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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Gates McFadden is a trained dancer... just not that kind. (She's an experienced tap dancer, and did the choreography for the tap dancing her character taught Data herself.) She got married to Jack Crusher and had Wesley while she was still at Starfleet Academy, and he passed away in unspecified circumstances on the Stargazer a few years after she graduated. So definitely Lifetime movie material. (Would've been even moreso if the writers hadn't chickened out on making Wesley Picard's secret son via an affair with his best friend's wife. That idea got tossed around a few times, but got veto'd every time.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    So... when all was said and done, the Harmony Gold AX panel was the usual nonevent full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Just another hour or so of quiet desperation as they try to feign relevance to an industry that had already decided they and their series were a joke thirty years ago, accompanied by some wishful thinking and deliberate misdirection as they report having spent fifteen grand to have someone successful pen another disinterested story treatment for a movie that has been in development hell for 15 years so far, and a single announcement that would almost have been newsworthy if it hadn't already essentially been announced four months ago by Crunchyroll and over a year ago by Funimation. (Seriously. Funimation announced they had the streaming rights to Robotech and related materials back in June 2021 and that their entire streaming catalog was moving over to Crunchyroll on March 1st, 2022. It takes no great feats of deductive reasoning to figure out that stuff was coming to Crunchyroll in the near future. Esp. after Funimation stated they'd put the brakes on streaming all but new titles on their service while things were migrating to Crunchyroll.)
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eden's such an upscale place, I doubt it'd be Subway... they've gotta have at least a DiBella's or a Firehouse Subs. Like I said, the VA-3M is a special case... being essentially the only known model of VF actually intended to operate underwater. The few VFs with submergence ratings are rated to only 30-100m underwater. Even a World War II-era submarine could go almost three times as deep, and modern classes like the Los Angeles-class and Seawolf-class have an official test depth of almost 500m and a theoretical maximum operating depth of somewhere around 750-900m. Imagine what overtechnology-based submarines could do with the far-superior materials like hypercarbon and energy conversion armor. A VF would be a pretty awful choice in anti-submarine warfare unless they were either dropping depth charges or attacking a sub near the surface with guided missiles. (Even the Octos, a Unification Wars-era light submarine-slash-destroid, could submerge to 375m... almost 4x as far down as a VF could go.)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Why would there be? While VFs can operate underwater to very limited depths for short periods of time, they are by no means intended to do so. The VA-3M is a very specialized exception to that rule and the only known craft of its type. Anti-submarine warfare wasn't exactly a concern after the Unification Wars ended and the First Space War revealed the shape of wars to come was all about space-based defense. Air-to-surface and anti-submarine missiles had already largely replaced air-launched torpedoes in almost every role decades before the Unification Wars too, for that matter. The only ones using submarines are humans, come to that, so a hostile submarine is a vanishingly rare thing on its own.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Gene Roddenberry, like George Lucas and several other noteworthy creators, was a good concept guy and a terrible terrible hack of a writer. He needed minders. A group of other, more grounded, creatives around him to hold his leash and refine his wild ideas into stuff that could actually be filmed. He had that in Gene Coon, Dorothy Fontana, and others on the original Star Trek series. Predictably, he wasn't always happy with the final shape of the rough concepts he originated or how others built on those ideas with or without his input. Star Trek: the Next Generation had such a rough start thanks to Gene leveraging his screen credit as Star Trek's creator to obtain full creative control. Armed with the last word on all creative decisions and with nobody holding his leash, a lot of terrible ideas that would not have survived a proper editorial review made it into shooting scripts and his draconian set of rules for the series nearly caused him to end up without writers altogether. It's not that listening to Gene was necessarily bad in and of itself... it's that listening to him directly without his minders meant the writers got all his ideas, not just the highly polished good ones that'd been carefully vetted for workability.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    ... and now you've got me rewatching TNG, damnitall. The writing in the first season really is pretty preachy... I feel like every time I watch it I block out a bit of how bad it really is once I'm done, and don't remember until I watch it over again. Several of Picard's early speeches are less dignified and more just temper tantrums.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Flying it into the ground so hard HG stops funding it internally counts as finishing it, right? In the Mortal Kombat sense of "finish". Because having something come out, even if it's obviously of poor quality like this Blu-ray release, is enough for the remaining die-hards to validate their continued faith in it. With the average quality level being so low, even the bare minimum improvements like rereleases in a new format can superficially look like improvement.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The rights were a problem when it was new... now that it's a twenty year old series the music rights ain't so pricy.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, I'd bet on their panel being as useless as ever. I remember AnimEigo's Robert Woodhead mentioning the thing holding up the boat on releasing DYRL? outside Japan was that nobody knew who owned the distribution rights from that awkward time of Clash of the Bionoids and the like. It's not my favorite series, but you'd can bet your life I'll buy at least one copy. I've waited for this for too damned long to take half-measures.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Just saw on FB that RightStuf is releasing Macross 7 on Bluray... so I guess that just leaves Zero.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    They've also been out of print for a long time... and the old releases had a lot of issues. If they're going to do it right, they'd be doing it more or less from scratch the same way they're doing Frontier or Delta.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    That explanation works for Frontier and Delta... but both II and Plus are older and they're getting Blu-rays immediately.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Plus does, yes... Macross II has its own variant of the roundel that is subtly different.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The book from Udon mentions Flash Back 2012... the DYRL rights are a perennially sticky wicket due to the uncertainty over who actually owns the distribution rights (a third party not BW or HG), and HG has the distro rights to SDFM.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I notice Zero and 7 are missing from this... I assume there needs to be some additional legal wrangling due to those shows using characters from the original series due to HG.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I have been waiting for this for soooooo long... bring it on!
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Just a minor correction for mine, the showings I attended were in Rochester Hills. Not many theaters in my neck of the woods, oddly enough, but that's what you get in industrial towns, eh? Oh, yeah... it's super blatant once you're watching with the songs subtitled, isn't it? 🤣 Pretty on-brand for her, though. She's the provocative idol playing opposite Ranka's innocent idol, and she knows it. Remember, she tells Alto early on in all versions that being "all natural" is part of her appeal in Galaxy. Even her first single was suuuuper horny... "Pink Monsoon", a love song about doing scandalous things that fog up the windows on a rainy day. (She's supposedly her own lyricist too...) (Not that most pop culture isn't at least low-key horny... after reading this last night, it occurred to me that one of the folk songs my girlfriend was listening to in the car on the ride back was basically the man in the song spending five minutes bragging about how thirsty he was for this girl he just met in passing.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    'bout a dozen folks at the showing I attended. Mostly ones I haven't seen before from previous showings, I think. The audio mix was vastly improved over the previous film's, though we suffered a bit because there was some movie going next door that had a lot of loud bass effects that were literally shaking the walls at inopportune moments. All in all, the only lackluster bit was the same basic (and very brief) introduction from Aya Endo and Megumi Nakajima. I'd have liked to see them do something more like what they did for Macross Plus or the bit that preceded Fathom's screening of Star Trek: the Motion Picture in terms of a more documentary-like feel. Having the music videos for Gorgeous, Good Job, and The Wings of Farewell was a nice touch, IMO. Glad I went, and I'm hoping we'll see screenings of more Macross films in the not-too-distant future.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Kaguya-sama: Love is War picked a pretty good spot to end the season. I hope that their recently announced next series will adapt the final story arc, since the manga will be ending soon. Just an all-around fantastic adaptation.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    30 minutes to showtime.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I'm definitely looking foward to Sayonara no Tsubasa tonight.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It shows up in a fair number of the character descriptions Gene wrote. After the first few, you start to get the impression Gene really wanted to hire strippers. (Which, considering some of the pranks he pulled on TOS era staff described in The Making of Star Trek, he may well have... just not for a screen role.) No, Wesley was originally conceived as a boy and an idealized self-insert by Roddenberry (who named the character for his own middle name). Bob Justman briefly convinced him to change Wesley into a girl named Leslie in a bid to make the character stand out more since TV at the time did much less with the troubles of adolescent girls (and the whole boy genius thing had already started to become a bit of a cliche). It didn't stick, and the character went back to being a boy shortly thereafter.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... it took a really long time for TNG to finally figure out what to do with Deanna Troi. It wasn't until season 6 when Jellico forced her to start wearing a proper uniform (like Marina Sirtis had wanted to all along) that she finally got to act like a proper Starfleet officer and not just "the chick". That one little wardrobe change seemed to clue the writers in to the fact that they could do so much more with an empath besides repeatedly traumatizing her. Personally, I blame Gene Roddenberry. The TNG season 1 and 2 development materials and writer's bible are absolutely oozing his sexist attitudes towards women. It's screamingly obvious he saw the female regulars as principally decorative given that the character descriptions and casting guidance make frequent mention of the female characters having to have a "strip queen" body. Marina Sirtis was, and is, certainly lovely to behold but she's a heck of an actress too and they wasted a lot of potential in her character by making her a decorative installation on the bridge for most of the show. It took a long time for the show to completely outgrow that beginning, by which point they'd lost Denise Crosby and Gates McFadden, and only got McFadden back because Diana Muldaur's character bombed so hard. (My favorite Troi episode is "Eye of the Beholder", where Troi actually gets to put her powers to proper use investigating the suicide of a fellow telepath.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Got through the final episodes of a few shows today... Don't Hurt Me, My Healer! was a massive waste of time. The protagonists are so utterly useless that the first actual threat they face is defeated... by the guest stars from the show's previous episodes. It can only be described as the unwanted child of the Big Lipped Alligator Moment and an Anticlimax. Skeleton Knight in Another World is another one that really never developed or went anywhere. It's another boring, minimum-effort isekai shovelware series that never manages to get past the basic premise it borrowed from another, more popular, series and is noteworthy only for a total banger of an OP. Otherwise, it's so forgettable I literally cannot remember the names of 90% of the cast and I just finished watching it. Trapped in a Dating Sim: the World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs also stumbled to its going-nowhere conclusion that really doesn't do anything except halfheartedly reveal that Leon actually does give enough of a damn about other people to bother saving them in a terribly passive-aggressive way. This one suffered more from terrible production values on almost every episode than anything else. It's especially noteworthy with the Armors, which are off-model so much I'm not actually sure what on-model is supposed to look like! Started Spy x Family, and it's had me in stitches... I can see why this one ended up a breakout hit.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    That and "Do they still sings songs about the Great Tribble Hunt?"
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