Konami's Vic Viper model, Sky Girls anime version

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greg
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Konami's Vic Viper model, Sky Girls anime version

Post by greg »

So I forced myself to watch the Sky Girls anime a couple years ago. It started out fairly amusing at first, but it got old fast with the premise of somehow only adolescent, cute girls who were born without personalities must wear bathing suits and fly around in the sky to defeat alien invaders. I was almost expecting some Evangelion-esque religious bullcrap, but I was relieved that the explanation to the whole conflict turned out to be non-derivative and at least somewhat interesting. Still, it didn't hold my interest well, and I watched the 20+ episode show over the course of a year or so. Then I went back to watching Zeta Gundam for the second time.

Anyhow, Atelier Sai is not a company known for making plastic models. Nevertheless, Konami chose them to produce a series of Vic Viper models for their Gradius game series. First on the list was the Vic Viper from the Sky Girls anime, and this was the kit that many of us bought once it first came out... only to discover that Atelier Sai does not know how to make decent plastic models. They tried to make the model build sort of like a Gundam model by Bandai, ie different-colored plastic to make painting "unnecessary," providing lousy stickers instead of waterslide decals, etc. Well, the parts don't fit together properly, the plastic is waxy and has a weird eggshell texture that first needs to be sanded, and so on and so on. For fans of the Gradius games who bought this model who've never really put together a plastic model before, this kit will certainly be a challenge to make it look nice.

I have been working on this model a little bit at a time over the past week or two, hoping to have it completed soon. I have been videoing the progress to show people what I am doing to put it together. Hopefully it will look nice in the end. I'll upload a link once it is completed. Unfortunately, the first part of the video was recorded back in America and it lies on a hard drive to a dead computer, which I am unable to read via a SATA/USB converter.

I am ditching the colors used in the Sky Girls anime in favor of my own color scheme. It's supposed to be in a stark white and blue color scheme, but I am using grey and navy blue, along with my first attempt at making chipped paint. I will also try weathering it to make it look dirty. I am not going to bother building the Sky Girls frame that also came with the kit. I have another Vic Viper model, the one from Gradius III on the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom.

As far as a Gradius anime goes, there actually was a 3 part Salamander OVA put out by Konami. The first episode is Salamander, the 2nd part is Gradius and is actually a prequel, and the third epsiode combines the characters from part 2 with part 3. I bought a bootleg DVD of this OVA series off of eBay, and it was probably the best bootleg I've bought because it had decent subtitled (the others being Robot Carnival because I was unable to find the LD anywhere, and the Sakura Taisen movie which I later replaced with the legit version. The best part of this OVA, apart from seeing squadrons of Vic Vipers flying in formation, was that the character designs were done by the beloved Haruhiko Mikimoto. The crazy part of this show is, why is it that only the main characters do not wear helmets?
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greg
Posts: 2159
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 9:00 pm
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Re: Konami's Vic Viper model, Sky Girls anime version

Post by greg »

My presence on the Net, with plenty of random geekiness:
My homepage
My YouTube channel
My Flickr photostream
My Tumblr page
User avatar
greg
Posts: 2159
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2011 9:00 pm
Anime Fan Since: 1989 (consciously)
Location: Shizuoka-ken, Japan
Contact:

Re: Konami's Vic Viper model, Sky Girls anime version

Post by greg »

Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb4rpTuEOQc
Part 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZtTDC2-grA
Part 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-rNTDOIKzY
Complete!


Why can't I include images? This is weird. They've been disabled...
My presence on the Net, with plenty of random geekiness:
My homepage
My YouTube channel
My Flickr photostream
My Tumblr page
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