Ginrai

I'm pretty sure it's only the Macross II RPG from Palladium that says those are rail guns and the original Japanese source disagrees.

Could always call it Megaroad...

It is also quite similar to his work in the crazier battles in the original Mobile Suit Gundam he worked on, never mind that he is specifically credited with action choreography in anime like, oh, Macross Plus. Itano was the animation director on DYRL, and the key animator on the opening for the original SDF Macross as well as mecha animation director for many episodes of the original SDF Macross. The Itano circus is not just missiles, it's all the robots flying around insane as well. He even has people and gunshots flying around all crazy in other shows, like Angel Cop, with its super detailed flying exploding body parts. That is Itano's trademark, NOT Kawamori's.

Basara doesn't develop as a character because he's not the protagonist, Mylene is, and she develops a lot.

If anyone gets the Military Garland and doesn't care about the Yui figures, I'm totally interested in buying them.

Thank you for your feedback. I don't want to get into a big debate about 2001, but it is a very slow movie with very little emotional impact. It is kind of the opposite of humanistic. While it has amazing visuals and was hugely influential in sci-fi, it is a flawed movie. Tartovsky's Solaris is kind of a rebuttal to 2001 and is in some ways a similar movie, but is intensely emotional and humanistic and in my mind, the superior film. We're not going to stop swearing. Sorry. I guess one option left would be to get paypal and just hook it up to your bank account and then buy it off ebay? Or try to get someone else who does have a card to buy it for you and just pay them cash, you know, if you are really interested in seeing SC. The problem with Dai Apolon is that despite the weird ass football veneer, it's a very generic 70's super robot show. It's not bad enough to be unintentionally funny, and not over the top enough to be entertaining on those merits (like Mazinger Z vs. Devilman was), and it's not great, either, so it's just kinda there. It was stupid and funny in places, but not stupid enough, so it was kind of like, "Wow, this is... sorta weird..." Probably the best podcasts are when we really hate something or really love something, but I am just as interested in getting obscure things recognition as I am about promoting things I love dearly or exposing overrated crap for what it truly is.

Nope. The red and blue one from Part 2 is the GR-XX Proto-Garland, the red and white one in part 1 is just the regular Garland (uh... GR-01 I think?) It's slightly different, mostly in that the Proto-Garland is more detailed and has funny wires hanging out everywhere.

We did a new podcast. It is about a football robot. Also we react to feedback from you guys. THE END. www.destroyallpodcastsdx.com

The artist who draws the robot that the toy designer builds as a toy are not necessarily the same thing, but at the very least Aramaki DEFINITELY designed Car Robots. "Aramaki: I was working on "Micro Change" which became "Transformers" later on. I was also working on "Diacron" and making all sorts of real looking transformers like car-robots." Source: Genesis Climber MOSPEADA Staff Interview 8, From Genesis Climber Mospeada Staff Interviews/Staff Articles

Spoilers: I hated this movie. www.destroyallpodcastsdx.com Again, feedback is lovely.

I started using a higher bitrate lately because there was this weird tinny echo thing in earlier podcasts with a lower bitrate that was driving me nuts. I'm not really an mp3 compression guru, do you have any suggestions? Maybe 128k can be made to work without sounding all tinny? Glad you liked the Galactica podcast! Can you tell me which parts specifically you thought were funny? It's always helpful to hear what worked and what didn't.

What do you mean by the sidetrack? Well, yeah, I'm not sure why people defend Mospeada so sincerely. It's OKAY. I LIKE it. But it's not the greatest ever, and it's not that original.

For the record most of the Car Robot designs were by Shinji Aramaki, but the Battle Convoy was Kawamori.

Mostly I picked Tommy Yune's brain about Megazone because I am obsessed with it. Almost all of the background material for both Southern Cross and Mospeada came from the booktlets that came with the DVD set and staff interviews. However, I did confirm some Tatsunoko staff members and such with Tommy Yune. Thanks for the feedback! Some podcasts can get reallllly long, just not ours. I listened to an episode of Anime World Order that was three hours long! I would really like to do Go Lion (possibly Dairugger XV), but I only have about three Go Lion episodes and they are all straight Japanese. I know Media Blasters is planning on releasing a Go Lion boxset with English subs sometime in the future, and I will probably pick that up when it comes out, but I'm not going to do it based on three grainy episodes totally in Japanese. So be patient, but thanks!

Which is exactly what I said. It is a pale Macross imitation because it tries to have Macross' love triangle and fails miserably at it. --space war - and? so now macross and mospeada are a rip-off of star wars? Don't be pedantic. Non-sequitor. --aliens that wind up being basically human - uhm, I missed the part in SDFM where the zentradi were larval stages of a giant energy based life form Like I said, Kakinuma and Aramaki had good intentions, but Tatsunoko perverted it so we were right back to Macross. --idol singers that win over the aliens - minmei = shock and awe psychological weapon. Yellow falls in love with a particular slug and reasons with the refles to leave earth. Yellow is also soldier, minmei is annoying teenage girl who whines a lot. There is a lot more going on than just shock and awe with Minmay. Miria's behavior is an excellent example of how the aliens were won over by Minmay and human culture in general. That is not the same thing as being astonished long enough for a pilot to shoot you with a missile. Humanity survived because of mass defections in the Zentradi fleet, not because of "shock". Now in Mospeada they again do it on a much smaller, weaker scale. Aisha and Sorji both "defect". Her daughters being won over is what convinces the Refless to leave (by Yellow and Stick), not just Yellow arguing with her. --You really might as well say that macross is a rip-off of star wars if you're going to say that merely having similar themes is enought to constitute a rip-off. hi-karu/luke, young naive pilots who are suddenly thrust into a much larger world and war, become pivotal pilots. Both suffer great tragedies that force them away from what they know. Roy/Ben - older and wiser gurus who have looked after the protagonist, who teach them the skills necessary to survive, both die tragically. zentradi/empire - huge space empire bent on domination, large capital ships capable of destroying worlds. This is also a non-sequitor. Star Wars is NOT a love triangle, it is not about transforming three mode jets, it is not about aliens initially monstrous in aspect that become humans by the end. Young naive hero thing is a standard heroic story trope, not something that comes from Star Wars, and space wars with giant alien fleets and captial ships go back a lot further than Star Wars. Obviously there is Star Trek, but also Forbidden Planet and a host of other movies that came before that, not to mention Buck Rogers and everything. Mospeada is not a ripoff because it is also about robots in space, it is a ripoff because it contains most of Macross' central themes and visuals, whereas Macross only shares a couple of themes and visuals with Gundam, just as Gundam only shares a couple of themes and visuals with Yamato and so on. Furthermore, Star Wars cribs liberally from Yamato, Lensman, Dune, The Hidden Fortress, and The Dambusters. But once again, I think Star Wars is a non-sequitor, because clearly Macross owes much more to Gundam and Yamato than it does to Star Wars. --Story similarities: Hikaru/luke get captured and escape from zentradi/empire and learn vaulable military secrets along the way. Oh please. The hero getting captured is another standard heroic story trope that occurs in almost all stories of that style. Placing the hero or his loved ones in peril is the stuff of action/adventure drama. --Hikaru/Luke place faith in an intangible force to secure victory against impossible odds - hikaru- love / luke - the force. You are really stretching here. He does not put his faith in an intangible force, he puts his faith in massive enemy defections and the technology of the reaction missile and barrior overload. --Mecha/machine similarities: x-wing / valkyries: out numbered but technologically superior to their counterparts, and have multiple modes/ configurations. Man, this Star Wars thing is getting ridiculous. Again the hero being outnumbered is a standard heroic story trope and multiple modes? Please. The X Wing has wings like a Tomcat, two positions, up and down. The Valkyrie TRANSFORMS INTO A HUMANOID ROBOT. That is not remotely analgous. --pods/tie fighter: cheap war machine with limited abilities but mass produced, primarily fight by overwhelming the enemy with numbers. Once again, villains out numbering the heroes is a standard story trope. --millenium falcon/ SDF Macross: main ship of series, plagued by technical issues, constantly on the run from pursuing forces. Pilots/bridge crew use ingenious and counter intuitive plans to survive. Oh come on. The SDF is a gigantic fortress with an incredibly power cannon capable of destroying enemy ships outright, the centerpiece of the human fleet, and salvaged from alien technology. The Millennium Falcon is an obsolete, stumpy little five person smugger's ship plauged by technical issues. The Macross is not plagued by technical issues, it is plauged by humans who don't know how to use it properly. This is not analgous either. --so did macross rip-off star wars? no more than lucas ripped off kurosawa's seven samurai. The various ingredients are similar but the end product is sufficiently unique and worthy of existing in it's own right. Lucas ripped off The Hidden Fortress, not Seven Samurai. Get it right. P.S. Mospeada has seven main characters like Seven Samurai. This was done on purpose, as per the same interview booklet.

That's not what I said at all. I said there WERE original ideas, but they are mostly impossible to see because the elements stolen from Macross are front and center. The make a much bigger deal out of the Legioss and Tread than they do of the Mospeada, despite the name of the show. The REASON Macross is not a Gundam ripoff is because the mecha is vastly different, the character focus is entirely different, and it is primarily a love story. The war is the background in Macross, where in Gundam the war is the foreground. Macross is about how love conquers all, and Gundam is about how war screws everyone and love is not enough, so just try not to die. In the case of Mospeada, the reason it fails in my eyes is that it has too much Macross crap to be an original show about robo-motorcycles and space crabs and not enough Macross to be a good Macross style space romance. As we brought up in the podcast, the characters are all pretty shallow and the there is zero development in the love triangle, and they abandon it almost immediately. It is a pale imitation of Macross in that regard. I like the mecha designs, but again, we all agree that the Legioss is a pale imitation of a Valkyrie. Primary elements of Macross: Love triangle in THE FUTURE, space war, transforming three mode fighter jet, aliens that wind being basically human (they start out giants, end up our size and sexually compatible), idol singers that win over the aliens. Primary elements of Mospeada: Half-assed love triangle IN THE FUTURE, space war, transforming three mode fighter jet, aliens that wind up being basically human (they start out as slugs, end up as humans, again sexually compatible), idol singers that win over the aliens. The big differences are the addition of the motorcycles and that the idol singer is a crossdresser. What do YOU guys think is so different and original about Mospeada?

What they wanted it to be was a hardcore serious war motorcycle/power armor version of the Normandy invasion in World War II. What we got was Macross with a kind of Mad Max world... which is sort of what happened in the last few episodes of Macross anyway. Their story was submerged in a bunch of unwanted Macross elements because the Tatsunoko people were from a different generation and wanted a piece of Macross' pie. I maintain that Kakinuma and Aramaki's original story was pretty original, but what we actually got in Mospeada thanks to Tatsunoko was a Macross ripoff with a few elements from K & A's original idea floating around. They even managed to turn Mospeada's radically inhuman slugs in space crab armor into human beings by the end of the show. This is probably why Artmic and a K & A started working with companies besides Tatsunoko that wouldn't poo all over their ideas, and provide a better animation studio than damn AnimeFriend.

Read closer: Kakinuma: The finished film had totally different backgrounds from what we were thinking of while we were making the mecha. We had a generation gap. Mecha designers who were on the sponsor side selling the hardware were early 20's and the staff who were making the film were late 30's. We were divided in two generations and two standpoints. It was a tremendous gap. But I don't think it would be successful to broadcast a brutal war story during that time of the day. Aramaki: Something unlucky was that the staff of the older generation had experience with "Macross." "Macross" was based on hard mecha, but the striking points were beautiful girls and idols. So they thought if we pointed up these areas, people would have liked it. Which means they decided to make it more like Macross instead of the hard war story Aramaki and Kakinuma were going for.

Roy Focker explains that giant aliens are invading, that their robots can turn into jets, and other important background information Hikaru did not have. In a plot sense, Focker serves the exact same role as Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mentor figure that gets the important exposition out of the way. Roy didn't explain about spiritia, but Obi-Wan didn't explain about midichlorians.

Here are quotes from Mospeada's creators Shinji Aramaki and Hideki Kakinuma complaining about Mospeada ripping off Macross. -Is that the way the fighter jet robot was made? Aramaki: But I wish we made only the motorbike. At the beginning, we thought we could do it with only the bike. The producer wanted an "attractive plan" rather than the sponsor's order to push it commercially. At that time, it was our first program and I thought, "That's the way it is," and followed his idea. Kakinuma: "An airplane is not enough. Let's put a booster. Let's make the booster transform..." Like that, we had no idea what we were doing. -Did each of you have your own role in the mecha design? Aramaki: I did the bike as I had started. [sic] But I drew Legioss and Mr. Kakinuma traced it. We had give and take. It was quite vague. Mr. Kakinuma made most of the enemy mecha, but both of us drew the set-up of each episode together. If I left my rough drawings, Mr. Kakinuma traced them, something like that. -The panning [sic] was based on the model development. Kakinuma: The finished film had totally different backgrounds from what we were thinking of while we were making the mecha. We had a generation gap. Mecha designers who were on the sponsor side selling the hardware were early 20's and the staff who were making the film were late 30's. We were divided in two generations and two standpoints. It was a tremendous gap. But I don't think it would be successful to broadcast a brutal war story during that time of the day. Aramaki: Something unlucky was that the staff of the older generation had experience with "Macross." "Macross" was based on hard mecha, but the striking points were beautiful girls and idols. So they thought if we pointed up these areas, people would have liked it. Kakinuma: It was too much. -I saw a title "Mechanical Animation Supervisor" in the Opening Credits. Kakinuma: Mr. Kubota who had been working with me at Baku, was doing the actual negotiation with the sponsor as a hobby toy producer. He didn't draw pictures, but he was doing things like what scale and how many kinds of the merchandise to make. Also, what kind of gimmick to attach and checking the wooden models. He did all sorts of details like these. -Legioss is smaller in scale compared to the Valkyrie from "Macross". Did you distinguish it on purpose? Aramaki: Legioss is shorter than 10 meters. The only thing I did deliberately was distinguishing it from the Valkyrie when it became a robot as merchandise. For the gimmick on the toy I wanted to open the canopy of the Legioss because the Valkyrie's canopy couldn't be opened. But I was told it was impossible to divide the parts. We ended up making the whole thing open. Kakinuma: Back then, we drew the wooden models and the drawings for the toys and plastic model kits. Aramaki: They asked me to make a parts drawing. I guess they misunderstood and thought that I was someone who could make blueprints because I knew about the design. So, I had a tough time convincing them that I couldn't do that. And when we were making "Mospeada" toys, the person who made the test products didn't understand the transforming bike. He was making wooden models but he interpreted them the way he wanted and made them with different structures. Then they said, "It doesn't transform well." And they asked me for advice so I went to see it. It was a totally different thing. In the end, the person from Matsushiro who made the Valkyrie, made it and brought it to completion. [Ginrai's note: Matsushiro is apparently the company that did the actual molding and manufacturing for the Valkyries, and after Takatoku's collapse, sold Valkyries in Europe without the Macross license or name attached, and later with Hasbro sold the Super Valkyrie as Jetfire, before they were asborbed by or began cooperating with Bandai. Most of Takatoku's staff that worked on the Valkyrie ended up working for Bandai anyway.] Kakinuma: It was an extremely subtle era. Back then, most of our work which was credited as mechanical design were making drawings in different scales from the models of a few tens of toys and parts' drawings, decal design. These things took so many months... Aramaki: This popped parts attaches in this dent, something like that over and over (laugh). The color of decal should be something like this, this word should be spelled in this font. Also rough sketches for the picture of the packages. Kakinuma: There was a huge amount of work, which was nothing to do with anime films. From the time we started drawing on paper two-dimensionally to the time of the completion of the mockup for the while lineup of merchandise. Aramaki: In reverse, these things were most of our work. These were nothing to do with the film, but we thought we were at the base of the work in our standpoint. "Macross" was our example. Thanks to these frontiers of model development like "Gundam" and "Macross," it's very sure that we could develop the same way like them and it was that kind of time. Source: Genesis Climber Mospeada Staff Interview 8 From Genesis Climber Mospeada Staff Interviews/Staff Articles, available in English in the booklet that comes with the Genesis Climber Mospeada ADV DVD set.

Ray = Hikaru, not Stick.

What are you talking about? Roy Focker clearly explains the rules of the game to Hikaru in the second episode. It's the exact same scenario.

This movie totally sucked. I am stunned at how bad this was. I did not believe anyone. I thought they were just being whiney fanboys. This movie is terrible and it's not because of how it did or did not follow previous Transformers products. It is terrible because it is two hours of indicipherable CG blobs flying at my face while the camera shakes like a meth addict with Lou Gerhig's disease. I feel like the flipper on a pinball machine. It gave me a splitting headache.

I don't feel like arguing with you. Maybe I will reply at a later date on the podcast.

Maybe because Southern Cross is THE SUPER DIMENSION Cavalry Southern Cross and we are talking about THE SUPER DIMENSION Fortress Macross. But beyond that, we did say that the Logan was an ugly, crappy Valkyrie ripoff, but the Spartas and Auroran are pretty different from the Valkyries, and Musicia hardly counts as an idol singer, and Southern Cross is about a spunky blonde bimbo tank driver who disobeys orders all the time, and Macross is about an emo jet pilot dude who gets shot down all the time? Mospeada is much more similar to Macross than Southern Cross is.