Saturday, January 19, 2019

Making it Gundam Style

A semi review of:

So it's been a long, long time since I've built a Gundam model kit. The newest two I have are from when G Gundam was running on Toonami, so around 2003ish. Needless to say, I haven't done this in a while. I didn't actually set out to buy this model kit initially.

I recently found my old Gundams and added them to the display atop my dresser:

My nerdiness knows no bounds

There was but one problem. My good old Shining Gundam's head appears to be missing (and my Gundam Deathscythe original is pretty unusable too). I couldn't find a suitable replacement for it, so I ordered the Master Grade Shining Gundam off Amazon.

The only problem is, it looks like it's shipping direct from Japan and won't arrive till mid February, but the tools I bought for it got here quickly. I knew my local bookstore had some Gundams so I checked their selection. Now I don't know this particular variant of the Strike Gundam, but Gundam Seed is one of my favorite Gundam series', so I do like the Strike.This appears to be a build fighters variant on it, but it was the only thing they had that was close to what I would know.

So I built this sucker over a few days. I started with all this:

All you have to do is put it together


Needless to say it was a lot of work. After the first day I just had a torso and a head and some shoulders.
If I only had some arms...
If I only had some legs...




The next day things got more interesting...


One, one arm! Ah-ah-ah!

Two, two arms! Ah-ah-ah!


I was finally getting somewhere, though looking back I made a ton of errors at this time, I didn't put the shoulder armor on properly, and missed a part of the arm, something I would discover later. Next I built some legs


You don't have a leg to stand on!
LOL JK
That's better















♫ We are dancing in the space!
weapon madness
Finally getting the Gundam frame together made me pretty happy but I had a long way to go. My next few steps were to make the included stand (thank you Bandai!), and the weapons for this guy. Was quite an interesting run, especially the gun that had some intricate moving parts. This was around the time I started noticing issues, mainly in noticing the sticker sheet was pretty full, and there were more parts than I expected to need to build the backpack and shield. But I'd really notice the issues with the hands - they would swivel pretty wildly and the gauntlets were always pretty loose.


Turns out I was missing some arm and shoulder parts. Something I was finally able to remedy once I noticed them, which allowed the backpack to peg in, and made the hands much more stable.

surprise!



I got my model supplies at this point, up till then I was using my kitchen scissors to get at the parts. The box to the supplies was trashed, but at least I had nicer tools to do this with (which should really help when I upgrade from 1/144 scale high grade to 1/100 scale master grade). Building the backpack from there was pretty simple, and the final piece ended up looking great!










one sexy bastard

So, with that all out of the way, do I recommend building this model kit? It was fun and if it looks like something you'd like I'd say go for it, it was a nice refresher for me for an old skill I haven't used in a long time - in some ways easier than I remember it, though the real test will be on the larger size master grade. Still, I'm quite happy keeping this guy protecting my Masters of the Universe Classics Castle Grayskull.



Friday, January 18, 2019

Blog Revival

Hey y'alls, this has been an interesting day for me so I'd like to talk about it a bit. As you can see I've posted my Dragon Ball Super Broly movie review (and backdate posted my one youtube video), but otherwise this blog basically didn't exist. I actually went to go make a new one but found out my wanted username was taken. 

Well, to my surprise it apparently belonged to me, from way back in 2004 and I never did anything with it, but it was not associated with my gmail, and because it existed (and I know it was me, it had info from when I lived in Parker CO on it and all the other information definitely pointed to me), I had to figure out what email it belonged to.

I took an educated guess and was correct, it was an old yahoo email that no longer existed. I lucked out and was able to recreate that old email (SOMEHOW no one else took it) and now that it existed again I was able to connect the yahoo account online. But it wasn't that simple!

Once I had reclaimed the yahoo account I couldn't find blog access no matter what I tried! It was pretty frustrating 'till I found The Legacy Account claim page. From there between reclaiming my old yahoo email address (which will probably self terminate soon anyway as I don't really plan to use it much...) and using that I was able to put it all back under my Gmail account.

Blogger people if you ever read this I didn't steal anything this was all definitely me - though having to remake my old email account was... weird - you didn't tell me which email it was, just that it was a yahoo one... which ironically meant one of two email addresses, but I had a good guess which one it was, and was correct.

Whew, this was a weird fun experience just to keep one legacy useless post, a blogger address, and some user info (some of which I had to update, I'm not 25 anymore, thanks though 2006, but a lot of which I left unchanged or only added to). I'll try to make things interesting here!

Dragon Ball Super Broly Review


Dragon Ball Super Broly was surprisingly amazing. It's not -just- a dumb action fighter movie. It IS one with insane action sequences, and if that's all you needed, go freaking see it while it's still in theaters.

I have a long complicated history with Dragon Ball, and especially regarding the titular character, Broly. That is to say, prior to seeing this film I absolutely loathed the character from the old film series (for those that don't know there were old Dragon Ball Z movies back in the day that did not fit into the TV show's story, three of those starred Broly, whom in those versions was a big dumb brute whose only motivation was that as a child he heard another child crying and this upset him, the other child being Goku, so he has to kill him now for.... reasons). The old Broly was a cardboard cut out of a character who made no goddamn sense and was only popular because "his power level is maximum!"

But this movie, unlike the old ones, is actually connected to the TV series in plot and is thus a completely different story. The drama is in full effect here in this film and I cried my eyes out several times. Incidentally, this is not a terrible starting point as it shows the origins of the main characters of this story - Goku, Vegeta, and the new Broly, and how each survived the destruction of their shared home world because of, or in one case in spite of, their parents and the different ways this has impacted who each of them are.

This may all sound pretty heavy, and it can be, but it ALSO lays on the comedy in well timed doses to keep it from being a slog and there are multiple moments that had me laughing my ass off. Goku not knowing what Repugnant meaning and actually asking his adversary to define it for him, or the revelation of what Freeza wanted to wish for on the dragon balls being keen examples of this.

Visually the animation is the absolute best I've ever seen for this series, and that says an awful lot. The pretty is in full force here, and sparkling in some CGI here and there tastefully helped compliment the absolutely stunning hand animation. The soundtrack was on point, but I wouldn't necessarily call it amazing - though I really enjoyed the riff on the Dragon Ball Z theme song, Head Cha La early on.

This continuing past the end of Dragon Ball Super did concern me somewhat as I am still following it's weekly dubbed airings on the Toonami block, Saturday nights on Adult Swim. However, no major spoilers for the current arc appeared for me, much to my surprise.

The only major thing that could impede viewers is if they were not current with the show is the presence of Freeza, a longstanding villain previously thought dead. Though he was notably revived in 2015's 'Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection F', he was defeated at the end of such, and so was previously thought dead, he recently made his return in Dragon Ball Super, and as such is present here.

All of this though avoids the biggest reason I loved this movie, and that's Broly himself. No longer presented as a brutish moron, Broly is now a tormented soul who engenders a good amount of sympathy. While he is the antagonist of the film, he is being used, first by his abusive father, and then by Freeza, and what ultimately sets him over the edge into a mad like rage is one of the most heartbreaking moments of the film.

I would say this film is perfect but for a bit of overuse of action towards the end that attempts to add suspense to a dramatic moment, but really just feels like padding, but this is like saying that a masterpiece cake isn't perfect because the icing is a bit too rich. I'd still call this film an absolute masterpiece, a 9/10 and heavily recommended.