tekering

If you watch this hoping it'll be good, you're an optimist... If you watch this expecting it'll suck, you're a realist... If you watch this knowing it'll suck, you're a masochist. Guess which one I am? 😅

As an outstanding film? Not necessarily... As a kaiju concept? Certainly. As the work of a filmmaker capable of making outstanding films? Absolutely. Both Dawn of and War for the Planet of the Apes are proof of that.

I don't think Japan ever managed to make an outstanding Godzilla movie... I mean, Shin Godzilla was terrific, head-and-shoulders above anything Toho made back in the day, but that's hardly a high bar to clear. I just don't think the kaiju concept attracts the kind of filmmakers capable of making outstanding films. 🤔

SEVEN HOURS of special features...? Are they counting The Sentinels, Love Live Alive, and Shadow Chronicles as "special features?"

The jury's still out on that one, actually... 🤔 It's a minor issue, and easily remedied with a little sanding (as long as you ignore the recessed detail on the flat side). I'm only going out of my way to reproduce every detail because our redoubtable Captain hinted at a contest... and competition always brings out the best in me. 😎

You'll have to wait a few more weeks, I'm afraid. The only parts I've actually finished so far are the gun pods: Satan Claws' weapon turned out to be quite a pain, actually. See, despite some inconsistent proportions, the gun pod used by Seifreit's Bioroid is always depicted with the bulbous disc protrusion on the starboard side (and the rarely-seen etched symbol recessed in the port side)... ...but the weapon included with the kit is backwards, a mirror-inverse of what it's supposed to be. I'm not sure why it was designed that way, but I needed to make changes so mine would be anime-accurate.

And MFT's tend to be that much bigger than most of the other Legends figures as well, 3P or official, which makes mixing and matching that much MORE problematic. Thank Primus all the third-parties at least stick to a standard scale for their Masterpiece releases.

It probably sounds hypocritical, coming from me, but models aren't supposed to be played with. I treat Gunpla like toys, to be honest, and my Japanese colleagues criticize me for it; anything from the passive "You pose your Mobile Suits like Transformers" to the overt "That's not a toy, Ted!" As action figure collectors, we know that the most well-articulated figures are also the most fragile... and that goes tenfold for models, and a hundredfold for garage kits. It's fun to mess with resin kits in their bare plastic state, seeing how much playability we can squeeze out of them, but things change a great deal once the parts are properly painted. After weeks of work, I'm starting to get an impression of what the final results will look like: ...and at this stage, I'm terrified to change the poses. 😬 The Invid kits weren't so bad, but these 'Lloyds are all overlapping surfaces constantly interacting with each other, and there are few points where moving a limb won't result in parts rubbing together. I'm actually not likely to use much of the articulation I've engineered for these kits, now that I've put so much work into the surface textures. It's just not worth the risk! 😳

It means "Please wait for us to make a decision about this product, because we haven't decided whether to include the figure."

It's an awesome kit, one of my favorites; impeccably molded, and relatively easy to put together. I can't recommend it highly enough.

In North America, maybe... but it'll make a killing overseas. The Japanese box-office returns alone should guarantee a profit; animal pictures are huge here in Japan. Remember this film from 1986? It made TEN TIMES more money in Japan than it did in the States.

I think you may have confused "Optimus Prime" with "Optimus Primal." 😅

I love the production design in this series. The abandoned Kaminoan cloning facility was a fascinating setting.

As did I. Even more fun-fact: Roger Ebert tried to insert Halloween 3 into the main franchise with his film review, having mistaken an android corpse for Michael Myers' remains. 😅

$700 CDN? What a score!

Wrong continuity, pal. 😅 This Laurie Strode was never any relation to Michael Myers.

That'll be super-easy. Barely an inconvenience. Revoltech has got you covered, dude. Have you figured out how to articulate the head? 👀

The whole payment process is a real pain. A percentage of my monthly salary should just be sent to you automatically. That's the easiest part. Cap' produces parts with such exacting tolerances that sometimes you don't even need glue. It's fun, too, 'cause you can mix-and-match parts and mess around with poses without fear of damaging the paint. For me, though, the most enjoyable part of the process is adding custom markings, using waterslide decals and dry transfers. By adding a level of detail not possible in TV animation, the model starts to look more a like a box art illustration than a cartoon robot, and creates a much more profound sense of scale: To maintain the alien Zor aesthetic, I'm deliberately avoiding anything that looks like an alphabet, since all visual evidence from the anime suggests the Zor rely on pictographs, rather than written language. I want to match the techno-organic design sensibility, and use shapes that complement the existing geometry. My Japanese Gunpla masters have taught me how important it is to add your own distinctive touches to the piece, so that you're not merely reproducing someone else's design work. Expressing your own creative impulses through the model is how you win contests, and get your work featured in modeling magazines.

Why not indeed? They could get it scripted, cast, and prepped by the end of the year, shot and edited next year, and then... ...delay its release until 2026.

To be clear, you're describing a TOY, not a resin kit. Even mass-produced injection-molded model kits designed to be transformable rarely function as well as intended. With a garage kit, the most you can hope for is a design that allows you to choose what mode you want to build your kit to represent. Most paints don't adhere to resin any better than they adhere to die-cast metal, and (as most of us know) transformable toys with die-cast parts are notorious for paint chipping... so just imagine a transformer that was entirely made of die-cast, and you can imagine how problematic a transformable resin kit would be. In fact, when it comes to hand-drawn designs like the Spartas, I don't even think it would be worth the effort to design a transformable model. I expect it would be easier to produce a kit for each mode, with proportions and articulation appropriate for each design, and the resulting models would be simpler to build and paint as well... and undoubtedly would look more accurate than a transformable model that made the unavoidable design concessions required to realize a triple-changer. I imagine our erstwhile Captain could design a Spartas kit that shared a lot of basic parts between all three modes, but would have a lot of specific parts for each mode as well... and a 3-in-1 kit that didn't actually transform would likely be able to match the line art much better than all the boxy 3D-rendered attempts we've seen generated over the past few years.

Any of those are possible... provided a generous benefactor gets the ball rolling. I'd say the "girl trio" is the least-interesting part of the anime... I really like the concept of human colonists on a remote world, having to defend themselves against a superior alien* species trying to reclaim their homeworld. It was certainly unique for the time, and I genuinely love the episodes set aboard the Zor motherships, where our heroes explore their surroundings and learn about Zor technology, society, and culture. The production designs are interesting, and the mecha combat is very dynamic... at least, within the confines of the "real robot" genre. * Had the series not been rushed to its apocalyptic conclusion, we would've learned that the so-called aliens were merely time-displaced human colonists, thousands of years removed from their human brethren... another fascinating subversion of the genre that unfortunately never got the chance to play out in the narrative.

Mospeada fans be like: @Podtastic be like:

Wow, I guess Lloyd's proven more popular than expected...! We're gonna need it... They only ever appeared in groups of three, after all.

To be fair, that "weird pedo thing" had already been established with Lalah Sune in the original series...

The ship is called the Brünhild, and it's just over a kilometer in length... meaning a 1:8000 scale kit will be a stupidly small 125mm (less than five inches long).