MacrossMania

Those who live in glass houses probably shouldn't be putting Yo-Yo's behind glass bookcases either, but that's just my humble opinion.

Yo-Yo's! OMFG I'm dying laughing. Just had to call the EMT guys and they resuscitated on the spot. Now I owe the ambulance company on top of everything else. Thanks Yo-Yo's!

Just picked up my copy. It was the last one available in the store and I called to secure it literally minutes after it had been posted. Wow! My luck is just extraordinary at this point.

Love this. I will always love the 1/48ths, no matter how much they've been overtaken by modern technology and thinking re perfect realizations.

God damn! I love these pictures! I don't know what it is, the contrast with light and dark, drama, the snow outside (always a harbinger of anime). Give me more!

Awesome. I'm going to start a go fund me campaign to buy all the Macross valkyries I want to buy, and I am going to be totally up front and shameless about my intentions. Macross for me and no other 100% of the time. On second thought, I'm going to do something totally selfless and benevolent and start a go fund me campaign to buy all the Macross valkyries I want to see in a museum, call it the Macross Museum, and have everything from the eighties to the present day. Any and all members of the MM forums can contribute if they want. We'll have it in some deserted Midwestern city like the one I grew up in. That way it won't inflict any real cultural damage. Every contribution made will go toward buying another centerpiece in the collection. We'll charge admission fees of course to sustain the premises, utilities, rent etc. And the administrators of MM World can be the administrators of the Museum. What do you think?

http://blog.livedoor.jp/hacchaka/archives/52036391.html?fbclid=IwAR08QjZMkGfvmbOpcq2HfoeKZYCYUydLJOrEQFBhNj9h-jW5TTFiMfynMbA Blog with more images. Google translation is a bit of a parody though.

I really like the tampo printing and paint. SOOOO many valks botch the paint job. Slathered on too thick or too thin, too toy-like like a Yammie with no paint, or too model-like with overdone tampo prints. I don't know if this is just the original Kawamori design, but the balance is perfect on this one. It really shines through. The goldilocks of paint jobs.

A magnificent bird. And the comparison pics really show the shortcomings of the Yamato 1/48. Although it is near and dear to my heart as the one that kicked off this toy collecting madness back in 2003 (the Low Viz, which I got back graded an AFA 90 after it traveled in a tattered box all the way from Japan with the corners missing, lol, one of only two at that grade), developments in toy engineering and design over the last two decades are obvious. Bandai really knocked it out of the park. Credits to "Macross Ross" from FB.

Gotta admit I don't get the ThreeZero thing. I think they're great toys and I definitely admire them, just not enough to buy. They definitely fill a market niche with the whole post-apocalyptic thing, which they seem to specialize in. But their toys totally lack any metal. Plus they don't seem to be durable at all. They're slathered in paint. I used to be an amateur modeler who won a few competitions back in the day and I know that the kind of flat paint that they use can be prone to rubbing off. It seems to me that if you wanna be a player in the high end toy game, die cast is a must, and durability has to be a consideration. With all plastic and flat paint, it seems they aren't that though. One of the big complaints of Yamato/Arcadia is that they're just display pieces. Their too fragile to be real toys. Having never owned one, I could just be recklessly speculating here. Am I just totally off?

Jesus, this thing is so gorgeous. I was going to propose to my girlfriend, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to put that on hold. Final payment on the ring is going to be delayed at least a month, maybe two. Depends on how many copies I get.

This is a personal plea to Bandai. Please do a DX version of this!

These look great together. Love em.

Boss.

Turns out HMR's aren't that tough after all. Recent shelf dive for me below. Anybody else have something similar?

late the party, but it's never too late for a regult.

had to get these beauties. My priorities are right where they need to be in life.

Details please.

You should definitely expand your resources on this one. Metal builds are some of the best "toys" out there. They perfectly capture the essence of the gundam series - at least from a design perspective - much more so than even the SOC line. I have about six of them right now and plan on expanding my collection on that front - even while sacrificing some standard MF and Delta releases.

Just got this myself. Was thinking against it because I just went through a mammoth round of purchases, but caved in. Glad I did. I knew it would be one of those regrets later on if I didn't cave early. This is a beauty. The things they are doing these days with the metal build line is just amazing. Taking it to a whole other level. And here I thought they did that early on with the modular plastic parts and the metal endoskeleton. But this is just crazy. Plus I think Charles aka OptimusPrimeSG nailed it when he said that Bandai's artistic license with the builds really makes them stand apart from the plastic model releases. They seem more by the numbers.

Ah yes, Van Damme. If ever there was a sillier, sullen-looking soldier, it was him. Somehow the smirk never quite matched the sobriety necessary for the role. Born for porn, in my mind. Born for porn.

well, well, well. What you can get people to say with a little encouragement. I'll be sure to tongue "tie" you in the future with yet more flattering hashtags.

Basically my worst nightmare. Thank god for ebay's buyer protections though.

Rant for the night: I was going to post a couple of photos under the pretend "hashtag" of "About to go Shizuka the Cat" and implore all you toy collectors out there not to go the way I did, spending all my hard earned cash on a bunch of recent releases and some not so recent but all the more hard to find vintage releases, that, truth be told, unless I got them now, I'd probably never, ever see again. Trust me, I've been there, and lived to regret every day since. And the long lesson learned here is that cash is more plentiful than toys, so you might as well snatch them up while you can and the cash is flowing, because you never know, even if you do get the chance to own one later on, they may be asking far more than you're willing to pay. But I digress from my intended rant as a digression from my originally intended post. So, here it is: got hit by the postman again. But being the picky MISB box collector that I am (yea that's right, I said "box collector"), even just one ding on the corner of a box instead of the pristine specimen I had been fantasizing in my mind ever since I got the notice in my inbox that my delivery had arrived on my doorstep, is enough to ruin my week. And of course, that's just what happened. At least I'll admit that Toy Dojo (anyone ever shopped there?) actually did do as I asked (at least somewhat), and bothered to keep the original shipping box in the box that was shipped to me, so that technically at least, it was "double boxed." Which is all to say that I am very disappointed. Yes, it was a very pricey Gundam Metal Build - Astraea Type F - and no, as is my usual OCD habit, I will not be posting pictures of it because I have sealed it up in its cardboard tomb never again to be molested by the unwanted sunlight unless I, and only I, decide the time is right to send it off to AFA for a see-through mausoleum case of its own. Somewhere in the back of my mind I tend to think that the will world of the world bends to my own, only out of the pure fantasy that somehow my superficial, shallow wants in life (i.e. toy collecting) actually have mass enough to bend the space-time continuum around it (in actuality it's probably the sheer mass of my own collecting habits collapsing in on itself and creating a vicious black hole that sucks everything in its path, even my life). Somewhere, I actually half believed when I opened up the toy tonight that the pension gods or the girlfriend gods or whatever other god I should be servicing right now, and not the toy gods, had grown angry at my avarice, and decided to rain down a fiery hell of retribution for my audacious move to go outside my usual collecting sphere of vintage G1 toys, and try to maintain some sort of semblance with the other modern toy lines that I clearly don't deserve, like Metal Build for instance. In my warped mind, I actually half believed that the winning streak of perfect deliveries I had achieved thus far with mainly vintage toy deliveries would soon be continued, only to be so disappointed, thus giving rise to the fantasy that it was retribution by the toy collecting gods who thought I had gone maybe a bridge too far. Then I realized this is just plastic and metal, and while beautiful, there's no interaction between me and its essence, and no one really cares whether or not I collect or what I collect, and it probably just had a rough journey over from a distant, far flung part of the country. And then I left it at that.

Lol, absolutely cracks me up. I hadn't even thought about the Gerwalk mode issues to tell you the truth, but I think you're spot on. LMAO. Interesting U turn here in the discussion. I was going more for aesthetics in this discussion, but it is interesting the points you bring up about whether a valkyrie would actually function. More from above, my point was never about how a valkyrie would function in real life. While it's an interesting brain teaser in my more idle moments whether an F-15 could actually transform mid-flight without breaking apart in a spectacular fireball, I think we can all agree (at least I hope I can) that this whole concept of a plane transforming into a crab-like gerwalk mode and thence into a robot is pure mindbending rubbish that never happen in real life, at least not in any practical sense on the battlefield and in the air. We are dealing with pure fantasy here, and a lovely one at that. Not, as Shizuka's posts seem to suggest, with root concept engineering principals and whether or not any of the cartoons would find purchase in an engineering classroom. My point is wholly aesthetic, and that is all. Call me shallow. Call me an aesthete. Call me what you will, but when I say that I think that the YF-29 is an underrated masterpiece, it's not because I think the USAF Is well on its way to building one to fight the Chinese. It's because I think it is an absolutely gorgeous valkyrie. Does it have the same love and production values as the YF-31? No. Clearly, bandai was giving more credence to the designs and spending more time with them in the factory. But truth be told, that doesn't change the fact that the YF-29 just looks better. Those flaring wings. The boosters and missile compartments that look mean and menacing and bad a.f. The whole thing is just a beast in my mind. The same with the VF-19. I think you nailed it when you said that Omega Supreme just looks good with those railroads on its back, like a nice wing spread. And oh, that reminds me. I couldn't agree more with your assessment that the Wing Gundam Zero is the silliest ever conceived if one looks at it strictly from the standpoint of a functional war machine. It would be destroyed in a second. But man! What a beauty? In my own personal opinion, it is by far the best gundam that Bandai has produced so far precisely because of its beauty. Which lie mainly in those wings and the expressiveness of those poses. I know I'm running up against the fan nerd-dom here, which finds safe refuge in the more mechanistic aspects of the toy designs, perhaps harking back to their childhoods when they would play with an erector set, legos and playdo. And maybe many of them have grown up to be engineers, where such concepts find purchase in their daily lives and dominate their thinking in ways that many of us can't fathom. In fact I'd be willing to say that's the case with Shizuka, with her MIT pedigree. But for me, it's all about the beauty. First and foremost, and last out the door. Let the last breath of the broken Gundam Take its lonely wings to the verdant heavens. So go my thoughts after, run aplomb With dreams of splendor matched only by madmen. -MM