Tochiro

Well Renato, the reason you dont enjoy movies much is because you just dont like fun - comeon we all know that! :-p I've seen Japanese audiences get emotional at the cinemas PLENTY of times. You just usually have to see something opening day before everyone has already seen it. And Save will back me up on this one - LOTS of audience reactions for this movie during the first week or so. As for the topic at hand - no, you dont need to have seen any past Macross shows, however being familiar with them will add entire layers to both the Frontier series and movies. As a 25th anniversary project, the show has LOTS of winks to fans - while you dont need this knowledge to enjoy the movie, I honestly cant imagine what seeing it without said knowledge would be like... But hey, strictly IMO. Waldo will definitely be playing it for a few weeks yet at least. BTW Renato - while I know your first ever original Gundam experience didnt go all that well, I just watched UC ep 3 on blu. Soooo pretty. Damnit I WANT a Macross ova with this budget!

When surrounded by hundreds of people who all gasp (at said scene) and over half of them openly cry (at a different scene), its a pretty big deal I can assure you.

Yeah, they'll announce the new scheduled time on the site once its been decided. This has happened for a bunch of stuff. There was a Kawamori and Mikimoto talk cancelled and the Mac F Appreciation even was postponed by almost a month. Earthquakes will do that!

So guys, now that some time has passed Im presuming that some more people have gotten their copies? Any thoughts? favourite illustrations?

Zinjo - you beat me to it! lol. yeah, I suppose what I'm trying to say is that those spoiler tags dont always work (on the iphone in particular from my experience) and unlike text, which you can stop reading halfway, you cant stop seeing a picture halfway. With the risk of spoiling the movie for others being what it is, why post spoilerific pics? Why not just post a link behind the spoiler tags? This makes much more sense to me. I mean, I have a tonne of magazines, photos and flyers that are potential spoilers so I refrain from posting them until later on. To me thats just common courtesy. Then theres posting random Japanese without translations and using keywords to link to torrents of pirated soundtracks - but I wont go there. For now.

Yeah I need to sit down and read these. Possibly the most interesting non-manga element of this issue. With regards to the new issue, imo Macross The First is strong, as always with the rest of the manga running a very distant second. Theres also less merchandise coverage than before and they have rehashed some Traingl Frontier stuff, but given that the Macross Frontier boom is almost over now I see this as a natural progression. It will be interesting to see how they try to pad content out in the months to come (with more interviews hopefully!). I was also surprised that they didnt cover the premiere of Wings of Farewell in more depth. The opening day talkshows got the barest of mentions in a tiny corner with a teeny tiny picture or 2. On the good side, all the Macross-themed food from the Namja Town promotional tie-in is covered - much better pictures of the food than...well, than the food actually looked like. Also of surprise was not one, not two, but THREE posters. The main pack-in one is a bit spoilerific and is, honestly, not all that good. the two fold-out A4 posters though, are excellent. One is a touched up version of a Mylene picture that Mikimoto did specifically for the Double Mylene Birthday concert. I never thought it would see the light of day, so seeing the poster was a nice surprise. Looks like I can post the pics I snuck at the concert now, lol. And while this has been said elsewhere - this issue is full of movie spoilers so importers, you have been warned!

The whole new issue of Macross Ace is full of spoilers. I dont know what anyone would post a pic like that. For someone who had the spoilers ruined for him by inconsiderate posters on other forums, Kresphy seems pretty oblivious to potentially spoiling it for others on these boards.

High quality versions of the pictures done by Kawamori, Ebata and Tenjin for those affected by the Great Tohoku Quake: http://www.macrossf.com/donation.html

I was at my local bookstore to pick up the latest issue of Hobby Japan and check if the new Macross Ace had been put on the shelves a day early (it hadnt) when I stumbled across THIS little beauty! Model Graphix magazine - a smaller, lesser known model magazine which also tends to have lots of interviews, has released a DESTROID SPECIAL!!! I dont know how they decided such a thing would sell (far less risk to put the 29 on the cover) but as a result we get a gorgeous cover that could only have been done by one man ;-) Rapidly snapped mobile phone pics follow:

Excellent translation mate. Great job and thanks for taking the time out to do this!

Like many people here, Macross 2 wasn't my favourite series in the franchise, but as one of the few entries that was readily available outside of Japan, it certainly had an impact on me. I actually saw it for the first time during my first ever trip to Japan in 1993. My host student at the time had rented and copied the show on VHS. I had yet to grasp even the most rudimentary aspects of Japanese, but the minute I saw that opening I realised what I was seeing - and a whole new world of stuff not necessarily released in Australia was opened up to me. Save sent me a scan of a very short Q&A with Hiroshi Kakoi from the Nov., 1991 issue of Animage. I have included a rough translation below: Animage: Tell us a little about the mechanical aspects of Macross 2. Kakoi: Please view the (Macross 2) world as basically being an extension of that in the original Macross tv series. In the future of this world, Zentradi and Human technologies continued to be mixed together and Kazumi Fujita designed the shows mecha with this in mind. Also, the main characters Valkyrie illustrates how military technology from the original series has reached the point that it permeates civilian life. Animage: How about the enemy mecha? Kakoi: Basically, Marduk mecha were based on those of the Zentradi. The concept they were designed around was that the Marduk had improved upon existing Zentradi technology by adding their own.

The CG Pachinko commercials above were apparently not supposed to have been made public yet, so Sankyo has removed them from their YouTube channel. I'm sure they will go back up later on when the commercials are actually due to air.

I stumbled across a PDF of a promotional flyer for the upcoming Macross F Pachinko machine this morning: http://www.pbs777.com/pickup/catalog/cr_f-makurosF-catalog.pdf 18 songs are included in the game, with the Fan-requested songs including Triangler and...Try Again?!?! Great song, but I wonder how on earth it ended up being included? ^^;

A message of sorts from Kawamori to those effected by the March 11 Great Tohoku Earthquake: http://twitpic.com/4c169a/full

The fact that its actually IN the mainstream charts for weeks is in itself amazing. I know Im repeating myself here but this isnt a mainstream property. Its very niche. The fact that they got posters on the trains on the JR Yamanote Line continuously blows my mind. But you just cant compare it to something like Gantz, for example, which housewives and tweenyboppers alike rush to see. Between the movie, the OST and merch sales, there is no way the film has been a flop. I saw it a 5th time on Saturday and the cinema was still half full despite the current situation here in Japan. Heck, we had an earthquake in the middle of the movie and no-one left! So anyways, just my 2-yen, but these sort of box office comparisons are rather pointless imo.

For anyone wondering what these are, they are tv commercials for Sankyos upcoming Mac F Pachinko machines.

Sorry to be the bearer of sad news, but the producer of Mac 2 was one of the victimes in last weeks quake/tsunami: http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2011-03-18/macross-ii-producer-hiroshi-kakoi-passes-away-in-quake

Due to the recent earthquake and tsunami, the Macross F Kansha-sai (Appreciation Party) this coming Sat (19) has been indefinately postponed. May eventually be cancelled depending on the casts/guests availability.

Write-up on one of the events I mentioned, Oshare Macross, by Otaku USA's Patrick Macias http://tokyofashion.com/oshare-macross-fashion-anime-marui-one/ My own final update to this thread should be coming sometime over the weekend, providing I can find time (Theres a Kanno tribute concert, a big screen showing of Roujin Z and potentially another viewing of Wings of Farewell happening...oh and editting the first Macross podcast - busy busy busy!)

Write up on the Oshare Macross 'event' by Patrick Macias (Editor of Otaku USA) http://tokyofashion.com/oshare-macross-fashion-anime-marui-one/

Thats the problem when someone posts scans from an album labelled as NETABARE (=SPOLIER in English). The legality of scanning CD booklets and posting them not withstanding, theres stuff in the tracklists and the pics that are potential spoilers so its a bit of an inconsiderate thing to do imo.

Nice spot! Am still hoping to jump online for this but its the weekend of the Tokyo Int. Anime Fair, AND the day that GitS: SSS3D comes out, AND Im not even sure what country Ill be in on that weekend ^^; just out of curiosity, do you use HOME often? Personally I think its a huge waste of time and havent updated in like...forever ^^;.

The official website has posted some interview footage from Ikebukuro on the day of release - Kawamori, Endo, Nakajima. This was taken in the same room Save and I were in only minutes before :-) Sorry guys, it isnt subbed. http://www.youtube.com/user/PIAchannel?feature=mhum#p/a/u/0/OmRoezrpOAE

Personally I really like the album. Having said that, its more of a soundtrack than an album. Universal Bunny was an album imo. It could stand on its own without the movie. This one is more of a sountrack - theres musical ups and downs that are irrevocably linked to certain scenes in my mind but I can see how you might not appreciate it as much if you hadnt seen the movie. I do feel that it has more musical variety than Universal Bunny although yes, theres a few repeat tracks (once again though, all are relevant once you have seen them in context). Having said all this - 'bad albume'...really? This is the BEST you can come up with for pirating this stuff before the ink on the booklets is even dry? Does this mean that youve actually gone out and bought albums when they are 'good'? I mean come on, CDs arent region locked and they are comparatively affordable (compared to Japanese bluray and merchandise prices) and as such they are one of the best ways fans can support Macross. The album is BRAND NEW. Sure you have skirted breaking forum rules by posting a key word instead of a full link, but the result is the same. Please, take that down, seriously. You didnt even have the decency to put up a disclaimer asking people to support the series and buy the album as well. Maybe I'm biased because my voice (along with several hundred other fans) is in the background of one or two of the tracks. But you know what? I can guarantee that every one of those fans bought and paid for the album. As a fellow fan, I hope you do too.

OR you could buy it? Mine just arrived - love amazon Japan free shipping :-) Am off for a listen now, just wanted to share an image from the booklet - and no this doesnt happen in the movie...unfortunately.