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Jeff J

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    Macross streaming on Disney+ (under the "Star" label; Star/Hulu of D+)

    in Movies and TV Series

    Posted · Edited by Jeff J

    24 minutes ago, Old_Nash_II said:

    Only North America XD

    It's like Independence Day, everyone has their own. :)

     

    12 minutes ago, cfernandez said:

    Watching my first - SDFM: Flash Back 2012 on Hulu but can't find where to activate subtitles.  It says "not available" for subtitles.  Will keep looking and enjoying (need subs though).

     

    Interesting. I see it on the Android App. The option is only for Japanese subs, but it's closed captioned in English.

     

    Screenshot_20250113_112044_Hulu.jpg

    The Newbie and Short Questions thread

    in Movies and TV Series

    Posted

    My head canon iss that Sharon's relationship with Myung was complicated. Part of Sharon wanted her out of the way at first to make sure she didn't interfere with the plans, but Sharon's programming also drives her to facilitate Myung to feel a rush of emotions. Maybe letting Myung get free was intentional...

    Finally got to watch Macross Zero!!!!

    in Movies and TV Series

    Posted

    16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    I'm not sure I'd agree that they were treated as Serious Business in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series.  Vrlitwhai and Exsedol were caught off-guard by Earth's use of reaction weaponry, but that owes far more to it being a technology the Zentradi had believed lost for hundreds of thousands of years.  Earth spammed them pretty heavily without much comment in the actual fighting via the ship-mounted ones carried by the Oberth and ARMD classes, and the SF-3A space fighters and VF-1s as well.

    Reaction warheads certainly weren't powerful enough, by themselves, to swing the balance of the war. They also weren't these super important MacGuffins for the story, either. But when they got specific mention, there's at least some emphasis that they pack quite the wallop.

    I'd say the biggest argument against them as these big bad weapons was that the omidirectional barrier surrounding the Macross itself was able to withstand several thousand reaction warheads detonating in the near vicinity, but the Boddole Zer flagship itself wasn't able to, and that thing was millions (if not billions) of times more massive than the Macross.

    16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    Macross 7 treated them quite seriously, though they ended up being ineffective because the Protodeviln used their innate space fold ability to teleport the high-yield reaction missile Max intended to kill them with back to the Stargazer in orbit.

    Macross Zero treats them with a lot more gravitas, though the stated reason for doing so doesn't actually make sense as noted previously.  (Everyone involved probably should've been a lot more concerned about four reaction bombs with a maximum combined yield of 200 kilotons going off just a couple kilometers away.  The shockwave would probably not have done great things to the Asuka II, which was a largely conventional aircraft carrier.) 

    The Destroid Monster scene was easily my favorite action sequence in Zero. 

    Finally got to watch Macross Zero!!!!

    in Movies and TV Series

    Posted

    6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    Honestly, I think using it that way was the point... to make the connection explicit (and also to highlight the connection to the real world term).

    I don't think it poses any problem for the story itself, esp. since Macross Chronicle et. al. indicate that Hasford and Turner's theories were neither widely known nor taken seriously in the academic community at the time.  

    I don't think it breaks the story. It works to bridge series together, and the franchise isn't about precise continuity, but it's just not what I would've preferred from a prequel.

    6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    Their reactions are pretty understandable.  Misa telling them that the Zentradi have millions of ships is the very picture of hyperbole or even hysterical fear.  The UN Forces brass were thinking of things on a planetary scale, which would make the logistics of operating a fleet of that size completely ridiculous if you haven't actually seen it.  The US Navy is Power Overwhelming at 470 ships... and the Zentradi are supposed to have a fleet ten thousand times the size?  No wonder they balked.

    General Global believing the report wasn't likely to lend it any credibility, since he has a well-known personal connection to the officer making the report.

    Yeah, I left out the part of my prior response that Global believed his crew because 1) he's closer to them, particularly Misa and 2) from the real world perspective, he's one of the protagonists, so of course he's aligned with them. 

    I don't think it's implausible they were skeptical, but the part of the skeptics's laughing was too much for me. To be fair, once Global and Misa made their report in person, it seemed as though they didn't rule out the validity of the report, but weren't going to budge on future course of action, which unfortunately included having too much confidence in the Grand Cannon.

    6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    They definitely handled the use of thermonuclear reaction weapons with more gravitas than usual.  Of course, they're new technology there.

    Macross 7 was, IMO, pretty serious about them too.  They were only shown being used in Operation Stargazer as part of the mission to destroy the Protodeviln and their usage was a serious godzilla threshold for the series which had up to that point avoided large-scale destruction.  The only Macross title to be really cavalier about them is DYRL?, where they're spammed against the Zentradi from the very start.

    I didn't mean they were cavalier about reaction warheads, it's just that they go from being the big scary monsters in SDF and even Plus (though only through reference instead of visual display) to being hyped-up-but-ineffectual weapons in 7. It's kind of like the Crane Kick in Karate Kid, Part 2. 

    6 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    His statement is so weird and inconsistent that Macross Chronicle had to explicitly hedge around it.

    Neat to know.

    Finally got to watch Macross Zero!!!!

    in Movies and TV Series

    Posted · Edited by Jeff J

    2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    There is nothing continuity-shredding about it.  If anything, it's a reasonable usage of a real world term AND an in-joke to how Macross's creators came up with the name.

    "Protoculture" is not a made-up sci-fi buzzword.  It's a real scientific term used in anthropology that was coined decades before the original Macross series was made.  Its meaning is "the origins or rudiments of culture", and is normally used to refer to passing down learned behaviors from one generation to the next.  

    Yeah, the Macross guys didn't make it up, but the term is, IMO, too loaded to use in such a generic, lowercase-p, manner in the series. I would've preferred if they expanded the Macross lexicon and came up with a synonymous term.

    2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    The Earth UN Forces skepticism over Misa's claims about the Boddole Zer main fleet's size are perfectly understandable, given that they'd only seen fleets of at most a thousand or so ships and Misa had no actual evidence (due to having dropped the camera she'd been using).  They had expected, and prepared for, a classic "alien invasion" scenario and were completely unaware that EVERYONE had massively underestimated the scale on which the Zentradi and their creators operated.  Given the state of Earth's infrastructure, it wasn't unreasonable to assume a planet could support a few hundred to a few thousand ships, but millions would require infrastructure on a scale Humanity hadn't even begun to think about.

    Plausible, sure, but IMO their responses were unlikely. The first bunch of leaders (sans Global) even laughed at the suggestion. I think high command gave Misa more credibility, but overall I felt like the general level of skepticism was a bit much, there mostly in place to make the specific plot happen. 

    That said, Global believed them, so it's not like nobody took Misa's report seriously. 

     

    2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    As for the Birdhuman, well... it wasn't that impressive.  It would've been an apocalyptic and potentially unstoppable threat to a less developed civilization, but Humanity had already obtained the overtechnology of Alien Starship 1 and begun to reproduce it nearly a decade earlier.  A lot of its technology was cause for scientific curiosity, since it was clearly a lot more advanced than Alien Starship 1, but at the same time its systems were still recognizable and many were just different or more advanced versions of systems Humanity were already reproducing.  The one weapon it demonstrated that would've been cause for significant concern was the heavy quantum reaction beam gun it used to destroy the Alliance fleet, but even that appeared to be significantly less powerful than the ones Humanity had in its possession.  That the Birdhuman was ultimately "defeated" by the detonation of a handful of low-yield reaction weapons wouldn't have made it out to be an especially powerful foe either.  

    Nutouk says, "Mankind will be extinguished," and Hasford says, "Behold, the end of the world." Now, neither man might've been right, but the final episode expressed a sense of apocalyptic urgency. Even though this display of power was more or less in line with the Macross canon, and potentially less potent, that's not really the message being conveyed.

    Speaking of reaction warheads, I enjoyed 1) that they were enough to take out the target and 2) Shin talked about the fallout. In the original series, they are a big deal, enough to keep the Zentradi both interested but at bay, but by Macross 7, they kind of get poo poo'd as part of standard escalation of the power of new threats. Zero was right to re-elevate them to being the nuclear (no pun intended) option.

    Finally got to watch Macross Zero!!!!

    in Movies and TV Series

    Posted

    6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    Need one of those Spongebob title cards "6 YEARS LATER"...

     

    Yeah, my bad. Was looking for an existing thread and this was the only one I could find within the first however many minutes or so.

    6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    In fairness to Macross Zero's writers, the idea that aliens visited Earth in the distant past and interfered with humanity's development has been a thing in popular fiction since at least 1898 and a (profoundly racist) pseudoscientific theory in its own right since 1954.  

    I think even if Zero were more of a conventional prequel, it still would've been completely in bounds to have a scientist character talk about the aliens-visiting-earth theory. It's 100% reasonable for some scientist to ask out loud, "Maybe ASS-1 wasn't Earth's first contact with alien life..." But using the buzzword "Protoculture," with all the baggage it carries in the franchise, is pretty continuity-shredding. Acknowledged, though, that seamless continuity hasn't really been a Macross priority since the get-go, but if you like that sort of thing, it's something you're going to miss out on.

    8 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    The incident on Mayan was classified top secret, so the entire military brass wouldn't necessarily know.  Records weren't unsealed until 50 years later.

    That said, the main thing they were incredulous about was the sheer size of the Boddole Zer main fleet.  Up to that point, they had only seen the ship that became the Macross, the one Birdhuman, and a few branch fleets of a few hundred to ~1,200 ships.  The biggest fleet they'd seen was only 10 times the size of the Spacy's fleet.  It's onyl natural that they'd find "the enemy really has millions of ships" hard to swallow.  What they understood of the Birdhuman's abilities was not that far outside what they were already reproducing from OTM, sometimes on a far bigger scale.

    That's one of the small handful of contrivances from the OG series that still kind of bothers me. Don't get me wrong, I like the antagonistic nature of the UN military high command, but their utter skepticism that the Zentradi fleet could be that large just seemed like something in the plot to 1) create conflict for our heroes to overcome and 2) set up humanity for disaster when at least some of it could've been abated.

    Also, I get that someone like Capt. Global wouldn't be in the know about the Mayan Island incident, but someone as high up as Admiral Hayase and his cohort should've known, and IMO the highest level of command should be on high alert for any extinction-level threat instead of being all like, "Well, we got the Grand Cannon, so we're good!"

    Finally got to watch Macross Zero!!!!

    in Movies and TV Series

    Posted

    I finally finished this series. I downloaded episodes as they became available on Kazaa (LOL) starting in 2002. I lost interest and never bothered finishing, but since I'm visiting family in Korea right now, I elected to watch the whole series on D+.

    Well, nothing about my opinion really changed. To the creators's credit, I understand the desire to avoid making lazy sequels. They did well not to churn out more of the same, and as such, every Macross property feels distinct and introduces something new to the lore and world-building.

    That said, I don't think Zero works particularly well as a prequel, and it gets kind of frustrating when a small subset of fans insist that people introduce themselves to the franchise starting with this series. Yikes. Some specific complaints I have include the rampant use of the word "Protoculture" and the circulating theory that alien civilizations influenced life on earth. Doesn't really jive with how the heroes in OG SDFM slowly uncovered the myster of Protoculture. Also, with all the craziness the UN military witnessed on Mayan Island, it seems ridiculous that military leaders in OG would be super skeptical about the size and power of the Zentradi forces. 

    I think what turned me off from the series 20+ years ago was the floating rocks and other ethereal/supernatural stuff. I'm probably stuck in 80s/90s Macross, so I generally don't like seeing that too much (Frontier being kind of the exception; you could say I enjoyed Frontier in spite of some of the weird stuff).

    Just a reminder that Macross continuity shouldn't be taken too seriously. The less seriously you take it, the more you can enjoy series that radically change things.

    Macross 7 Discussion

    in Movies and TV Series

    Posted

    I finally got around to watching FB7.

    It's been 25 years since I watched Macross 7. I didn't enjoy the series, but I was such a completionist back then that I made sure I got through the all of it, or at least almost all of the M7 stuff. There were some things I genuinely enjoyed, but overall, that show was not for me. I do like most of the Fire Bomber tunes, though.

    Watching FB7 was a weird mix of getting a nostalgia rush, bopping to the music, but also being bored and anxiously awaiting the end. I don't recall ever having a feeling like that for anything I watched the first time. Even though I didn't enjoy the series, it had its moments, and seeing those moments commemorated was enough to make me think, "Oh yeah, I remember that, it was pretty cool." Music speaks for itself. But, unfortunately, FB7 also reminded me of all the things I didn't care for. I thought there must've been some meta joke about how in the first 15 minutes of FB7 they keep repeating people asking Basara what the heck he was doing, since that pretty much was my recollection of the first 20-25% of the series.

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