movies, and they wanted kid-friendly affairs instead. Never mind that Spidey was not kid-friendly. The rule went from "force in some gore and nudity to get an R, no matter what" to "cut stuff out to make sure you don't get an R, no matter what." It never even registered for a moment that quality of a production might matter more than the rating, or what kind of camera shots were involved. And that brings us back to the present. We have Pacific Rim, a movie that did very well in spite of all expectations, so they made a sequel. And the sequel is nothing like the movie whose name it bears, because the original movie doesn't do a whole bunch of things that a successful movie "has" to do. I guarantee that somewhere in a board room, the Pacific Rim 2 conversation started with "What if we made it more like Transformers? A robot movie can't be successful if it isn't full of hyper-caffeinated jumpcuts and a complete lack of momenteum. Also, the cast needs to be teens. No one old enough to drink on our cast!"
  3. JB0
    Who DOESN'T?
  4. JB0
    The hate is coming from people that DIDN'T give it those reviews. The people that liked the movie, and appreciated its unique take on the theme. The people that made it a surprise hit. Faster and shinier is not the same thing as better. In some respects, faster and shinier are antithetical to what Pacific Rim is. We're talking about a movie with a dedication to Ray Harryhausen and Ishiro Honda in the credits, that has "could be implemented as a rubber suit" as a key point in the monster design. It is a love letter to old-school monster movies, in all their melodramatic plodding. This movie is throwing everything we loved away to make it check a bunch of bullet points. It is a slap in the face. I have no interest in seeing something I love being screwed up by people that want it to be something different. They may both be "dumb fun", but this is NOT a sequel to Pacific Rim and it shouldn't be branded as such.
  5. JB0
    I wanted a five-star movie, not a three-star.
  6. JB0
    I blame Tommy Yune.
  7. JB0
    Yeah. The VF-11 was pretty cool, but we only ever saw it in the same three stock animation clips.
  8. JB0
    Wasn't that Children's Palace?
  9. JB0
    I was just being cheeky and dragging it onto a side route. Though I do remember back in the days when they DID redub songs. It usually didn't go well, which strikes me as the main reason that redoing the songs isn't an option these days.
  10. JB0
    I'm going into withdrawal!
  11. JB0
    In fairness, half of that music is Planet Dance. Dub it once, and you're set for twenty or so episodes.
  12. JB0
    Well... nuts. On the other hand, he was told he had two years to live back in the sixties. That was a REALLY LONG two years.
  13. JB0
  14. JB0
    No way to tell. The translation community is capricious at best. The guy who was translating it stopped because he decided he was encouraging piracy and didn't want to be an enabler. Something like that. Honestly, the fact that no one picked it up after he quit is probably a good sign of what will happen with Macross the Second.
  15. JB0
    It was adapted into Tranzor Z for the US. Mazinger Z is somewhat important to anime history, though. It was the first piloted giant robot(following in the massive footsteps of the remote-controlled Tetsujin 28), and its runaway success inspired numerous sequels and copycats, birthing an entire genre of super robot stories virtually overnight. The trappings of the super robot genre would eventually give way to tales with more realistic settings, like Gundam and some show called Muh-cross. So in a sense, we're all here because Go Nagai drew a giant robot.
  16. JB0
    This is so much more hilarious than anything I could've made up.
  17. JB0
    Hey, don't hate. Just because the 99/4a had more bits than your TRaSh-80.
  18. JB0
    Gosh-darn whippersnapper! Get off my e-Lawn! 37 here. You don't KNOW what bad knees are yet, kid.
  19. JB0
    Dino head aside, I find Scoria to look kind of awful. And not just in a "toy supremacy" way. He is mis-shapen and ill-proportioned in dinosaur mode, and the humanoid legs have none of the puffy moon-boot look that Slag should have. He just looks like he has unusually boxy legs. Cesium isn't TECHNICALLY Fanstoys, but everyone knows it really is, so... Cesium is STILL a misshapen lump in dinosaur mode, but robot mode looks fine. Just a bit too "cartoon supremacy" for my tastes, as I'm very biased towards the toys on the dinobots. And it looks like the dino mode's lumpy proportions and awkward legs are to make it more closely match the animation model, so "toon-accurate" is my entire problem with him, I guess. As I said, with the dinobots, I want a new iteration to hew close to the original toy aesthetic.
  20. JB0
    In fairness, I am pretty sure Alpha was based on Robot. Also, we have the entire Titan AE fanbase posting in this thread. I hereby request this thread be renamed "Planet Bob"
  21. JB0
    You forgot "and fiails his arms around wildly while he says it"
  22. JB0
    Having had time to sit on things, and with the novelty of a Slag big enough to judo-flip Unicron having worn off, I think I can offer a real list of things I would change on Grassor. It isn't a long list, honestly. I've ordered it from easiest to hardest changes. 1: Missile launcher holes on the shoulders where they belong instead of dinohip/roboshin. I don't understand why they aren't there already, it is a trivial modification. Only reason I haven't fixed it myself is fear of taking a drill to something this expensive. 2: Make the smoked plastic pieces on the tail permanently affixable instead of just a dino-mode accesory. 3: I'd swap the dino head for the one off Scoria. From pics I've seen, Scoria's dinohead is far closer to the original toy's, with the frill being damn near perfect, and it is the one place I prefer Scoria to Grassor. The frill angle is a significant issue as-is, but with change 4, it isn't. 4: The dinosaur head would be on an extendable neck piece. This would be less toy-accurate, but the added articulation would be worth the deviation, and it'd improve humanoid head and arm posability because you can get the dinohead and frill out of the way more easily. Also makes it more real-triceratops-accurate. 5: Individually-articulated fingers are cool as heck, but these are loose and potentially dangerous to the toy as designed during transformation. The first needs to simply retract into a channel like the original toy(a channel prevents finger snagging), something needs to be done to lock the fingers in place during transformation, or the arm needs to open far enough that the hand can't get stuck inside. Opening the entire forearm seems like the easiest modification, and cosmetically pleasing due to the design, but I may be overlooking some engineering details. 6: Humanoid feet. I'm not sure entirely what to do here(hence why I filed it as the most difficult change), but they are huge even by Slag standards. I've seen a mod to make the dinotail stash inside the feet to reduce the bulk, and it is a trivial engineering change that reduces the boots to G1-Slag proportions. But you lose the ability to hide the dinosaur rear legs in there, and a lot of people like their Slag with the legs hidden(even though it is wrong). This may just be an unavoidable cost of Gigapower offering people the choice of toy-accurate or wrong dino-legs.
  23. JB0
    Surely if there can be only one, it would be Frank Welker playing Jim Cummings playing Poohbear. Except once they let Welker in, suddenly he's the entire cast for some reason.
  24. JB0
    Less SDFM and more SDF1?
  25. JB0
    I am one of like three people on Earth that loved Titan AE, and keep wondering when they're gonna suck it up and do a BluRay release.
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