I guess one of the cool things that made Macross great, aside from the music, the mecha, the characters and the awesome plot and graphics was the Macross Missile Massacre. More popularly called by fans as the Itano Circus because it was created by Ichiro Itano.

Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s I got exposed to Japan’s greatest exports. Aside from the TV and cars, one of the best things that came out of Japan was their anime cartoons. One of the cartoons I loved to watch at that time was the Mekanda Robo(t) series. So of course I got excited when I saw a toy of it being sold here.

Update: Ooops, my mistake again, this is actually a VF-11C and not a VF-11B that was seen in the Macross Plus series. Yamato toys just released a 1/60 version of the VF-11C. This retcons my statement below that Yamato Toys doesn’t have a license to produce Macross 7 toys.

Update: Ok my mistake, the VF-11B Armored version actually came out first in Episode 26 of Macross 7 and was flown by Diamond Force’s, Kinryuu and not in FOTSW.

Speaking of Armored Valkyrie’s, I was watching Macross 7 Encore yesterday and saw this Armored version of a VF-11B being shot off a catapult ramp. It was shown in the episode Fleet of the Strongest Women (FOTSW). That was the time that the Macross 7 fleet was under attack by a rogue Meltrandi fleet led by an ace counterpart of Milia Fallyna Jenius.

Google Trends is a very useful tool for tracking the popularity of something in the web. In our case, how frequently anything related to Macross was searched in the WWW. Click on the image below to enlarge.