TheLoneWolf

8 hours ago, Old_Nash_II said:

If we are going to take the reference, it reminds a little of these old concepts made by Yune, a few years ago

Tommy Yune's designs are 20 years old, but they're still much better than the new one. Yune had a bulky fighter transform into a bulky battloid.

3 hours ago, Knight26 said:

Especially now that FA has passed.

Doubtful Frank Agrama's passing changes anything.

It's amazing how such a sleek fighter like the YF-4 can transform into a bulky battloid mess.

2 hours ago, glane21 said:

I don’t understand this.  Tommy Yune is an excellent artist.  He could produce a much better in-universe  line art  design and, as licensor, make the comic company use it.  I don’t know why he would allow this train wreck design to be used.  

I honestly can't remember the last time Tommy Yune drew anything new for Robotech.

Just now, jvmacross said:

Kinda of doubt that...they are pretty prolific in their releases and I doubt they'd give up the chance to release the simple DYRL paint schemes....perhaps the deal HG made with BW included something that prohibited HG from licensing DYRL merch...if so, that was pretty dumb of HG to accept, especially since BW has clearly forsaken both SDFM and DYRL on the international marketplace....it seems DYRL is truly stuck in limbo at the moment, in terms of merch outside of Japan....in some ways it's actually worse now

 

 

I dunno, their notorious quality control shows saving money is a priority.

7 hours ago, jvmacross said:

However, HG must be holding off on granting the DYRL licenses for some reason....perhaps they are doing so in the hopes of perhaps gaining the favor of BW and maybe striking some distribution deal with companies like Bandai who seem to be tied up tightly with BW to a point that it almost seems like they are barred from doing business with HG on SDFM-DYRL merch....

Or maybe KC is just too cheap to purchase an additional license for DYRL 😉

I doubt it. Eugene Kim's announcement says "Designed & produced in S. Korea by Project Blue."

Try contacting Bandai. This one is a worldwide release, so Bandai should be able to offer you customer support.

8 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

Yeah, I think they just had a bad drilling alignment on this one.  The fighter looks fine, so I probably won't mess with it, but it's absolutely a dud.

I hate thinking this way, but it kind of feels like they shuffle the QC duds off to the foreign markets.  Technically speaking, this one is complete QC failure, because I don't believe it can transform, due to all the mis-aligned joints.

I'm sorry yours was a a dud. But since this was a worldwide release, you should be able to contact Bandai directly for customer support.

IMO, the biggest improvement from the new BW/HG agreement is that we can finally get some customer support for non-SDFM products.

Max's color scheme really makes the VF-0 design pop!

Now if we could only get some non-canon Fast Packs with this non-canon paint scheme. 😛

On 1/19/2023 at 10:18 AM, MKT said:

Not a recreation, but something in spirit. Might be enough to trigger Isamu’s PTSD again lol..

 

Love the new twist on the old pose. And your lighting is excellent, as always!

Personally, the only value that set has to me is the box and the Elintseeker itself. To me, errors only have value if they're rare, can't be easily duplicated, and come from a popular product.

On 12/31/2022 at 10:15 PM, jvmacross said:

 

 

These Toynami "retro" releases are probably the only toys I ever bought "just for the boxes"...lol

I think they really do capture the essence of part of what made the old Takatoku Toys Macross collection (and vintage Macross merch in general) awesome....the amazing boxart!

Toynami would have my money if they'd just sell the boxes along with new plastic trays to fit the Hi-Metal R toys and accessories. 😄

Don't get me wrong, I love the Hi-Metal R boxes, but these pique my nostalgia.

22 hours ago, MKT said:

Unfortunately, the plastics appear to have some unwanted levels of translucence. This is the complaint by some, but the way I see it, wrongly attributed to plastic thickness but is due to the plastics color itself. It's not noticeable during normal handling, but the moment some light gets behind it, the translucence becomes quite apparent, like the following pic ..

Tbh, Arcadia's VF-1 toys have been sporting similar transluscent plastic for years and there haven't been any durability issues. I agree that it's likely due to the color of the plastic than thickness, since it's not that apparent on any non-white parts.

Attached photo is courtesy of davidwhangchoi.

3 hours ago, nightmareB4macross said:

Very inconsistent scaling. This is quite a turn off for me. The VF-0S should tower over all.

That chart is wrong. The VF-0 is 14 meters tall in battroid mode, but that chart shows it at a whopping 16 meters.

I tip my hat to you, sir! Jetfire's production history is ridiculously convoluted and further muddled by honest misinformation, but you grabbed that beast by its horns and presented all the facts in one scholarly article. The academic in me loves how you showed your sources, the Internet needs more work like this. That is an essay that will be cited countless times in the future.

Thanks for posting those comparison pics, noel!

I think the main reason for the confusion is that some people are assuming that Yamato/Arcadia's battroid height is accurate, but it's not. But it's not really Yamato/Arcadia's fault. Back when Yamato released their VF-0S in 2006, there weren't any published dimensions for battroid mode, just fighter mode. So Yamato probably just made an educated guess based off of fighter mode, resulting in a VF-0 battroid that towered over the VF-1 battroid.

Later on, the Macross Chronicle revealed the VF-0 battroid height as 14 meters, not that much taller than the VF-1's 12.68 meters. This wasn't an issue for Yamato, since their VF-0 toys were long discontinued by then.

When Arcadia released their VF-0 renewals in 2015, they most likely realized that Yamato's battroid height was way off, but probably didn't to upset fans by releasing an obviously smaller battroid that's supposed to be at the same scale. So they pretty much stuck with Yamato's dimensions and nobody noticed...until now.

I'm pretty sure the era of having English subs on Japanese releases is over, now that Big West has official Western licensees.

Can we blame Harmony Gold for that too? 😄

That's some great sleuthing! Just played M-4 alongside the opening battle sequence and it fits like a glove.

I personally prefer M-4 over Fate's Arrow in that sequence as it gels with the movie's overall melodramatic score.

I always liked that song! My guess is that it was Haneda's audition piece for DYRL. Perhaps someone in Big West wasn't sure that he could score epic pieces that the movie needed and wanted a sample. Or maybe it was just a bonus track to help flesh out the movie OST.

Sales for not-Jetfire might tempt KC to ditch their Robotech/Macross line and dedicate all their resources on to the more lucrative unlicensed Transformers. 😉

When Hasbro decided to quietly let unlicensed third-parties rip off their designs, I wonder if they ever imagined that official licensed companies would also get in on the act 😆

Tatsunoko Production and Harmony Gold still hold the worldwide (excluding Japan) merchandising rights to SDFM/DYRL, which is why it's not being released here. Last year's licensing agreement between them and Big West didn't change that.

They look pretty similar in color to the old Hi-Metal fast packs, at least in noel's pics. But in borgified's scans, they looks more gray. But I'll chalk that up the scanner's color processing not being calibrated.

Other than the dark canopy and micro pilot, this looks awesome!

On 8/20/2022 at 5:34 PM, Thom said:

I liked it. Not a Gaiman fan, so my only real knowledge of him is the movie Stardust and this, so obviously I haven't read the comic. Didn't know there was one,

Overall, good plot and story. Great acting for the most part and imaginative. Happy Land from the 'Cereal' Conference freaked me out a bit.

Thanks for your input, it's always good to hear from someone who hasn't read the book.

And if anyone isn't aware, two bonus episodes have been released. The 2D animation in the first episode was jerky at times, but they were otherwise good and faithful to the source material.

Recently finished watching the show and enjoyed it. I actually think it's a more polished version of the comic in many ways. I bet Neil Gaiman noted some of the weaknesses in the book over the years and seized upon the opportunity to refine it.

Naturally, some of the changes I didn't like.

Overall, I feel the positive changes significantly outweighed the questionable ones. The casting was also excellent for the most part; Tom Sturridge did a superb job as Morpheus. There were only a few that were ok at best, but no one was flat out miscast IMO. Like noel mentioned above, there's surprisingly few Asians in a show that's meant to be inclusive. Hopefully this will be addressed in season 2.

Speaking of season 2, I'm a little worried it won't happen. Netflix spent a ton of money on the show (even if the VFX was mediocre in a couple of spots). Given Netflix's recent financial troubles, hopefully the show can manage to pull in Stranger Things and Squid Game ratings to secure its future.

1 hour ago, Slave IV said:

Yeah, I was trying to figure out a way to get the stand to hold the Valks the other way. Another reason why I just don't want too many of them. Clear arm options would have helped. Best I could play off:

Someone used a coat hangar to correctly attach a 1/48 Super VF-1 Yamato to the arm claw way back. One end of the coat hangar was wrapped around the backpack and the other end was wrapped around the claw itself. It looked pretty good IIRC.