Ginrai

We have a new podcast up at: http://www.destroyallpodcasts.com It is about the Power Rangers mini series from the early '90s, Green with Evil. What do you think, sirs?

Oh, cool!

Gee, for a sequel to DYRL that takes place in the same universe as Macross II, Macross 2036 sure has a TV looking SDF-1 with the Daedalus and Promotheus as arms...

Hey A88, do you have any interest in doing Pink Noise OVA 3: Evil Dragon War Chronicles 1?

I know I'm going to get yelled at for about talking about this, but Lensman talks a LOT about them having suped up space armor, especially in Galactic Patrol (first printed in 1937 according to my copy. You need to pay more attention to what you are reading. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f...ctic_patrol.jpg or http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51kj...cAL._SS500_.jpg Oh look, armor. And no, I am not confusing it for the anime and comic adaptation, which does NOT have the armor. I just grabbed my book and without much trying found a passage. It's the part where Kim gets the crap shot out of him. In my copy, page 158, "He belted on his personal equipment, including a nullifer, then inspected his armor, checking its supplies and apparatus carefully before he hooked it ready to his hand." He attacks his enemies and turns their home into a "gorily reeking slaughter-pen" (page 161), flies with his armor, uses its built in generators. He get shot up in the armor and almost dies and there's stuff about its "power lead [having been] severed by a bullet" (page 164) that he has to repair. Does it have the mechanical detail and does it go into great lengths about how it works like Starship Troopers? No. But again, that's why Starship Troopers was so influential to real robots and by extension, so influential to Gundam, which in turned was a big influence on Macross, Dougram, and other shows that Battletech borrowed robots from as well as the obvious connetion with the Elemental. These shows and Battletech as well are obsessed with mechanical detail and explaining how things work, whereas Lensman doesn't care about science, especially pretend science. I don't know how people here feel about Mech Assault 2, but you play a lot of that game as an elemental, and yes, you can be "on the bounce" ala Starship Troopers. The Elementals also were playable in the old MechWarrior games like Mw2. Like in Starship Troopers, they are just a little bigger than man sized. Also Spacehounds of IPC is not part of Lensman.

Aha! I got it! (With the help of some tweezers.)

Hey folks. I just got the large Bandai SDF-1 from the Robotech line (not the Takatoku, though I assume this is the same in both versions.) When transforming it from robot mode to spaceship mode, the instructions say to pull the main bridge left and the radar dish thing next to it to the right, but I can't seem to get either part to move. Is there a button I have to push or something to get this to work that I'm missing?

The Macross II movie is just the OVA with the OP/EDs edited out except for the very first OP and the very last ED.

Sweet! Thanks dude. I will grab it when I get home tonight.

I liked the first UA game but wow, you just totally killed any interest I had in the game. Civil War was awful.

They turned her into a delicious soda made from slug butt juice?

Oh, this looks like a cool start.

Yeah, being a sucker, I'd probably buy it.

Then it wouldn't be in scale with the Garland!

My Priss is non-metallic but doesn't seem brittle or anything. The design is just kind of badly executed.

Cool. I actually have the VHS of this already, but I appreciate you putting stuff up. We plan to review this on the podcast sometime soonish.

So more info: Apparently the tracker blacklisted many different BT clients including mine. How lame. If you can hook me up with a DL for this, A88, that would be rad.

Oh fine, you know what I am getting at: Starship Troopers is hard sci-fi, Lensman ain't. Right, which is exactly what I said: Starship Troopers inspired the REAL ROBOT type of anime/manga robot, not the SUPER ROBOT. Mazinger Z and Getter Robo are super robots. Gundam is a real robot. Well, let's see. First, here's an excerpt from the US translations of Tomino's original Gundam novels: http://books.google.com/books?id=E5U95deDq...ino&f=false From the introduction by Mark Simmons, "Yoshiyuki Tomino, the director of Mobile Suit Gundam, was a veteran of the anime industry who already had a handful of traditional super robot series to his credit. Tomino's previous entries into the genre had drawn attention for their dramatic flair and unusually harsh storylines, but, even so, Gundam came a bold departure. Inspired by real-world space science, and literary sci-fi like Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers..." Mark Simmons, if you don't know, is pretty much the foremost English-speaking authority on Gundam. If that's not good enough, see this: http://www.ex.org/4.1/33-book_g2.html This is an article by Egan Loo talking about the Gundam 20th Anniversary Tribute Magazine from a decade ago. "Nevertheless, the best essay in the first issue is easily Iizuka Masao's recollections on GUNDAM's genesis (as told to Mizutani Tatsuhiko). Ever wonder how Sunrise discovered Robert Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS novel and his influential powered suits? The book was brought to the attention of Sunrise's head by a certain science-fiction fan named Takachiho Haruka—co-founder of Studio Nue and author of CRUSHER JOE and DIRTY PAIR." I assume you know who Egan Loo is. Here's an excerpt from The science of Anime: mecha-noids and AI-super-bots By Lois H. Gresh, Robert E. Weinberg, "The basic idea of the 'mobile suit' as a weapon came from the high-powered space suits used in the novel Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein." http://books.google.com/books?id=waFSojA3I...iew&f=false Nearly every comment everywhere on the web and in anime books about the creation of Gundam mentions Starship Troopers, but there's some concrete evidence for you. If you want more evidence of Starship Troopers' influence in Japan, you can look to the interview on the DVD of the anime version of Toward the Terra, where manga-ka Keiko Takemiya says that Starship Troopers and Cyborg 009 were a big influence on here. You can get the disc and watch the interviews yourself if you want, but one of the reviews here mentions it: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3DGKT4H18QTO1 I also found an interview Matt Alt did with the late Taku Sato, designer and sculptor for Fewture Models. Sato designed Fewture's Getter Robo toys and such. Here's the interview: http://altjapan.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006...first_of_a.html Sato says, "Studio Nue's illustrations for the Japanese language edition of Robert Heinlein's novel "Starship Troopers" left a deep impression on me as well, and they continue to influence my design work today." Do I need to keep going? Starship Troopers was a huge influence on the real robot movement of robot manga and anime. Do I have sales figures for the novel's Japanese re-release in the '70s with Miyatake's cover? Of course not, but at the very least, a lot of sci-fi anime/manga creators cite the book as a big influence.

I still haven't been able to get a single byte of this. Could someone please seed it or megaupload or something?

I have the Priss Motoslave too and it is in my opinion nowhere near as cool nor as fun as the Proto. It's way too small and the transformation so finicky and intricate that it's no fun, and the robot once you've built it is tiny and underwhelming. Also the Priss figure doesn't really fit in it too well. There are very few modes where her feet reach the little pegs they are supposed to be standing on. Meh.

There were power armor of sorts in SF literature before Starship Troopers, this is true. Lensman is the earliest example I have been able to find. Lensman, however, pretty much invented the space opera and is a very pulpy brand of sci-fi not very concerned with science or reality. Starship Troopers is one of the early examples of hard sci-fi, and among the first to depict power armor in fetishistic mechanical detail and was a big inspiration for Gundam. The mecha designs for the '70s Japanese reissue of the novel (by Miyatake) were a big selling point to the Japanese audience and that is how they directly inspired the real robot movement. Yes, they didn't get around to doing an anime adaption until much later and it was kind of an interesting failure, but that's hardly an indicator of the book's success in Japan. If there's a sucky movie adaptation of a book does that suddenly mean the book wasn't popular and didn't sell well? Of course not.

New podcast up at: www.destroyallpodcasts.com It's about The Calamari Wrestler, a touching love story about a wrestling squid and his estranged family. Imagine if you will, a kaiju version of Rocky, and you have the right idea. This movie is totally ridiculous and from the director of Executive Panda, so you know what you are getting into!

Gimme a break. Tetsujin 28 is a robot controlled by a remote control box. No one rides in it. It's a very different concept.

Well, I'm not sure that's an arc but season 1 is only like 12 episodes, right?

Cool, glad you liked it! I think the biggest thing is that it had been a long time since I watched the original Transformers show. The last time I saw the majority of it was Generation 2 and some reruns on Sci-Fi Channel. I've been steadily making my way through more of the DVD boxset, though, and getting more caught up. Let me know if there are particular episodes you'd like us to talk about. I was planning on just doing the multi-parters and maybe little ones here and there that were favorites of mine.