F-ZeroOne

rewooh - "Claw game" machines are often referred to as "UFO Catcher" machines. They often have some very unique collectable items, but you can burn an awful lot of 100 yen coins trying to get them - it can be cheaper to go to a shop in Tokyo and buy the item in question...! (some Japanese people must make a fair living out of re-selling rare items to these shops! ) "Gashapon disease" is a term sometimes used to refer to bent or bendy material used in various toy lines; gashapon often have bent or bendy accessories ( swords, etc ) and the name is often applied to toys that aren't gashapon but have easily bent accessories - Gundam Mobile Suit in Action figures, for example.

"And so ends the challenge... " All I can say is, first hint of singing when they do the test flight, and I'll be digging my YF-19 straight out of storage...

I'm pretty sure that the original concept was an Osamu Tezuka idea. There was an anime version released in the UK a few years ago, "Ambassador Magma".

There is a distinct difference between something being 'good' and something being 'popular'. Just beacuse the masses like something, does not make it good. The Spice Girls & Britney Spears are two examples that spring to mind. But anyway, I digress, that is a discussion for another time. Graham (not a Harry Potter fan). I'm well aware of that, Graham, but I do think that the amount of publicity around the books does rather obscure the fact that they are, more or less, pretty good reads ( its also been pointed out that Britney Spears single "Hit me baby one more time!" is actually a pretty good song - by a British band called Travis, who did a slightly spoof cover version that has been remarked as sounding as if loneliness really is killing the singer... ) I'm not claiming that they're the greatest things ever written, but that doesn't make them bad either, and the impression I've got of J.K. Rowling is that she deserves at least some of her success. Also, we British do tend to be very hard on the successful, and I think its great that a British export has become so well known all over the World. But, as you say, this isn't really the place and arguments like this do tend to go round and round in circles. Maybe we should move on to wondering when the VF-0 Hoki no e Varible Broomstick will make an entrance in Macross Zero... Edit: a further thought or two: perhaps anime fans more than others may appreciate the value of a story as a bridge between languages or cultures, as well. Rowlings England isn't the England I live in, just as the Japan of, say, Love! Hina isn't exactly the Japan I've visited. But a sense of the countries they're set in is there, and the generation of interest in other places hopefully works in two directions...

Him and half of Japan, to be fair... ( when you travel about five hundred miles in a completely foreign country and meet three different people all of whom are Harry Potter fans, it kinda makes any argument about whether the books are any good rather redundant... ) I can't wait to hear the radio chatter now! "Skull One, Angels Twenty, vector three hundred, estimate bandits six million plus, over." "Copy, Macross. Skull One to Skull flight, bandits at six o'clock high, climb at buster and engage. Tally Ho, and get Hikaru to put the kettle on, Emma, we'll be back in time for tea!"

Add another vote to Babylon 5. "Its a Sunday, and I'm going for a drive." Also Blakes 7 - there haven't been many SF shows that have had endings like that. Anime-wise, Gainax do good endings. Nadia made me so happy I wanted to cry, and of course, Gunbuster. Kimagure Orange Roads first movie conclusion to the love triangle actually hurts. And also Maison Ikkoku the manga, because I never ever thought I'd see Rumiko Takahashi do that...! Edit: moved KOR a little so people don't think I think its a Gainax show...

Good luck - Nintendo Europe have recently been coming down rather hard on UK importers, and I guess that might apply to exports in the other direction as well. These may be of help: https://www.anotherworld.co.uk/cgi-bin/awv2.pl http://www.goblindirect.com/default.asp?KillKart=true But if Mario asks, I didn't tell you... B)

Heh, good guess but no - I think I've dropped enough hints that I'm from the UK. Most of our wildlife is pretty harmless, at least in comparison to other countries. You'll notice that Steve Irwin has yet to do a programme here... "And this little blighter is a common household pussycat, very common in England. Look how mean he gets when I stroke his fur the wrong way... " ( the lack of lethality among UK wildlife is probably why the UK had a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals before it had a similar organisation for children, and even that hasn't got a Royal warrant...! )

One spider in Australia has caused a number of fatalties and it isn't even venomous...! It likes to live in cars, and has a habit of crawling out onto the windscreen when people are driving. The problem is that this spider is huge and people tend to react in a rather alarmed manner when the sun is being blocked out by an eight legged beastie... and swerve straight into the nearest immovable object...! Kinda makes me glad I live in a country where the biggest spider is usually about th size of a penny and theres only one kind of poisionous snake, and thats not often encountered...

One quick web-search later... Eep. I'm gonna need a bigger gun...

That I did not know but what I do know is that it is the same craft used in a new/recent japanese animation. I dont know the name to this animation but it was the other one alongside Macross Zero & Yukikaze at the panel at Hobby Expo If I was to take a completely wild guess, its possible that animation is Firestorm, an anime series which originally had a degree of British involvement, which included Gerry "Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, and please don't ask me about Space 1999" Anderson. I stress that is a complete guess, but seeing as the TSR-2 is quite an obscure aircraft relatively speaking... the TSR-2 was actually probably as close as anyone got to making a real Thunderbird-styled aircraft...! ( of course, we all know that Macross made the XB-70 Valkyrie quite famous - as did Zeta Gundam - and its always possible this unnamed new anime has some aviation nuts on the staff...! )

Actually... some kind of spiders do have hive mentality. Though, they don't build hives like ants, they simply mark their territory. Some thing size of your fist? Heh... in Amazon forest we get spiders the size of your upper body. You can't scare me like that - I know that spiders can only reach a certain size because of the method they use for breathing (among other structual problems... ) Of course, if you were some kind of mad scientist, and tried to create some kind of... oh, I don't know... man-spider, then that might be suitably big and scary - wait, whats that scuttling sound behin - YEEEAAARRRGGGHHHHHHH!!!

Spiders definitely do get more film attention, but people should be more scared of giant ants - after all, I've rarely heard of spiders co-operating in real life, but ants do all the time... ( funnily enough, at least two spider movies have spiders acting more like ants than they do spiders... ) I believe Arthur C. Clarke once wrote a spoof SF short about a mad scientist who was teaching termites how to make fire... Edit: BTW, I think that spiders do a lot of good and largely unsung work in the ecological community. However, if something the size of my fist happens to be crawling across the floor, just pass me that Janes All The Worlds Variable Aircraft, will you...?!

Thank You very much for the kind comments And thanks for the recommendations! interesting! Just for completeness sake, the small grey jet is an actual prototype technology demonstration plane thats been raising a few eyebrows ( I think its a Boeing product ), while the white cropped delta with the famous blue, white, and red roundels is the TSR 2, arguably the greatest aircraft ever to be destroyed by political squabbling...

3D CGI helps a lot, but even mega-budget films like Pearl Harbour often need close-up shots and the dilemma there is whether to make the 3D models match the authentic ones or what they've actually got available. In fact, when I saw one of the movie posters, I thought that the Japanese torpedo plane depicted looked a little strange - I later found out that some of the aircraft used were "pretend" Zeros and the like...! ( my all time favourite production story, though, is from when I visited Bletchley Park and the guide explained that the real mansion looks very different from the one in the film Enigma, because the producers felt that Bletchley Park didn't look enough like Bletchley Park! ) Gerwalker, there is a movie due out that will cover at least part of the Desert battles; its about that magician who helped the British Army with various camoflauge tricks and the like. The war film I would most like to see would be a biography of the RAF reconnaissance pilot, Adrian Warburton ( sorry - make that Wing Commander Adrian Warburton, DSO & Bar, DFC & 2 Bars, US DFC ), whose remains were recently found in Germany and properly buried, finally solving a 60 year mystery...

A fairly common sentiment in the British press is that there should be more war films about British war stories... I've long felt that an anime war anthology series would be an interesting idea. There would of course be some grumbling about Japanese animators being responsible for stories about American or British solidiers, for example, but I'd like to know where you'll find better animated flying sequences...! The advantage animation would have would be that its a lot easier to use authentic equipment thats hard to find these days - just about every film featuring the Battle of Britain, for instance, has to make do with what aircraft are currently available; its not noticable for a general audience but for those who know what to look for, Mk. V or later Spitfires or a Merlin engined Bf-109 do tend to stick out in 1940...!

I voted "other". Coming from the other side of the pond, there were a number of attempts by European companies to cash-in - and that is the only word for it, because there is no way in Hell these guys were going to beat the likes of Sega and Nintendo - on the 16-bit console craze. I can't remember them all, but among these ill-starred and doomed attempts were consoles from Commodore ( based on Amiga hardware, I think ) and Amstrad ( which if memory serves, bizarrely enough, was based on their CPC-464 computer hardware - a fairly good computer in its day, but completely out of its depth pitched as a console against the competition... ) There was also a handheld gaming unit made by a company more famous for its joysticks than its technological prowess; and oh, do the Sega VMU and Sony PDA count?

Apologies for the big edit to your text, I think you just burned out my cortex. This is what gets me about Evangelion. I've seen the entire series, seen several key episodes more than once, seen the movie, twice, and still when I read things like this I feel that theres some party I wasn't invited to. Could you please let me know - with full frame numbers, timing stops, and scene-by scene deconstructions - exactly where all this is explained in the series?! ( just kidding, honestly, but I think you can see what I'm driving at...! ) Edit: typos.

If you're seeing Dr. Who for the first time from the point of view of someone bought up on Farscape, Firefly, Babylon 5, etc, you might rather wonder what all the fuss is about. From the point of view of a UK resident and SF fan who grew up during the tail-end of Dr. Whos mainstream popularity, however, its a bit easier to understand. See a Dalek in action today and you see a wobbly pepperpot armed with a sink plunger. See it when I saw it first, and you'll grow up believing nothing, absolutely nothing, could possibly be more terrifying... Dr. Who might not have the best special effects, or the best plots ( there was an awful lot of running down corridors or around quarries ), but it had character in spades. There hasn't been a new series in years, but even today, a magazine in the UK can refer to a car as having a "TARDIS like interior", or someone "speaking like a Dalek", in the sure knowledge that everyone will instantly know what it means. And - for all the wobbly sets, and chroma-hue SFX, and tin-foil clad monsters - it could also explore some pretty fine SF ideas and stories. The TARDIS itself was an icon from the moment it appeared, but then throw in the Cybermen, and the Doctors re-generations, and UNIT, and the Daleks... B)

Just in case you're wondering, the writer Russell T. Davies is quite well respected in the UK. However, he does have a habit of picking controversial subjects; one of his dramas was about the Second Coming of Christ - in present day Manchester, England...! ( okay, for an anime crowd familiar with Evangelionthat might not sound out of the way, but for a "typical" UK television audience it was considered a bit of a stretch...! ) One things for sure, whatever - or whoever - the new Doctor turns out like, its probably not going to be anything like we expect...!

"Who?" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/t...dio/3140786.stm Its about time, if you'll pardon the pun...!

The more and more I try and find something that resembles this thing, the more convinced I am that its a made up design using elements of a lot of aeroplanes that the artists liked...! The cockpit and forward fuselage reminds me of some Italian monoplane fighters from WWII, the landing gear from a WWI Fokker Triplane, the rear tail is a *little* bit like a Hurricane (but more triangular... ) I did try a bit of lateral thinking and had a search for model kits that may have been produced to tie in with the anime, but came up blank. However, I would expect that *someone* must have tried building something like this at least once; anyone got a large collection of 80s Hobby Japans they're prepared to search through...?! Edit: the "Revi C/120", BTW, is the reference to the make of gunsight shown in the book scans, just in case anyones wondering.

Although theres a Patlabor influence in there, the thing this reminded me of the most was the Destroid Spartan...

IIRC, the SR-71 was originally "RS-71", presumably "Recon-Survelliance". Then at some press conference or another, a Presidential candidate - it might have been the President - got his letters the wrong way round, and SR-71 it was for all time to come...

Anything by Ghibli - Kikis Delivery Service if your audience has a worthwhile attention span, Totoro or Porco Rosso if they haven't. Project A-Ko if you think they enjoy some slapstick. Cowboy bebop does not need much scene-setting. Macross Plus movie. Dragon Half for laughs. If you think they have open enough minds, the Utena movie. Granted, the story will make very little sense to the unintiated, but as a as a visual spectacular, I don't think it can be beaten.