Pat Payne

I feel for her. I was in a crash on Jefferson Blvd a week ago (fortunately it was a minor fender-bender and not the pretty sizable collision she was hit with) and it scared the living daylights out of me. I hope that her injuries are restricted to just whiplash (although it seems that the medico she went to is confident that it is). And if the doc tells her to take it easy while performing on the 18th, she takes it easy. Simple as that. Career cannot trump health, because if she loses her health, so goes the career. Given that, I say again: Get well soon, Mari-san! As for the accident: LA drivers. Gotta love 'em. Mostly, because you can't have the majority of them involuntarily committed. I completely agree, Sumdumgai, that probably a cell-phone was to blame, from the sound of it. I have lost count of the people on LA County roads who do stupid-ass things or who just plain are not paying attention to the road because they're yakking on those stupid boxes that AT&SprinTmobixtel have said we all desperately need to have (sorry about the small rant, but cell phones are a pet peeve of mine). It sounds like (admittedly, we're only getting her side of the story) she wasn't at fault, and that perhaps the other driver was also going way too fast (Being stopped, she was presumably at an intersection, and so the damage was a bit major for someone going the appropriate speed/slowing down correctly and just taking too long to stop) and was distracted. I hope she sues the other driver down to parade rest!

The other thing is, we know that the VF series has a removable crew-cabin/cockpit compartment. It potentially could be that the Valks are modular, allowing a 2-seater cabin module to be placed on a 1-seater's chassis.

Are you sure you're not conflating two different facts? 1) That Mari Iijima (barring any complications from the auto accident) is going to be performing Minmay's songs at the 25th anniversary concert and 2) That they're introducing a new voice actress for the new series I've not seen from what limited sources I can find that the new actress has been referred to as Minmay. This isn't ruling out a "Zachary Quinto ia the new Spock, here's Leonard Nimoy to pass on the torch"-style announcement at the concert, but I just don't see any evidence to support it yet.

Ouch. I hope it's nothing terribly serious, though the fact that she's able to write after it is a very good sign. It sounds, according to Babelfish, at least, that the other driver may have been a drunken driver. (And don't get me started on the subject of drunken drivers -- my feeling is if someone gets behind the wheel blowing more than .08, it ought to be an automatic attempted manslaughter charge.) Either way, though, I know for a fact that people here in LA County can drive like maniacs given half a provocation. Mari-san: Hayaku naorimasu-ne!

Well, if the UN Spacy clones are anything like the Zents, they probably leave the cloning tubes in early adulthood , and they probably do reach an aproximation of old age -- Britai was in his 30s during the show, and there was reference to one Bakorela, a Zent on the verge of retirement in Kamujin's batallion, (although in a very militaristic culture as the Zentradi, I shudder to think what "retirement" really means) who was so old his aim was deteriorating, a fault Kamujin used to his advantage during the intimidation barrage that Britai had ordered to induce the Macross to surrender. In fact, the UN Spacy repopulation clones probably were designed to be indistinguishable from normal humans, and so probably had a full and normal human lifespan (after any potential acclerated aging to get them up to child-bearing age, if they went that route)

Wanted to go to SDCC, but AX wiped me out for the most part. However, next year, if AX doesn't rethink the move to Downtown LA, I might just go to SDCC. I really wish I'd been there, though, as Leonard Nimoy was there (would have been cool to have gotten his autograph) and they made the big Trek Movie announcements.

Grr...double post blues

I'm guessing that the reason was that having some randmoness, while perhaps raising the risk of genetic deseases like hemophilia also raised the possibility of unplanned improvements to the Zentradi "species" for lack of a better term. For instance, if an unplanned gene variation increased Zent strength or dexterity by 20 %, it would be seen as an unalloyed good. and for those variations that resulted in genetic defects, well...the PCs most likely would have seen Zentradi life as pretty cheap. (Storywise, of course, it removed the story confusion of all the Zents looking like Temura Morrison ) Not as much as you might think. The inbreeding has to be in a fairly restricted bloodline for many generations for problems to occur, IIRC. Around a million people aren't going to cause those problems, as there's still enough genetic diversity to offset any potential inbreeding damage. It's more of a problem in royal families where the "breeding stock," if you will, numbers somewhere in the thousands or even hundreds (even less for the Macedonian Ptolemy line of Pharoahs, where brothers and sisters were oligated to marry as king and queen). That's why the decendants of Queen Victoria (the Windsor, Hohenzollern and Romanov lines of England, Prussia and Russia) had and have such problems with genetic defects (which may give Harry and William an out for their lunacy) such as the hemophilia that plagued many members of those families , most notably the Tsarevich Alexi. Similarly, there was a clan of blue-skinned people in Kentucky, the Fugates, who were carrying a rare gene that they passed on through inbreeding due to geographic isolation 'round 1800. It's less common among them now due to their isolation being largly eradicated and more genetic material making its way into their bloodline.

Pretty easy to find here in the US too at JAST and RightStuf as well, if [prude]you're into that sort of thing...[/prude]

Hey, Bee...just wanted to pop in to say thanks for putting together such a great con. You did great with it --it was a blast. I was glad to finally make one of them, and it's a day I won't forget for a long time. I definetly can't wait for next year. Also it was great to finally meet face to face some of the people I've gotten to know lo these past few years here on the boards. And, of course, meeting Mari and seeing her perform was the icing on the cake.

It is. IIRC, Kazutaka Miyatake actually did the artwork for the game, and so he put it in as a very natural in-joke.

I saw the special at MWCon, and it was pretty good, although some of the '80s effects (partucularly during Mari's video for "An Angel's Paints") were cheesy AND WHAT WERE THE WRECKING BALLS GOING ACROSS THE STAGE IN AID OF?!?!?!?! The second video (of Ai Oboeteimasuka) was a lot better, however. The interviews were kinda fluffy, and the host (whoever that was) was getting away with quite a bit more in the flirting department than a host here in the US today would dare to try with the female interviewees. I was wondering if either Mari or Mika was going to belt him after a couple of remarks! One thing that got me though: I wonder about the remote bit that they did at the Tatsunoko studio...it seems to me that Tat may have had more of a hand in DYRL than we were led to believe if Mikimoto and Itano had set up shop there to work on DYRL...

Nah, even better is today -- we are at the pinnacle of technology, and yet the hands of the Doomsday Clock creep ever closer to midnight. Technology and cultural development, sadly, never keeps pace with human nature.

I saw this POS at Anime Expo's Gundam panel this year, and I have the good news. The clip you saw is all that was ever made. No network was stupid enough to buy it. It is astoundingly bad, even for early '90s Saturday Morning cartoons, which were the nadir of the artform. (Then again, if Char's red Zaku is 3x the strength and speed of a normal Zaku, does that girl's pink Mobile Suit get 1.5x the speed and strength? Also, does anyone else find it patronizing that the kid in the wheelchair becomes the [i can't bring myself to say that ridiculous name] equvalent of the Guntank?)

I'd much rather that The Holy Floating Head go back and give us an exploration of the Supervision Army, than go with more spiritia. I'm sorry, but I really don;t see what it adds to the Macross universe, other than to be a pretentious philosophical concept. That's the problem that I've detected on his more recent works, starting really with Arjuna. He's gone onto a almost pompous and pretentious metaphysical and philosophical kick, (which isn't bad always, some shows like Haruhi and GITS get away with it quite well) but it just, to my mind, doesn't gel well with the Macross universe. (the one time it did was Macross Plus, which IMHO did deal in the big questions of "what is life?" "What is reality?" But then the engine of the rumination was a computerized idol singer, not some hastily-slapped-on energy field.) And at any rate, retcons=poor writing, a continuity getting out of control or too many cooks spoiling the soup. There were so many of those in Star Trek's later shows (Want a quick answer for everything bad in the Trek universe? Section 31 did it. ) and it became almost a race for the writers to put the latest "everything you know about how the Trek Universe works is totally wrong" storyline out there. I don't need Kawamori-sensei to explain that "well, no...Minmay didn't shock the Zentradi through her songs and the promise of culture -- nope, a wizard did it." In a way, that takes away from the message that I percieved was at the heart of the show of the show -- that even though there is a place for warfare, there is still the hope that love and culture and the realm of thoughs and art will win over the warrior's ways -- that the creative impulse (whether that's creating music (Minmay), love (Max & Millia, Hikaru & Misa, Roy & Claudia, The Bridge Bunnies & the Three Stooges) or a massive spaceship (Humanity in general) ) is ultimately stronger than the destructive impulse. You don't need rainbows shooting out of Basara's ass or a half-baked metaphysical framework to convey that message. Indeed, it dilutes it by saying "no, it's not about the creative impulse v. the destructive impulse in mankind -- it really IS about rainbows shooting out of Basara's ass." I didn't intend that to be a dig at Mac7, other than it's the most egregious example so far of the "spiritia" concept.

Except that Obi-Wan, through the three movies, explains a lot of the minutiae of the backstory (at least those points that Lucas had already extrapolated on, barring the later revisions from the prequels) including giving forth with a (somewhat concealed) origin for Darth Vader. All Roy does is tell Hikaru "Here's how you don't end up shot, and damned if I know what these things are, it's all top secret." Besides, Hikaru had discovered independently and accidentally that the Valks had the Battriod mode through Misa's intercession. And he already knew that giant aliens were invading. One was about to squash him and Minmay flat just as Roy arived and saved the day.

I'll definitely be there for MW Con this year.

C'mon, Azrael, did you forget the first rule of most Internet forums? "If all else fails, beat the horse to death before it gets out of the starting gate. Repeat until arm is tired."

All of that's true, SpacyAce. But their primary audience, for all of that, will be a domestic Japanese audience. It would (to their mind) most likely be an extravagance to hire a competent dub cast and bring them to Japan, as well as hire competent ADR writers and bring them to Japan and record an English track for the show as compared to the potential sales that they would recieve. Remember also that very few people have Blu-Ray or HDDVD right now, and any DVD release is going to either (a) necessitate a switch to an all-region disc (doable, but would they?) or (b) force the end consumer in the US to buy an all-region player or modify their own player with an all-region chip (both expensive options if you don't know where to look) so most of those DVD sales for at least the next couple of years will be on mainline DVDs. Also remember that Japanese DVDs are often prohibitively expensive for many US-based anime fans (a lesson that Bandai Visual is slowly, and perhaps painfully, learning), and so that has to figure into the Japanese calculations over whether or not it would be cost-effective to localize the show themselves and avoid the legal tangles. Bandai/Big West certainly should explore the idea, but this isn't a time to hold one's breath, either.

If it makes its way to the US, they almost certainly will (though it seems that Bandai Visual doesn't do dubs that much, making for more questions about what the farkbot is up with their pricing structure). But if it remains Japan-only, there's less than a 0.05% chance of it having one. I highly doubt there'd even be an English sub track (only a handful of R2 Japanese discs that I know of have 'em [those being the Ghibli films and (oddly enough) the Mobile Suit Gundam Movie Trilogy]).

As the Great Orator said, "dum spiro, spero" ("So long as I breathe, I have hope.") And, who knows? There's always the possibility of change. I never said there wasn't. All I meant was that the likelyhood of this being the vehicle of said change is remote, only because there's no good way to simultaneously bring the as-yet-unproduced show out of the country and avoid a legal battle (of course, as always, IANAL, and lawyers tend to be of one of two types: either venal, vicious Tom Cruises or legal versions of Chief Engineer Scott )

But I still argue that as long as they place the Macross name on it, if what you're saying is the case, Tat and HG will still leap into action once BW tries to shop it outside of the Japanese Archipelago even if they "Gundam Wing-ize" it. Sadly, the only way they could sell it outside of Japan until the day BW tells Tat et. al to put up or shut up is to make it radically different from the Macross we all know and love and strip any Macross identifiers from it -- in essence, make an entirely new show with the bones of the Macross story submerged deep inside. It's a nice thought to say they're making a legal end-run around HG and Tat. But logically, I don't see it holding much water, unfortunately.

Still, I sense a great disturbance in the Force, as if a million Macross fans screamed out in terror and were suddenly silenced... But wouldn't that be the equivalent of them throwing up their hands and saying "you win, Tatsunoko -- take the flippin' franchise. We'll build our own Macross franchise, with blackjack and hookers..." (kudo points to anyone who got the reference) Seriously, though, it would seem to be abandoning the field if that were the case. I can't see them just ditching for that given the time, money and energy they invested in fighting the case and its still-ambiguous status. It may be though, that the Hoary Froating Head is finally sick of people asking about Minmay, Misa, Hikaru, Max, Millia, Isamu, Myung, (even) Basara and the rest of the familiar characers and decided to reboot to finally have a virgin Macross universe with all-new characters. Besides, if Tatsunoko wanted to be really pissy, so long as it has the Macross name they could declare it one of the "derivatives" that are being fought over no matter what universe it's set in. And we know that a certain stateside company would follow suit, so I can't see what they would stand to gain if that were the reason. I will admit that the capsule description sounds faintly reminiscent of the final text in the very last AD&D module "Die, Vecna, Die!" which was supposed to set up for Greyhawkers to move from AD&D to D&D 3.0: I'm not a big fan of AUs in general, though. UC-era Gundam ruled. Wing and the others were really 'meh' (though I admit I haven't seen V Gundam yet -- I've heard that one was pretty good). I hope JJ Abrams does not make an AU Trek (though all signs, blessedly, point to him giving us an honest-to-god TOS adventure, just with a dab of new paint and costuming). Give me the original and I'm happy.

I'd love to get in on the karaoke contest. Karaoke ga daisuki

{whistles} Now, how much are they gonna charge for the ultimate Transformers collectible?