It’s infinity billion years after the 80s, but that good old Science Team is still pumping out new product.
Coming soon (soonish) from Japan, we have a brand-new Gatchaman II New God Phoenix plastic model kit. There aren’t many pictures of it available online yet, but from what we can see, the plastics look awesome and the built ships are just deliciously charming.
We’re not even sure if this figure comes with the little figures of the famed team themselves. Judging by the picture, it’s just the model kit with its array of skeletons. For the confused, that’s what I call the plastic frames with the pieces you pick apart to assemble the ship/robot in question, though I’ve never confirmed if anyone else in the model kit community actually calls it that.
The Gatchaman II ship has an MSRP of $63 and is due out July 31st, 2019. You can preorder it here from Nin-Nin-Games. Really, for an import, that’s not such a bad price. And considering that overall lack of new product from this classic franchise, it’s very much appreciated.
And lastly, before we board our ship and depart, I’ll share an anecdote about Gatchaman, or ‘The Science Team’. From the 2004 American book Anime Explosion, they had the most fascinating paragraph referring to this group. The author claimed that all anime ensembles were influenced by this team and you could connect the dots on team personalities simply from seeing what happened in Gatchaman:
“[Among them was] Go Lions (Five Lions, 1981), renamed Voltron, which mixed two anime genres together to create an intriguing new hybrid. It started with the formula for the “science team” first established in the Gatchaman series and revived (with occasional minor variations) in dozens of other Japanese series. The team always consisted of: hero, woman, child, big beefy guy, lone wolf. The latter might seem odd, since loners aren’t usually part of a team, but such teams usually include a wild card to spice things up, since he’s capable of anything from criminal behavior to borderline psychosis.” –Anime Explosion, 2004
There’s something about that quote (and this new model kit) that I just simply adore.