Author: captainjls

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Action Figures

Dragon Stars Super Saiyan 4 Vegeta

Super Saiyan 4 Vegeta posed as though powering up his ki.

There comes a point in every long-running franchise’s lifetime where it comes time to either wrap it up or reboot it back to a default, classic state. For He-Man it was the sci-fi flavored The New Adventures, intended as a shot in the arm for the aging line, that marked the time to call it quits for a generation. For Ninja Turtles, Saban’s live action TV series The Next Mutation and the darker, seedier Volume 3 comics from Image were a last hurrah for two separate markets until the 21st century. Transformers threw a variety of figures and storytelling against the wall in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. following 1990’s non-transforming Action Masters until Beast Wars began a short-lived renaissance that crashed again with the bizarre techno-organic stylings of Beast Machines. In all three cases, when the early 2000s rolled around these franchises shed their ’90s evolutions and tried to revert to their 1980s glories, with varying degrees of success.

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This Robotech Thing

This Robotech Thing: The Year Ahead

Tiny Captain JLS begins their seminar on Robotech in 2020.

In which Captain JLS looks to the year ahead in the land of Robotech and sees it filled with comics, books, and toys, but offers little hope as far as movies and shows go. Features an eye-rolling rant about a thorny issue from six years ago and a few typical moments of Sentinels obsession.

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Movies

Movies 2019, Part 2

Movies 1992-2018

It’s part two of my round-up of all the movies I sat in front of in 2019, whether at home or in the theater. Ten movies, presented in release date order, starting off in the 1990s and making it into 2018 — which, as I said last time, just goes to show that I mostly saw stuff from 2018 & 2019 last year. (I’m really hoping to do better this year.)

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Categories
Action Figures

Gundam Universe RX-78-2 Gundam

The RX-78-2 makes an iconic pose.

It’s absolutely terrifying to realize in the awful dystopian future year of 2020 that it’s been about sixteen years since the end of Bandai’s big push to get Gundam toys into American toy aisles, an effort that ended with a last-gasp cough of 4″ Gundam SEED figures in the style of the Wing, Universal Century, and G Gundam figures that had previously littered Walmarts, Targets, and Toys ‘R’ Us stores nationwide. What a time that was — when you could walk into Walmart and come out with a sturdy plastic Zeon Gallop and a handful of Zakus and Doms! (Seriously, Bandai really wanted the original Gundam to be a thing in the early ’00s — it was nuts, but the good kind of nuts. The kind that got us a deluxe Zaku set that came with a Magella Attack Tank so you bash them together into a Zaku Tank. I miss those days …)

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Movies

Welcome | Movies 2019, Part 1

Movies 1955-1989

Well, hello there, dear reader! I’m Captain JLS, your faithful Robotech / comics / ’80s robot toy fanatic (over twenty years now of making loud noises about Robotech on the internet, which is utterly horrifying), welcoming you to my shiny new blog. Having given in to the idea that 2020 is the start of a new decade and tidied up my living situation within the past six months, it seemed the right time to press the eject button on my largely abandoned previous home on the web and get a fresh start under a unified branding umbrella. The screen name I’ve been using since high school — and which I still use on my Robotech-related videos on YouTube (and by which I refer to myself above) — seemed the easiest bit of nomenclature to attach everything to, hence the site you see before you.

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