To be honest, slightly lame. How many obscure 1950s B-movie flying saucers do you need? And that spaceship that looked like Eddie Murphy? Reaching, much?
The compiler commendably tries to avoid flooding the list with spaceships from the Star Wars and Star Trek movies (which between them could probably account for 1/5 of the list if they let rip), but their criteria elsewhere is vague. For example, they include Thunderbird 3 due to the two Thunderbirds spin-off movies from the 1960s, but then refuse to include anything from Battlestar Galactica, despite the 1970s show spawning two theatrical movies (with the three-part pilot, Saga of a Star World, being released as a film in both the UK and USA and the Pegasus story arc starring Lloyd Bridges as Commander Cain being released as Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack in the UK). Doctor Who's TARDIS and Dalek battle saucers also don't get much love, despite appearing in the two 1960s theatrical movies starring Peter Cushing.
More annoying is an apparent anti-Japanimation bias. No Space Cruiser Yamato? No SDF-1 or Valkyries/Veritechs (from the Macross movies)? Hmm.
The guy obviously had no clearly discernible rubric when it comes to what ships he's choosing. As you said, the Japanese get short shrift, and Battlestar Galactica and Dr. Who are ignored as well.
ReplyDeleteSome are obviously chosen because they looked cool, others because they were imaginative, but there doesn't seem some sort of unifying scheme aside from the author's own fickle preferences.
The TARDIS, the Galactica, the SDF-1/マクロス (Macross), and ヤマト (the Yamato) definitely deserve mention.
The ones that did get mentioned... I have no idea why they're even there. The ships from Coneheads? The USS Kelvin but not the Enterprise-D? The Helium-3 Delivery Vessel from Moon? The infected ship from John Carpenter's The Thing? It's as if this guy were desperately reaching for things to fill his list, but totally ignored stuff that deserved to be on it.