Kelsain

Cool. I will look forward to it. Plan B was to take the 30 year armistice sign from M+ and drop it down to 25. Thanks!

If anyone even has a lo-res version, could you point me the way? I'm working up a 25th Anniv. wallpaper...

OK, got the 19 and 1S all pieced together. I'm also working up a desktop with them. I'll post them soon.

Wow, neat. The game looks cool - my friends and I pretty much did this with Mekton in college. The main site is awesome, but what I'd really like to know is: Does anyone have an idea of how to save those super high-res flash pics onto my computer? That YF-19 is beautiful! *edit: Nevermind, I screen-grabbed each section and I'm stitching it together myself. I'll post it when done - I guess in the fanworks section?

That's probably good advice. *Deep Breath* After all, the last time I got caught up in the excitement over a continuation of something from my childhood was Episode1. Started to have that little kid feeling again, which was fun, but risky at my age. I'll keep an eye on the thread in case anything cool happens; but no longer with slathering hunger for tidbits of information. Thanks for the voice of reason, Sketchley.

Perhaps they feel that M0 was over-hyped, and then it didn't live up to expectations (fans in general and profit). I personally liked it but I agree that it could have been handled better. Anyway, maybe they're trying a different tack so that the series is less likely to let people down. Or perhaps to let it spread by word of mouth to lead into a big opening. I've been a Macross fan since before RT, having plenty of VF-1 models and being VERY surprised to see them in a cartoon when RT came on in '85. I forgot about it through high school until I saw M+ on a store shelf, by then M7 had run it's course. I didn't even see M7 or M0 until last year. So this is my first new Macross experience. Maybe this is a well-planned information strategy, but this is so bloody frustrating! I wanna see the trailer... I'm also beginning to wonder how long I'll have to wait to see some fansubbing... but Gurren Lagan seems to be keeping a fair pace, so that gives me hope.

What kind of paper do you guys use on this? Standard bond? Or something heavier?

To paraphrase from above: James Hong IS David Lo Pan and vice versa to me…

Yeah, toward the end there's a press conference where they explain that humans and zentraedi have the same DNA. There they announce that 3 of the Zents have volunteered to be micloned to normal size, and the three are asked to stand up. They're DYRL versions of the 3 spies (Bron, Rico & Konda - sorry, can't remember their original names!). They have bald heads, grey skin and pointy ears. As for the Meltrandi - hmmm, maybe the Protoculture appreciated the idea of giant sexy women, just like all of us who appreciate Millia. Therefore they kept normal skin tones, proportions, and long (LONG) flowing hair...

You should also check out some of Robert L Forward's books, he goes for REALLY alien. Like 12 eyed microscopic slug-like critters that live on the surface of a neutron star. Believe it or not, he makes it work. As far as Macross goes, I initially thought the grey skin and pointy ears of the Zents was weird when they introduced it in DYRL. Before that, you had a few odd skins colors (greenish & purplish) but they were pretty much human. After a while, I became OK with it; it makes sense that even if we're genetically identical, there would be some racial differences - we did develop indepedently. The weird part now is that Milla seems to be the only Zent that looks normal anymore.

What about J-country? I shudder at the thought of rap or country being the new musical direction. I hadn't even thought of ska- that's nightmarish. On the other hand, Macross with reggae could be kinda cool. Macross with blues could bring us back to the mature emotional themes of the original SDFM quite well. Ah well, we'll just have to see… So how long does fansubbing take on TV shows these days?

That Armored Zero kit looks like it requires great paw-to-eye coordination. Kudos. My cat would have given up and sat in the box by now...

I watched it at work, so it was on mute - now I'll have to watch it again. I guess the bugs are just a mystery...

I too have found the orignal SDFM to be miles better and more mature, but I kind of agree w/ DD & Scream Man: Robotech opened me up to anime; the storyline, such as it was, engaged my whole family; I had a great deal of RPG fun at it's expense. Now that I'm older, I prefer the original and decry what HG has done with the licensing. I also think it has gone to many interesting places on the official timeline. But I'll admit that I prefer the voice of Lisa Hayes to that of Misa Hayase. It just seemed more appropriate for a strong, defiant woman with daddy & abandonment issuses. Is it a coincedence that I married a strong, defiant woman with daddy & abandonment issues named Lisa? If not, then I do owe that to Robotech as well. (In a positive way )

So, after watching the M3 opening... What's up with the giant laser-shooting bugs?

My first was a Convertors version of the Macross itself. It was about 4" long, molded in kind of a metallic blue w/black painted diecast metal. I had not idea what it was, I think I got it at Walgreens or Woolworth's or something. I picked up a few Valk models at Stanton Hobby (Chicago), but had no idea they were related in any way. I remember painting my VF-1S testors gloss black with a silver canopy and some very poorly rendered flames. A year or 2 later, the awesome '85 series of TF's came out, and my brother got Jetfire w/ the Macross kite on the wing. A little later, I got mine, sans kite. It later met an unfortunate fate on our jungle gym. (Oddly enough, I had convertors toys of Whirl (<-) and Roadmaster, which were released along w/ Jetfire the same year) Shortly afterward, Robotech aired and it all started to make sense. Except for the Dougram, Orguss and other toy lines that got distributed under the Robotech name... Then I saw "Clash of the Bionoids" and got all kinds of confused.

Stopped watching it myself after the December break, but those two always smelled like redshirts to me...

One thing that bugs me is the model #'s of the cylons. We know the girls' #'s at least, don't remember if they ever gave us #'s for the guys. Lucy Lawless is 3, Tricia Helfer is 6 and Grace Park is 8. Now I realize they probably wrote this before deciding that the final 5 were all mysterious, but it forbids the possibility that the 5 are models 1-5 or 7-12 and thus the first set of human-like cylons or the most recent & advanced.

Ah, didn't hear that line...

I had issues with the way the Sagitarrons were presented. It had the standard scifi "one world-one culture" feel to it. Maybe I missed something, but I never felt that the differeing viewpoints on issues among the fleet were divided by homeworld, but by each person's upbringing. I had no issues with the prejudice angle. When the tribes fled Kobol, they likely settled their colonies along national differences. Following that, it's likely that before the cylons came about, the colonies warred back and forth, and prejudices took hold. Even after they formed a unified gov't, those prejudices would have remained. I realize there really wasn't much time to develop everybody, and at least Dee held a slightly different viewpoint, but it just felt very Star Trek to me, which is less than what I've been led to expect from this show. And why weren't the military characters going to Doc Cottle? The civvies, ok, they handed them off to Dr Racist; but Dee and Sharon had no real reason to bother the overworked refugee doctor instead of Cottle. Just seemed like an overt reason to add more drama.

Yeah, it was all supposed to be very zen. It was fun & fairly well-thought out for a TF series. It was more plot driven than new toy driven, in part b/c the toys didn't come out until the show was almost over. The Maximals couldn't just transform at first, they had to reflect, be a peace and find the Maximal within. That was corny. And it defeated Megatron's plan to remove the organic from the TF's. Didn't agree with that. But it brought us 3 of the coolest TF's ever: Obsidian, Tankorr & Thrust. Back to the Movie - the small toys look like poo, but the large OP looks pretty nifty.

My Boyfriend is a Pilot made it through. I remeber being quite surprised when Kate karaoke'd that in M+ (I knew the difference, but still hadn't seen the original Macross)

As long as they don't say "I am Transformed!!" Despite all his different looks, all of the Megatrons had roughly the same facial features. I actually thought the Giant Head Megs of BeastMachines S2 was the coolest looking of the bunch. No lips or nose, but you could tell by the eyes that it was him. This pictue looks like a pirahna skull or something. That and, if you're not bound by your disguise, build some decent claws into your vehicle mode. They look like the little grabbing tools that come in computer repair kits.

I thought it was a matter of mass and volume. The longnose cab occupies about twice the space as the flatnose. As I understand it, the movie TF's are bound by mass restrictions (thus, no Megs handgun). By having Optimus as a longnose, that gives you potentially twice as much metal to move around and make your robot. I honestly don't have too much of a problem with the new designs. The TF toys were limited in moving reasonably sized pieces of plastic & metal on toy hinges. The cartoon characters were stylized versions of those toys. Why should full-size "attempting to make them real" versions be limited by those constraints? Someone else mentioned just how many small parts you could fit in a car door, let alone the engine compartment, trunk, etc. My concern is the faces of the bot forms. There have been many styles of TF faces, but I've always been partial to the Optimus/Roadmaster/DepthCharge style. I bet the "battlemasks" will look awesome, then slide back to reveal dorkiness. The other concern, of course, is that it's Michael Bay. But that pretty much goes without saying...

Screw the green, then, that's purdy.