I love that Real G! So many cool garage kits from around that era, probably 95% never sold outside Japan. 

Hope you get the larger nozzles soon, I want to see you dig into this big beast! 

I pulled out this monstrosity from the Deep Storage Vault.

The Buran is mecha designer Kazuhisa Kondoh's interpretation of the MA-05 Bigro from the original Mobile Suit Gundam TV show.  Kondoh did a manga series which featured the Buran, as well as many other designs from various Gundam shows.  Kondoh's aesthetic felt kind of like anime meets Star Wars.  Such cool stuff in the heyday of the "hardware show" anime era.

The kit was purchased in Japan in the early 1990s, around the same time as the Super ZZ Gundam.  It was part of Goikken Muyou's "Abunai Mechanics Series".  "Goikken Muyou" means "Your opinion is not needed"!  And "Abunai" means dangerous, so the kit was from the "Dangerous Mechanics Series".  

The main components are big and chunky.  And HEAVY!  No roto-casting here; it's all solid blocks of resin!

Anyway, the reason this kit got pulled out of the stash is because I belatedly wanted to check if the 3-D printed F-15 exhaust nozzles I purchased were a good fit - and they were NOT!    They were too small.  Oh bugger, I need 1/48 nozzles.  Oh well, my friends have 1/72 F-15s so I can let them use them.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Looking forward to seeing how both of these projects shape up!

So cool!!!! Glad to see you in motion on this monster! 

So on New Year's Eve I started this monstrosity:

Gah, that's a lot of parts!

This is all I got done in one evening.  I was starting to nod off by 10:30, but managed to stay up past midnight.

But like eating an elephant, by working on subasemblies one bit at a time, I'll get this thing across the finish line!

Not yet Gamera, but hopefully soon!

That's so cool G! Did you get any more work done? 

We'll have to agree to disagree Potchip.  I found Katoki's aesthetic refreshing in the late 1980s/early 1990s.  At the time, I found the folded paper edges and sleek industrial looks to be an attractive and sophisticated step up from Kunio Okawara's kind of dumpy super robot designs.  I liked Syd Mead's work for similar reasons, but his take on Gundam was just too weird and off-key for me.

Perhaps Katoki's current work has become cliche, since it appears Bandai has chosen him to pen most of the new kits' lines.  I was hoping there would be a true Katoki Zaku II, since the Zaku II 2.0 was so darned near perfect.  But I don't gush over all of his works, as I dislike anything Gundam Wing (perhaps that smacks of blasphemy here in the US, but I got my Gundam indoctrination elsewhere, years before Cartoon Network aired the show).

Makoto Kobayashi is like the Picasso of the Gundam world, kind of the end marker of the farthest that the extremes of Gundam designs will go.  And I like it.  A lot.  None of my friends do, but I don't care.

Time to get on with the Super ZZ.

Ok you take that back about Turn-A Gundam! The bearded one has very elegant lines. 

The worst thing that happened to gundam design was Hajime Katoki IMO. When I read the background of that super ZZ at least I can appreciate back in the 80's there were competing asthetics and designers bring different styles to the table. Nowadays, it's all the same proportion and same concepts, with different backpacks. I scoffed at most of the Unicorn designs even if it's set in UC (unicorn mode itself, maybe, but the body proportions is an abomination). Just not interesting at all and stop making mecha with anime-human proportions already! /ENDRANT

Here are some closer pics of the kit:

The unpainted blocks on the shoulders are one-shot(!) energy capacitors for the twin beam guns.

There is a small white metal insert "face" that goes into the resin head.

Gigantic "smart gun", rear stabilizer fin, beam sabres, front armor skirt, and arm parts.

The hands are white metal, so the fingers can be adjusted a bit to handle the smart gun.  I think Kobayashi was inspired by Ripley's ad-hoc taped-together machine gun/flame thrower in Aliens, since this kit's gun includes a twin beam gun, grenade launcher, and flame thrower!

Those are really big shoes!

Actually, I think it WAS based on a Zoids King Kong.  I felt when Kow started leaning on the Zoids aesthetic was when his MaK design edge began to wander off course.  The Grosserhund is a prime example.

All artists have their off days though.  Kobayashi did that weird Space Battleship Yamato with the greenhouse window.  Heck, even the late, great Syd Mead did... Turn A Gundam.  I heaved about in rage/despair when I saw the design, asking myself how the artist who penned the Spinner and Sulaco could produce such a travesty of a mobile suit.

And if there is anyone with a high-pitched nasal voice who is about to tisk at me, saying Turn A Gundam was a great series - you are not welcome in my house.  

Never hire a westerner to do anime mecha.  It never ends well.

Real G

PhoenixG,

OMG, it's a powered suit...in a powered suit!

What kind of expired senko was Kow Yokoyama smoking the day he invented that thing?!

 

PhoenixG,

OMG, it's a powered suit...in a powered suit!

What kind of expired senko was Kow Yokoyama smoking the day he invented that thing?!

That's a spectacular looking kit! If more Gundam looked like that I'd be more tempted to pick it up.  Hope you get the opportunity to finish it.

I'd have to agree that there is something about the imperfections in a resin kit which give it a certain "liveliness" that is missing from the injection kits.

It was that which caught me when I first saw the reissue of this kit.

I've never done resin but I was ready to jump into the deep end for this one.  Sadly, finances determined otherwise.

Potchip, you apparently understand the Zen art of the unstraight straight line.  You speak the truth about how the imperfect organic look appears to look more natural than perfectly razor straight lines.

And this kit has unstraight lines up the wazoo!  

Interesting. I quite like the rough designs of these concept arts. And sometimes when irregularty transfers to garage kits, nature of hand made products, it lends to the same charm. It is part of the reason I bought Yellow Submarine's 1/4000 SDF kits, even after Hasegawa released their plastic kits. The crisp molding, straight lines etc of the Hasegawa kit is lacking the organic look of line drawings - sometimes you actually want unstraight lines and rounded edges and asymetric parts, which ironically gives a bigger sense of scale.