JsARCLIGHT

That's one of the things I love about the alien franchise... the whole "alien mimics the host" thing. Think if aliens made it down to earth, you'd have Giraffe aliens, kitten aliens, dolphin aliens, gibbon aliens, rattlesnake aliens and my personal favorite the elusive and deadly penguin alien.

Thank you. Everyone come over to VEX for some nice OT conversation. Kevin lets us play there, no need to pollute MW with our insanity.

I'd put mine in the passenger seat of my car and drive around town like those "security dummies"... either that or I'd request one that could hold a real rifle and use it as a gun sentry in my entryway.

I'm still waiting on an executive response on this myself in the pinned FAQ topic about sigs. If pics in sigs are outlawed then how come some people still have them?

Speaking to Bsu Legato's point, the alien costumes where quite different in all four movies. The first movie, the skull was almost like a jellyfish with a transparent dome on it. Then in aliens, the heads became this sort of lumpy coral-esque mass of ducts and seams. Then in alien3 you have the "dog alien" which basically combined the first two alien designs together with more dogish proportions. In alien resurrection they continued to alter the design even more as these "new" aliens where genetially extrapolated from ripley and they possessed different genetic code so to speak. If they do make an AvP movie the aliens should look like they did in the movie aliens, as that seems to be the original genetic strand of humanoid alien. Giger's alien was sort of the prototype which the "soldier alien" of aliens came from. The ones from the last two movies are genetic deviants, hence why they had to "look different".

If given the choice of watching Macross 7 again or shooting myself in the head I'd be asking for the hollowpoints just to make sure it killed me. I understand that a lot of people like this show... then again a lot of people like Sigfried and Roy, Elton John, Beastiality, Cosplay and Sailor Moon. I am no closer to understanding those people either.

I have tried over and over to get my fiancee to watch anime... she thinks it's all so childish and purile... even the "mature" anime. I agree with her on a lot of levels as most anime is a far cry from compitent storytelling. On the Macross 7 note I remember my fiancee watching me yell at the tv and constantly say things like "make it stop!" and "oh come on!" while watching it. She then asked me "why are you watching this trash if you hate it so much?" I was left with only one answer: "because I'm trying not to hate it."

If anyone deserves to be sued it's that dumbasses' parents. They failed to teach him the principal factor of geekdom: keep it to yourself. If you go doing stupid things like taping yourself dancing around like a freak then you had better erase that tape or hide it somewhere very secure. This is kind of the same thing as someone taping themselves having sex or committing crimes... and those tapes eventually get out into the public if you are not careful... and let's face it, people who tape themselves shooting pedestrians with paintball guns and fornicating with barnyard animals are not too bright to begin with... add this lardass to that list. If anything, his suffering should give us all a life lesson: keep your geekness and nerdiness to yourself... it will only hurt you if it gets out in the open. I would rather have everyone I know think I'm just an escaped mental patient than to know the horrible dark truth of how many geekish things I like...

The Tammy-hawk gets my vote. It's kind of like the "tank" of the line.

Much like this topic, the "prosecution" aspect also needs to be addressed. It is very hard for american companies to bring foriegn companies to "american" justice... about all they can do is squash the middlemen who are peddling those wares stateside. Bill Gates, George Lucas, Steven Spielburg, Madonna, you name it... they have all tried to hunt down bootleggers in... I don't mean to get geographical on anyone, but... in China who just evaporate when the heat is on. Bootleggers are like drug dealers, they offer something everyone wants at a low low price and when you kill one, ten more pop up to take his place. IMHO Bootlegs are such a big problem in the media industry due to some of the outlandish prices that are being charged for CDs, Moves and games. I know all the arguments about overhead and fees and such, but the only way to truly defeat bootleggers is to eliminate their one and only selling point: price. Bootleggers are paying for materials, packaging, staff, time and effort (if you can call it that in some instances) just the same as the big businesses they are ripping off. The only outstanding thing the bigger businesses have are the actual production costs of the original material... and unless you are talking a multi million dollar movie production costs are recouped in the first week of sales on most albums and games. I remember a time when top flight, new release CDs where $8 at Camelot Music in the mall... now they are $18.99... and the bootlegs are still selling for $3. I have less of an issue with the video game industry as they're prices have almost stayed the same (they've actually gotten better when you think of inflation)... games have always been $19.99 to $49.99, even back in 1982 when I bought my Atari 2600. Before I get jumped: I do not support the actions of bootleggers but I sometimes buy their products, but only when a domestic is not available. If one becomes available I buy that one and sell the boot. I myself work in the marketing business and I understand all the ups and downs of several differet industries... but as an insider I can also tell you that in some cases we the people are getting bent over at the checkout and bootleggers saw that and cashed in. Shame on them, shame on us, shame on everyone... but by buying a bootleg you are technically breaking no laws, the legal angle is all on the sellers and bootleggers. You'll just go to hell for buying that boot of Trigun... but on the up side Satan has an awesome bootleg collection... trust me... I've seen it...

Typical "HK" bootlegs are a grey area in the states as most of the time they feature their own "special" subtitles and they don't rip off someone else's hard work... but the english dubbed R1 ripped bootlegs are 100%... how do our friends ze germans say it... shtolen. R1 release houses pay good money to license the show, bring it over, translate it, hire out a voice cast and pay for studio time, remix the audio and repackage the show in a dubbed format. Bootleggers are just ripping the discs and inserting their own logo over or in front of the legitamate ones. Now... you could also say that the boots are basically doing the same things to the original properties already... and they are. But to the american legal system they are not taking that "final step" into illegality: they are not directly copying and redistributing a licensed property. Now they are. Any time you see a boot featuring english dubbing it is most likely a rip of the R1 release... and now it has entered a definate legal state of "bad" in the US. These boots are copies of domestic properties and are subject to all the wrath of our legal system that some of their grey area brothers are not.

The first Yamatos I saw where the Mac+ ones advertised in Toyfare magazine under the Toycom label. I thought they looked like crap and wanted no part of them. Time passes... Reading another issue of Toyfare I saw pics of the Toynami MPC valkyries and Super Posables... this piqued my interest as now it seemed someone was thinking about releasing original macross toys. I read that they where going to be super limited and where going to go for $80 a pop. I said no thanks and moved on... More time passes... The second Yamatos I saw where the sunwards super VF-1 series, also advertised in Toyfare. These looked OK but not worth my time, again. Then I happened to be on a business trip to LA (Santa Monica to be precise... Santa Monica Promenade to be more precise) and stopped in a collectable toy store and saw my first Yamato 1/60 in person. It was a 1/60 Hikaru VF-1A. It looked really neat and I wanted to buy it but the price they where asking was freaking outrageous in my mind then. So I passed. Even more time passes... Macross moves into the front of my mind again and I start doing searches for Macross Toys on the internet and I discover Valkyrie Exchange. From there I purchase my first (and to this day almost all) Yamatos. From VEX I find Macross World. The rest is history.

I just can't passively sit there and watch TV. I'm good for 2 hours... 3 at the most and I start to go insane. I also can't watch the same thing too close to itself, like several episodes of a TV show every day. I burn out very quickly that way. I think that's why I prefer to buy stuff on DVD and watch it at my own pace so I don't loose interest in something too fast. I just don't have the genes of a couch potato... I have the genes of a tree squirrel. That's why I'm always hopping around the internet, walking around the office, buzzing around like a bee... How I got those squirrel genes I'll never know, but the unfounded fear of birdbaths is a real negative.

Has anyone heard what the price will be on the "import" Mospeada varients?

Can I apply for a "Get out of Jail Free" card?

Actual "price fixing" as a crime is very easy to charge someone with, but a lot of the companies are so steeped in purchase contracts, point of sales agreements and the like that you'd have to go though a mountain of red tape to even find a place to start... and nine times out of ten with the smart companies you'll find that at some point you as a retailer signed some contract releasing them from any wrongdoing in the sales process. A lot of manufacturers like to sneak that in on invoices and purchase orders. Most retailers have no quam with companies doing this as they are making money either way... and when their price on an item is the same as the guy down the street the odds they will be outsold are slim to none. Look in the local paper some time, notice the items that have no price difference or a very, very limited one in everyone's ads in the paper. Some people have even said that Nintendo and Sony gave Walmart a hassle for advertising their items for $149.96 rather than $149.99... But I digress as we are talking about toys that will eventually hit the secondary market, which is totally uncontrolled...

I'm guessing a lot of you are not familiar with the degree of unseen price fixing that actually goes on in the united states. People have just become so accustomed to it that they ignore it. Some retailers are afraid of the manufactureres... companies like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and the like actually have reps that come into your store and make damn well sure you are following their corporate sales plan... whether you like it or not. You mess with their plans or pricing guides and they simply pull your ability to order from them. It's like they are "franchising" your own stock... and in other situations (like people who just buy one case for "personal use") the manufacturers sell an item at an at cost price of $50 and has an MSRP of $51. How can a retailer or second marketer not follow their MSRP and hope to make money? Toynami is just playing the game and we are the pawns. Unless you want to join me in a glorious workers revolt with ski masks and uzis against the evil corporate machine than we should all just sit back and pay the best price we can get for it.

I've always found Chat rooms to be like verbal shotguns... five people trying to talk with each other about five different things is just a mess. I prefer one on one IMs to Chat environments any day of the week. My A.D.D. would just go out of control in a chat room.

$175 is about $25 a set, which is about the average price on eBay, sans shipping costs. You got a deal... not a really good deall but you still did not pay retail. I myself have seen entire used legacy sets go for under $80 on eBay... if that puts anything in perspective. Robotech DVDs seem to be like a Desert Eagle pistol... they are uber expensive to buy but you almost have to give them away to get rid of them.

OK, I've worked in the management end of retail to know that there is no way a product maker can force retailers to sell things at certain prices. "MSRP" is just that, the suggested retail price. As a retailer you have all the rights in the world to sell it for whatever you want. Case in point: Durring a heated sales market in the 1960s, retail stores in an area where all selling the same record players. They all had the same overhead of $20 each on the players. The MSRP on the players was $30. Every store had them at that price. Then a price war started up and each store started undercutting each other. One store started it by selling the record players for $28, and then the next guy lowered his price to $25 and so on and so forth until they where all selling them for like $1 above cost at $21... then one of the store owners does the "unthinkable" and starts selling them at cost for $20 under the guise that he will make more money off the records he sells with the players than the actual player itself (kind of like Microsoft and the X box). Next thing you know all the retailers are selling below cost at $15 just so they don't loose sales to the others, all hoping to make their money back on accessories and records. True story. Then in the '80s something happened. Companies got mad that their items had drastically differing prices all over the nation. They started "stock enforcement", which is basically a way of the company setting a MMRP (Manufacturer's MANDATED retail price). The companies demanded that retailers sell their goods at a certain price and did not allow them to reduce radically like what had gone before. In other words: price fixing. The retailers went along with this as they got a little greedier and now the concept of selling "at cost" or below was stupid. The only way a manufacturer had any power over the retail market if they refused to follow their pricing structure was to simply "cut them off" and not allow any sales. I actually saw that happen here in Saint Louis when the X Box/PS2 price war started. A local privately owned game store started advertising X boxes "below cost" at $150 if you bought like 5 games with it or some nonsense like that. Microsoft pretty much told him to "cut it out and get with the program" or they would suspend shipments of product to him. Price fixing is common in today's market. Toynami/HG is playing the same game as Sony, Microsoft, Shell Oil and Eddie Bauer. Our only salvation is the secondary market and the rebel sellers who buy low and sell low.

As much as I like Macross, the concept of sitting in front of a TV for all that time straight would drive me insane. I can only watch like one or two episodes a day, tops... or one movie. I start fidgeting in my chair and want to go outside and play...

Of course it still looks like the pilot is "pulling the midget"... but what can you expect? Hey, does anyone plan to detail/pannel line/paint up their MPC Legioss when they get it?

I'd buy it if they made one, I like the 1D more than the VT-1 Ostritch. I don't think they'll make one though as the 1D would require quite a bit of design retooling and unless they plan to recycle the molds into more toys we might not see one.

I've got five sets on pre-order at the Valkyrie Exchange... and those paired with the 1/60 VE-1 and VT-1 mean I'll be having one expensive month.

Why do I feel like the lone gopher in a backyard full of 8 year olds with BB guns? JsARCLIGHT part DEUX: This time it's fargin' WAR!