Starting on November 2, 2019 and lasting all the way to January 7, 2020, Lake Sagami Pleasure Forest was host to one of the more unique Macross-themed events in recent memory, an “Illumination Live!!!!!!” (The 6 exclamation marks being a reference to this year’s upcoming Macross Delta Zettai LIVE!!!!!! movie)

Several of the theme-park’s attractions were converted to a more Macross-theme for the duration of the event which also included AR areas (for use with the Uta Macross app), Macross-themed food, and a merch shop.

Talk shows/performances were also held on November 3 (Freya’s birthday), November 23 (Sheryl’s birthday), December 14 (Messer’s birthday) and  December 21 (Macross 7 25th Anniversary).

The SpeakerPODcast Crew will report on the event in an upcoming podcast in February. In the meantime, here’s a few of the pics we snapped!

Long-time listeners of the SpeakerPODcast may have noticed the soft spot that several of us have for retro games and retro game characters. Well, The Akihabara Container must have been listening, because their most recent popup  shop ticks all the right boxes. While they’ve previously held SNK and Samurai Shodown events, their latest popup shop is dedicated entirely to SNK’s originl nippon ichi gal herself, Mai Shiranui.
And by that, we mean the entire store is dedicated to Mai, in all her various versions and iterations over the years. How many videogame characters are popular enough to get their own store?

The popup shop features a giant Mai standee, prints of various fighting game win screens, original art, classic posters, apparel, various nick-nacks and, most importantly, NEO GEO LAND branded merch! Check out the photo gallery after the jump!

The 8th annual Tengu Modelers exhibit was held today at Yoronotaki Research Center in West Ikebukuro.

A 1-day only event, the theme of this year’s exhibit’s was music-related models and was headlined by a custom-made 1:20 scale kit bashed VF-1S (Hikaru type) from Do You Remember Love by none other than Max Factory founder Max Watanabe himself.

Max Watanabe himself was present and we had a chat with him about Max Factory’s 1:20 scale Valkyrie line… but that’s a story for a future podcast!

In the meantime here’s a small gallery of pics, including an amazing custom diorama of the cover of Hiroko Moriguchi’s recent best selling Gundam cover album, Eureka 7, Fooly Cooly and even Death Stranding.

As we discussed during the last episode of the SpeakerPODcast, the 59th All Japan Model & Hobby Show was held at Tokyo Big Sight on September 28-29, 2019.

While there were no major Macross-related new toy announcements at this year’s show, there were plenty of model kits past and present on display. The following is a gallery of some pics we took, in order of franchise.