Penguin

It's entirely aesthetic. If you look around, you can see pics of custom conversions people have done to make the fighter mode into a fully-transforming model, and the results are a little spindly in battroid mode (very impressive work, but skinny nonetheless). Hasegawa decided to follow the original animation's example and beef up the battroid mode proportions. So, you could say it's more anime accurate... from a certain point of view. For some reason, the legs never bothered me as much as the tiny little wings.

The poster-sized, limited edition blueprints are a pretty rare commodity... but I picked up the spiral-bound, 12" x 16" blueprints reference pack, and I heartily recommend that. It's got all the blueprints (smaller size, of course), and tons more stuff. QMX' "Atlas of the 'Verse, volume 1", in the same size, is also a choice pick, with goodies like maps of eleven planets and accompanying moons, schematics for Mal's pistol, clinical descriptions of the pharmaceuticals from "Ariel", an ad for Higgins Industrial from "Jaynestown", and dorsal pics of other transports from the Serenity universe. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.

The video for "The Saga Begins" is a lot of fun, but songwise it's "Yoda" that makes me laugh the most.

True... you need to get at least above 60 Hz for people to really not notice. There's another vendor, EL Wire Online, that says it's power packs are adjustable for frequency and voltage output, which could solve that problem. In any case, if you wanted to mix EL wire with other sources, you'd have to either adapt the EL wire power pack to serve both the wire and the other output, use a second source, or design your own.

Interesting stuff. Really nice glow. Requires an external power pack, since the wire uses AC current, so the power connections to a model might get a little complex if you also wanted a regular battery pack for lights on other parts of the model.

I've been messing around with a bunch of stuff like this over the years (not specifically for glowing consoles, but in general), but have never actually applied it to a model. Just a bunch of experiments. Simplest approach would be to put a piece of clear plastic in between the source and glowing area. Coat one side with a transparent paint of the desired "glow" colour (a pale blue/green mix would be best, of course), and a clear flat coat on the opposite side. The flat coat will diffuse and dull the light coming through, as will the transparent paint. You may need to experiment with thicknesses to get the right "soft" luminscence. If you're really careful and can achieve it, a thin coat of non-transparent paint also works, but I find the flat coat and transparent paint work best since you have better control of the colour. You can make good use of fibre optics for point sources in a display without requiring long tracks for the fibres. Run short lengths of fibre (about 5 or so millimeters) through the console, flush with the front but extending out the back. A single LED placed behind will illuminate all of them, although the ones nearest the source will of course be brighter. This way, you only need to run the wires for the light source. You can also use a very light coat of transparent paint to tint the end of the fibre, but you need to be really careful as the light isn't all that bright. There's a light-dispersing plastic that's actually used in car displays. The Bandai Star Trek kits of a few years ago used it to disperse single sources to fill a bunch of windows. It works reasonably well. Never tried it with a point source like an LED. It's a softer plastic, and a little hard to work with. I played around with bits and pieces from those kits for a while. Typically, you'd put a piece of this plastic behind the item you want lit, and the light source behind that. Not sure how thick it needs to be to be effective. Might be able to sculpt the console out of this stuff, and then paint and decal the non-glowing areas. Never tried that. FYI... the chrome silver Gundam marker makes an excellent inside coat for lit models. It helps keep the light from shining through both by reflecting it back and being a pretty thick paint too. Testor's silver enamel works well too. None of the acrylic silvers I've tried are smooth and shiny enough.

It's a pretty decent figure. My only gripes with it were that the feet are posed balanced on the toes, which makes it very precarious to pose unaided, and the leg joints were really, really stiff on the two I got. On one of them, the ankle joint snapped rather than flex. It's quite poseable, although it uses rotation at mid-arm and mid-thigh for the legs, which can look a little odd since it offsets the patterns on the limbs when you rotate them. The Hot Toys variant I've held, but don't own (yet, anyway). Really superb poseability, but pricey as heck. I've got the Hot Toys Aliens warrior, and it is really nice. The NECA version is not a bad option, as long as you're just looking for a good representation. It's really huge, too. Makes an impression in a room, for sure. Avoid the Medicom RAH version at all costs. They just slapped a rubber skin over a normal body, so it never wants to stay posed. They also market it as 1/6, but it's just the same size as all their other figures (which is slightly under 1/6, really), instead of the 15-16 inches that it should be.

Note to all: Mr. March shall henceforth be known only as "P". (P For Punditry? Postmaster? ...)

Yeah, I've seen that scene before, including the laughable attempt at having the alien move in strange ways (Horrors! No human could crawl like that! oh, wait...). While the tail position could definitely be interpreted as phallic, it might be a leap to assume anything from that. Certainly, the beastie did more than just collapse her skull. I think not knowing what caused Lambert to make those sounds makes it all the nastier. Just watched the scene... I think that's her arm in the foreground.

That's just all kinds of wrong.

Yeah... I thought the orange contrasted nicely against all that blue.

I love my little fan racer. Shoulda taken the time to seal the seam on top, but it was too fun to build and I didn't want to wait. Guess it goes with the Yamato toys. They don't have sealed seams either.

Absolutely... that period spawned some of the best "think pieces" of the genre. Some were satisfyingly provocative, some merely pretentious, and others just pale copies. That strange gap at the end of the studio system but before the corporate mentality dug its claws in, independent film-makers ran amok and generated some truly original work, in many genres. Star Wars had the unfortunate side-effect of showing that science fiction could be vastly profitable and more mass market than the kids/niche fare that it had been perceived as previously. Now, producers routinely turn to science fiction for vacuous summer box office fodder. One the win side, we got even more high-quality sci-fi, on the fail side we've gotten a lot of trash too. I don't think anyone would argue that there hasn't been some astounding work since that period, although what counts as thought-provoking will naturally depend on the person. I think the period Gubaba's referring to was somewhat unique in that a lot of the more experimental and outre work being done got major releases. A lot of really good sci-fi in the post-Star Wars period got limited or art-house releases, or had to be "rediscovered" later to receive its due recognition, partly because of the expectations production houses now have on the profit sci-fi can make. Blade Runner tanked at the box office. Brazil had to be dragged kicking and screaming to release and also tanked. Children of Men and Moon ended up limited releases in most places.

That's right. It's not like Hollywood unleashed Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians before 1977. Sci-fi in film has always filled the spectrum from thought-provoking to mindless escapism.

Too sweet. This is definitely on my pick-up list. To add another vote, I think a sound booster with speakers and a line-in jack would be seriously cool too. I can't even imagine trying to fit speakers into the shoulders of a transforming toy , but the sound booster is a decent size for a couple of small speakers. We shouldn't expect spectacular range or anything, but it would be a nifty gimmick. Probably want external power rather than batteries to reduce weight and having to fit a battery compartment into the boosters.

For me, I gotta go with Blade Runner. There's lots of sci-fi I love, but above all them I still get chills when the flame-spewing L.A. cityscape first appears and Vangelis' score comes up in the surround speakers.

Intimate knowledge just kills suspension of disbelief, doesn't it? I totally enjoyed "Independence Day" until Jeff Goldblum writes a virus for an extraterrestrial computer network on his Mac. Who knew Apple stumbled upon the universal standard architecture? Or maybe they're all aliens too... (Although, the director's cut adds a scene where it's implied that the character figures out the invader's network by examining the computers on the captured fighter. Damn, he's a genius.)

I'm kinda conflicted about the movie. I loved the Marvel comic (pre-Ninja Force, anyway), and IDW is pretty good too (Devil's Due hit and miss), but thought the cartoon was dumb (except G.I.Joe Absolute - I loved it). So when it came to the movie, I have fun watching it as a dumb action film, but then every once in a while my head says "remember: this is the G.I.Joe movie" and I get annoyed at the movie interpretation. If I think about the movie compared to the G.I.Joe stuff I enjoyed, things big and small just tick me off: - Why does Snake-Eyes' mask have a mouth? And would people let go of that stupid visor? The first "commando" look was always best. (Okay, that last bit is just my preference.) - Scarlett's speciaity is counter-intelligence, a task often involving deep understanding of people and their motivations in order to recognize and defeat attempts at infiltration. Now she's child genius, "emotions-don't-compute", with a crossbow for no reason. Bah. - Dumbest Cobra Command mask ever at the end. - Ice sinks? That's a neat trick. (I know the dialogue says "ice and steel", but the visuals don't back it up.) - "Green shirts." Hated them in the cartoon, hate 'em still. This is supposed to be an elite, covert team, not a mini-army. - Delta Six Accelerator Suits... unnecessary, ugly. Did I mention the team was supposed to be covert? The whole film reminds me of Brosnan Bond films, filled with dumb sci-fi junk technology. - Did we need a Sgt. Slaughter revamp? On the other hand I loved Chris Eccleston and Dennis Quaid... great choices there. Arnold Vosloo wasn't too bad either.

Current 3D technology ain't too bad. Using polarization cuts out a lot of brightness (night scenes in Avatar without the 3D are really brilliant and striking) and the stereoscopic technique always looks off to me for near-field images (i.e. the stuff that pops "out" of the screen). That being said, the 3D effect for depth of field in Avatar was really effective. I think I still prefer 2D, but the occasional 3D is a nice diversion.

After the steadily diminishing returns from most franchise sequels I've endured, my formerly cautious optimism has devolved into pre-emptive pessimism... and it actually works out better (for me at least). I went into AVP:R expecting absolute dreck (which some would say is what we got), but like CoryHolmes I actually had fun watching it. So, "Predators" gets the same treatment from me... guilty of disappointment until proven mildly entertaining.

What gets me is that studios have these franchises they're so eager to exploit, yet at the same time they set them up to fail by spending no money, relying on 2nd and 3rd tier talent to bring them home. I can only guess that the thinking is the built-in fan audience will pull up box office numbers, thus they don't bother investing the extra cash so as to get better margins. Of course this drives down quality, fans leave the franchise, the diminishing returns cause the studio to put even less money in, and you're caught in the downward spiral that sucks everything good out of the concept. Y'know, I vaguely remember reading something like this somewhere... maybe in the Aliens script companion, the novelization, the Colonial Marines Handbook, I don't remember... explaining how in the corporate-driven future all the military talent went to the companies who paid top dollar, leaving the down-and-out and life sentence draftees (like Drake and Vasquez) for national militaries like the USCMC. On top of that, Burke used his clout to get a rookie C.O. for the mission who he could easily handle. ... or is my randomly-firing memory just making me think I read that to mask my unsubstantiated meta-think?

This all ties back to my comment Internal consistency is something competent writers achieve. Lack of same says something about the quality of Robotech's writing. It would have made for a better story just to stick with the Macross notion of the Zentraedi being so ignorant of non-military culture, rather than having the Zentraedi attribute anything they didn't understand to what turns out to be just a power source. As for the power imparting pseudo-life to mechanical devices, I think that was a McKinney invention (...or was there some off-hand comment from Roy or Rick about Protoculture and the cola robots? ... don't care enough to look it up), but again the idea that this strange biologically-derived energy had an effect on technology is something I think a good writer could explore. The novels didn't do an awful job of that, IMHO, considering they had to operate within the constraints of a poorly constructed and inconsistent story in the first place.

I dunno if I'd agree with "cheap" I always thought the original premise, an alien plant with a growth process so energetic that if you held the seeds in stasis to prevent that growth you could harvest huge amounts of power, was kinda interesting. At least, it was no more offensive to my suspension of disbelief than controlled matter-antimatter reactions, subspace, hyperspace, warp drive, admantium, unobtainium, Minovsky particles, or any other sci-fi contrivance that gets us around those pesky laws of physics. In the hands of a competent writer, it could even be an interesting plot device. Maybe that will happen some day. Then HG can hunt down and punish the author for daring to steal their idea.

I love Tamiya masking tape. I don't airbrush, but its great for brush and spray paint. A simple way to protect from "underflow" without having to glue down the masking is to brush gloss clear over the edges of the tape and let it dry first. It fills in all the nooks and crannies and seals the tape seam so that the next coat can't get under. Works for me every time, although it does mean that some gloss clear may get left on the canopy if it flows under the mask. Never bothers me, 'cause I always clear-coat canopies.

Gamlin VF-22S would be my favourite, but the Tomahawk's a real close second.