Reorganized some shelves while waiting for new arrivals. Here’s my 1/60 scale mecha lineup, featuring Macross, Dougram, Dorvack, Patlabor, Votoms, Gundam, and Mospeada. Basically, all of my favorite things. Click the top image for a bigger panorama.
Archive for the ‘Bandai’ Tag
1/60 Scale Party Leave a comment
MFV Missiles Are Ready! Leave a comment
Head to the Store because the MFV missiles are ready! Complete those vintage classics and finally get to enjoy their best feature. Every missile is marked for authenticity and indetifiability, and has been test loaded and fired in Getter-1 here. Let me tell you, loading and firing twenty-odd missiles multiple times and at various things to test their loading and durability is pretty darn fun!
Prometheus Rising Studios Casting: Bandai MFV Missiles! Leave a comment
There’s a new Page in the Menu bar at the top of the site, and I am proud to announce a new resin product that will soon be available, reproduction Bandai Missile Firing Vinyl missiles! The Bandai MFVs are some of the most iconic vintage Super Robot vinyls, but missiles are in great demand (mostly because these were toys designed for children, and those children probably spent all their time shooting the missiles at their younger siblings and pets until they lost the missiles), but I am pleased to soon be able to offer an affordable reproduction missile! Big thanks to my friend Sanjeev (mastermind behind Brownnoize Productions) for lending me some vintage missiles, no mean feat! I am figuring out pricing and ordering, as well as working on some stock, so check back for details soon!
Bandai Getter-2 Missile Firing Vinyl 1 comment
Last night we had a big CollectionDX meet up, and I got to pick up this fantastic figure. The Bandai Missile Firing Vinyls are phenomenal pieces of vintage vinyl, with great big chunky sculpts. I don’t have any missiles right now, but the launchers should work when I do get some. Until then, this guy is just a 10″ tall behemoth of mechanical justice, stamping out the evil of standard-sized kaiju wherever they may rear their hideous maws!
Bandai 1/20 VOTOMS ATM-09-GC Brutishdog “Phantom Lady Custom” Leave a comment
In Armored Troopers: VOTOMS (Vertical One-man Tank for Offensive Maneuvers), Fyana is the early show antagonist and mysterious Phantom Lady, who pilots the powerful Brutishdog custom machine. The Brutishdog is a fearsome design, armed with its massive rotary cannon and brutal shearing claw, with an upgraded roller dash system for enhanced speed and maneuverability.
I finished this kit about a year ago and somehow never got around to photographing it (and a companion piece to come later). I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with the excellent Bandai 1/20 VOTOMS plamo kits. On one hand, they are the most detailed and best articulated VOTOMS kits ever produced, but at the same time, they have a dearth of moving parts and are a bit delicate when painted up without care. I have broken a couple of the armor flaps after handling this kit for a year, but it is still one of my favorite models, and the kit really is solid, even if there is a large amount of stuff on the kit that got painted and will never be seen again on the interior and structural skeleton.
The regular pink and off-white Brutishdog has always seemed a bit boring to me, so I wanted to spice up the design with this kit. I added a two-tone pink disruptive scheme to add some interest, along with a large number of decals and some really controlled weathering to depict Fyana in her element, blowing up machines and roller-dashing rings around her enemies. If I ever get around to detailing up my Yamato 1/12 Brutishdog, I will finish it the exact same way.
Shelves 2 comments
My current shelf setup… a combination of real robots in scale and the vintage super robots I’ve been accumulating lately, along with some vinyls and vintage Transformers.
Bandai HCM Walker Galliar Leave a comment
Combat Mecha Xabungle/Blue Gale Xabungle is one of the early pioneer ‘real robot’ mecha animes. I haven’t actually see the show yet, but there is finally a fansubber out there working through the series, so eventually I will watch it. I have always been enamored with the mecha designs, and the toys thereof, especially the Walker Galliar and the Iron Gear. The Iron Gear is a massive transforming land ship, bristling with battleship features like a bridge and gun turrets, and is a toy on my wish list.
The Walker Galliar is one of the mecha deisgns that has a number of toy releases so it must have been a more important machine than the other side-designs that only ever got model kits. The Galliar consists of an armored futuristic pickup truck and a hovercraft, and the two combine and transform to form a robot. The Galliar is pretty much always depicted with its big goofy bazooka, and often an assault rifle and other random weapon situation depending. The ‘real robot’ nature of Xabungle means that every mecha design in the series is built for utility and function over looks and style. Even the Galliar has small gun turrets mounted on it, just like an armored fighting vehicle.
Bandai’s High Complete Model series is one of the staple 80’s mecha toy design lines, bridging the gap between model kits and toys. HCM models often have die cast metal parts and accessories that come on sprues and must be assembled like model parts. The HCM toys from the original line in the 80s included real robots and super robots, from Gundam to Raydeen, and featured excellent detail and articulation for the time. The HCM line’s spiritual successor in the HCMPro line started back up a few years ago with Gundam figures and are excellent as well.
The HCM Walker Galliar is 1/144 scale and features die cast feet and hip bar. The rest of the toy is plastic, and features fantastic articulation for the time, and only a little less articulation than the modern Soul of Chogokin Walker Galliar, which is about the same size. The little mounted gun turrets come on a separate sprue and must be attached to the figure, and the yellow details in the ankle rounds are stickers. I wanted to add a little detail to the figure, taking cues from the Real Robot Revolution Walker Galliar plamo kit by Bandai, adding some rivets and panel lines on the legs. I didn’t want to have to repaint the whole figure, so I did not worry about part seams and sprue marks on the figure, but just wanted to add detail and weathering to make a pretty figure that could still be played with. Weathering was made from my new favorite mix of Mig pigments, Tamiya weathering pigments, and paint washes. The tough thing was the balance weathering for robot mode and vehicle mode, so there is some overlap in weathering that applies to one mode and not the other, but really that makes sense for a variable machine.
Bandai 1/100 Zaku IIJ MG ver2.0 Leave a comment
The Zaku II from Mobile Suit Gundam and just about every Gundam production thereafter is one of my favorite mecha designs of all time. Fortunately Bandai’s Master Grade 2.0 is one of the most amazing pieces of gunpla I’ve ever worked with. The 2.0 MG combines Perfect Grade detail levels, including a full mechanical skeleton, with an insane focus on articulation, allowing the Zaku to achieve some truly natural looking poses. This rendition of the big one-eye has received some flak for its retro vibe, but I consider it a pretty definitive representation, combining the bulkiness of the original animation with a little extra sleekness and mean-ness and emphasis on functionality.
From the get-go I knew this was going to be a fairly heavily weathered model, as I really wanted to focus on the walking-tank aspect of this ground combat machine. However, after watching the first episode of MSG MSIgloo 2, I think my weathering is pretty take! I built the kit Out Of the Box with a few exceptions… the shoulder spikes were replaced with Adler’s Nest turned metal parts, as was the camera mono-eye fixture and the machine gun barrel. Form there I went to painting… the internals were all over brushed with a dark dark-grey, and then from there I only really focused on parts that would be visible once all the armor was attached… one of the biggest ‘problems’ I have with gunpla kits with full interiors is that I always go overboard working on the interior, which is never visible, and often messes up the fit of some of the parts when attaching the armor and whatnot. On all the visible areas (mostly around the joints) I added dry brushing, oil work, and fully painted piston parts. I also fully painted the cockpit and pilot, but I don’t have enough of a light setup to effectively photograph in there…
The external parts were base coated with acrylics shot through my GW spray gun… the light green was a custom mix, and the darker khaki color was a stock P3 paint (the Privateer Press Paints line features FANTASTIC drab army-type colors). The black bits were hand painted, and the two sets of green parts received something new for me… I used the spray gun on its finest nozzle setting to over spray some highlights to the parts. There’s not alot of highlight showing up once the kit is fully weathered, but it definitely added to the affect, and really, a single technique like that shouldn’t be readily picked out from a finished model. All of the parts then received a coat of Future through my spray gun, and I assembled the bulk of the armor on the skeleton. Next step was decals… lots of decals. I bought the Bandai water slide decal sheet for this kit (kind of a racket selling real decals separately, but they’re only four or five dollars a sheet, and phenomenal quality). I aimed for a marking set similar to the ‘Real Type’ Zaku design used by Bandai, including the striping, which all had to be done from individual line decals and trimmed to shape. All of the decals received a tough of decal softening solution to snuggle them all the way down to the gloss surface, and a coat of future brush painted on to smooth out the edges of the carrier film. I added the graffiti, which I had been planning to do from the start… I figure this guy’s been on Earth for a while now, and the Federation has probably started to rally its forces, so the Sieg Zeon would be like a rallying call for the Zekes. Once all the decals were set, the whole model recieved a matte varnish coat so I could start weathering. I did some initial dry brushing to weather the decals a bit and pick out the edges of some details. I added some surface discoloration filters using oil colors blended into the surface, and added rust streaking and panel lining in a similar manned (obviously less blended in). A bit of battle damage was carved into the model using an X-Acto blade, and I painted in this damage with dark grey and metal colors, and then added rust streaking to some of the wounds to make them look like older battle scars. Form there the model received some more matte varnish, and the dust and dirt on the legs and feet, done with some weathering pigments for the mud and tan Valeijo acrylics for the dust, done in a number of very thin washes. The accessories were finished (the Zaku also has a Heat Hawk close combat weapon, and a big bazooka which I did not bother to photograph, and optional leg-mounted missile launchers which I didn’t assemble.) I’m really satisfied with how this guy came out, and am thinking about adding some similar weathering to my big 1/35 Jumbo Grade Zaku to help it fit in with my 35th scale tank kits.
Prometheus Rising Studios 