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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I wish I could claim credit for the thought, but this is something a group of players in a session of the Macross RPG I was running actually did a couple years back. They were part of a rescue team storming an anti-government group's base to rescue an official from the Barnrose Authority and, to cover the hostage's escape, decided the best way to get the enemy's attention and create a diversion was to go stomping down the corridors of the base in suits of EX-Gear while loudly singing With Cat-like Tread. To their credit, it worked perfectly until the actual shooting started and the dice decided that everyone was a graduate of the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Ja... it's the reason Hakuna Aoba is interested in the prospects of the story's protagonist, Chelsea Scarlett, who was a Varauta colonist he rescued during the Protodeviln conflict. Aoba and his former CO, the story's big bad Naresuan, were both NUNS Special Forces pilots for the Macross 7 fleet. Angers 672, the other main antagonist, was Chelsea's mentor of sorts and also the first test pilot for the YF-25.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Or something like this, just with giant robots... Yes, it would... unless you were a phenomenally good pilot. Hakuna Aoba is, as it happens, a phenomenally good pilot. So much so that he's known as the Uncrowned King in the league because he performs well but his VF is so problematic that it keeps him from winning races. (Why he's such a good pilot comes out in the course of the story... he's one of Milia's students, a former elite Macross 7 fleet Special Forces VF pilot, and a member of the squadron Max personally tapped to provide the advance reconnaissance in preparation for Operation Stargazer. The man is a Jenius-approved ace twice over.) Macross R makes little secret of the fact that Hakuna Aoba's skill is about all that's keeping his VF-1X++ from ending up as a carbonized smear on the side of the track. A lesser pilot would likely find the thing completely unflyable.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, they've tried once before... but, as was revealed by folks on the side, it wasn't so much an attempt to bring Macross over as a laughably ill-considered attempt to extort Macross's owners into selling the franchise to them. Harmony Gold will never willingly let Macross into the states unless they can profit from it, which would lead to them shelving their own franchise if the profit picture turned out to be better. I get the feeling Tommy would actually prefer it that way, he seems to like the originals a lot more than the Robotech versions and I know he's a fan of at least a few Macross sequels.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The US is also the one key market where Big West would be at a distinct disadvantage unless Harmony Gold went under, since the US trademark laws are written to counterintuitively favor the first user of a mark over the actual owner of the brand/property. The vast majority of the rest of the world takes the vastly more sensible opposite view. I expect the trademark law situation to resolve itself around the same time we switch to metric.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty much, but I get a chuckle out of the idea of a bunch of giant robots tiptoeing around. Ja, though since the only spec we've had is for a further-customized racing plane we don't know by how much. Hakuna Aoba, being a reasonable man and a model of restraint and moderation, decided his VF-1X++ wasn't competitive enough so he swapped the engines for a pair of LAI-made engines meant for an unmanned fighter with comparable power to a VF-22 and then strapped rocket boosters to the sides. Nothing says safe sport like an almost totally uncontrollable mess that's forever breaking down and always one twitch away from being a slowly dissipating fireball, right? (It says something that league champ Nicolas Francois Berthier flies a VF known for its habit of SPONTANEOUSLY EXPLODING and Hakuna Aoba's VF-1X++ Custom is considered less safe.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That was (allegedly) a misunderstanding on Harmony Gold's part, when they were sending out threatening letters to toy importers in 1999-2001 claiming that those importers were violating Harmony Gold's exclusive rights to Macross worldwide by importing Macross toys (from shows HG didn't actually have the rights to). Whether said misunderstanding on HG's part was an actual misunderstanding or they hoped they wouldn't get called on it if they lied a little to protect the nascent Toynami license is unclear, since a deliberate lie is entirely in character for them but the events of the Tatsunoko arbitration also demonstrated that their legal counsel really is THAT stupid. AFAIK, HG has never claimed to have outright bought Tatsunoko's stake in Macross... just a limited-duration license to it. The European Union and People's Republic of China have both seen recent trademark filings by Big West, which HG is attempting to dispute but with little prospect for success due to trademark law in those territories preferencing owner over first user. (They have reportedly already secured some classes of trademark for Macross in China, while the EU courts are referencing Big West's successful UK filing as precedent for granting Big West's Macross trademark in the EU.) Well, they have to retain an IP law-specialist law firm in each market, and that ain't cheap... the ones I know here in the US bill upwards of $250/hr per head for services rendered. Not quite what I was getting at. Yes, Tatsunoko Production is a bigger company than Big West... but financially, Tatsunoko Production isn't really better off than Big West is. The 2010s haven't been kind to them or their bottom line. Having Nippon TV come to their rescue and buy a majority (54.3%) stake in the company and adopt them as a subsidiary helped but their financial outlook is still shaky at best. They finished FY2017 ¥50 million (~$450K) in the red, and they're limping along without any real successes in their portfolio for FY2018 and FY2019 thanks to go90's sinking without trace as a platform for their Transformers shorts and the failure to launch of The Price of Smiles. (Takara Tomy's stake in Tatsunoko is only 20%, the other two major stakeholders are talent agency Horipro with 13.5% and Production I.G. with 11.2%.) Tatsunoko wants a guaranteed winner, and Big West is sitting on one that Tatsunoko feels it's entitled to... even if the law doesn't agree. Big West could negotiate with Tatsunoko from a position of relative strength because they have what Tatsunoko craves most of all: a highly popular steady earner. (Basically, Big West would probably work with Tatsunoko if Tatsunoko approached them about it... but they don't need Tatsunoko and they know Tatsunoko needs what they have, so they're not going to make the first move.) Tatsunoko can barely afford to keep the lights on in the studio most years, they're a long damn way from having the money to buy a ramen stand... never mind an advertising agency that owns a hit animated franchise. They're probably thanking their lucky stars they were able to convince HG to drop the lawsuit and wave their obligations from the arbitration, or that might've been the end of them.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not certain they're unwilling to do business with Tatsunoko so much as they're unwilling to do business with Tatsunoko on Tatsunoko's terms. They'd probably rather have Tatsunoko approach them, so they can negotiate from a place of strength. Big West is sinking a LOT of money and time into securing trademarks on the Macross name and logos outside of Japan right now... I think it's pretty safe to say they are NOT content to ignore untapped markets or concede them to Harmony Gold. Where the f*ck are you getting this? They demonstrably did give Tatsunoko the rights Tatsunoko licensed to Harmony Gold. If they hadn't, we wouldn't be in this mess. It was Big West who approached Tatsunoko about getting involved in the original series production, not the other way around. Didn't stop them from curb-checking HG in the UK to sell Delta merch and secure the trademarks there... and challenging HG in the EU and China.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Robotech fans are a demonstration of that old adage that Ignorance is Bliss. Harmony Gold put a lot of time and effort into discouraging them from seeking out the facts themselves and the wilfully deluded among them continue to spread misinformation, so a lot of Robotech fans simply don't know that better things exist or have been actively discouraged from looking into them.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    There are likely several, which have probably been there since the beginning. Unfortunately, they would almost certainly require some manner of bad faith or criminal misconduct on Harmony Gold's part that would expose Tatsunoko to liability in some form or harm the integrity of Tatsunoko's IP.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    They didn't... Tatsunoko owed Harmony Gold money due to having been ordered to pay Harmony Gold's court costs and attorney fees at the end of the binding arbitration process that both companies entered into to resolve Tatsunoko's claim that Harmony Gold had been underpaying royalties owed for home video and streaming use of Tatsunoko's animation. They didn't pay up, so Harmony Gold filed a lawsuit against Tatsunoko in the California central district court (the original subject of this thread). We can't be 100% certain until the next time a lawsuit airs the contracts, but it would appear Tatsunoko held the all-important Robotech license renewal hostage until Harmony Gold agreed to drop the lawsuit and waive payment of part or all of the money owed from the arbitration award. (From Tatsunoko's perspective, this was probably the best possible move to make... getting out of another expensive legal proceeding and simultaneously sticking Harmony Gold with the check from the last one.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Not exactly... the VF-1X++ in Macross the Ride was a unit that'd apparently been disarmed and sold off to former NUNS Special Forces ace Hakuna Aoba, who (further) modified it for use as an air racing Valkyrie. The one that appears in Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye doesn't appear to have those racing mods, so it might be a unit in stock configuration or close to it. As produced? Military. As it appeared? We don't know... it's identified in the novel, but they don't get into whether it's a loaner from the military or a civilian aftermarket unit. Yes, the VF-1X++ was a further upgrade made for the New UN Spacy Special Forces in the late 2040s or early 2050s. Due to the large number of VF-1s that've been sold off into civilian hands, the Special Forces essentially made it a VF-1 for covert operations... as silly as the idea of covert operations in a 13m tall robot sounds. Incidentally, the song it appeared on was Love is a Dogfight during Ranka's first live. Macross R's take on the question leans towards disarming Valkyries before selling them off to civilians being the norm and that VFs produced for the civilian market are unarmed by default. Both Macross R and the Macross 30 novelization seem to lean towards the idea that whether it's actually required is something that varies at the local government level. On Uroboros, the local government seems to be A-OK with independent civilians operating armed VFs provided they obtain a license to do so beforehand. I'd imagine the Macross 7 fleet might be having second thoughts about its loosey-goosey attitude towards civilian-owned armed mecha after those three geezers accidentally took the top off a skyscraper with a Mk.II Monster though. The Vanquish League itself doesn't seem to particularly care if the VFs racing are capable of mounting weapons as long as those weapons aren't installed on the VF when it's racing, given that at least one VF (Anthony Clemens's VF-11C Thunderbolt Interceptor) is noted to be capable of mounting weapons designed for the VF-19 and VF-22 thanks to its newer FCS, while most every VF actually participating in the races is noted to have no weaponry and in a few cases having had its weaponry removed and replaced with other systems (as was the case on Nicolas Berthier's VF-9E).
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The VB-6 Konig Monster with the gatling cannon arms never shows up in the final version of Wings of Goodbye, but the red VF-1 is used in one of Ranka's concerts. IIRC the novelization of the film indicates that it's a real aircraft used for the concert, and that it's actually a VF-1X++ Valkyrie Double Plus.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    No, it was an actually-new design... looked a bit like a Star Wars speeder bike TBH. I unfortunately don't have a pic handy the way I did for the other one. (I'm in the middle of switching to a new PC, so for now I'm posting from my eminently crappy tablet.) They didn't start pillaging the Imai Files for material until a decade later.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... have you seen Tatsunoko Production's last attempt at an original mecha anime? It was called The Price of Smiles, it was a 12 episode series created for Tatsunoko's celebration of its 55th Anniversary, and it was a f*cking unwatchable mess. Getting Harmony Gold and Tatsunoko to work together to develop a new mecha anime is a textbook case of the blind leading the blind. Harmony Gold ended up with the staff they currently have is that the brand's reputation is terrible. Nobody but a fan would want to have Robotech on their resume, and at the salary Harmony Gold is willing to pay for franchise staff most of the fans don't want it on their resume either. They don't have any way to attract new talent because they don't have money and they don't have fame. If the company were a poker hand, it'd be a joker, a misprint, the card that tells you about poker hands, and two coasters from the casino bar... not even close to a winning proposition. On their salaries? HG's staff would be lucky to afford Airsoft, never mind a real gun.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Forgive me for tackling your post out of order, but this claim is rather easily refuted as obviously false. Harmony Gold can be demonstrated to have invested in the development of new designs, even if they ultimately went unused, in both Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and the more recent failed Robotech Academy pilot. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles had several new designs make it into the finished product, albeit mostly ones derivative of MOSPEADA works like the Ark Angel-class and Shimakaze-class or fairly generic-looking like the Haydonite ships and fighters. There were also several new designs that went unused, such as the VF-13 Gamma Fighter I posted in my last post, a "Hover Cyclone", and a version of the Ark Angel-class that obviously went unused because it transformed in a manner similar to the SDF-1. There were a number of new designs trotted out for the Robotech Academy pilot before the Kickstarter was cancelled, three fighters and two ships. Investing in making new material is not the same thing as investing in making original new material or high quality new material. First, let us differentiate between creating a good design for a transforming fighter and creating a good original design for a transforming fighter. Those two are NOT the same. Macross fans are working with much less strict constraints because they're fan artists... not a rival franchise that isn't legally permitted to create derivative works based on the design works of Macross. You're half right... it boils down to HG not being willing to invest the kind of money it would take to do a quality job developing something of their own. A big part of the reason that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and Robotech Academy were such fiascos were because what got produced was developed and produced on the very tightest of shoestring budgets. The writing was awful and the animation looked like arse because these things cost money... money Harmony Gold isn't willing to spend because it believes new Robotech development will fail no matter what just as firmly as we do, which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That's actually pretty damned hard to do... particularly when you have to design something that also transforms into an equally original and good-looking giant robot. Even the industry professionals in Japan struggle with that so it isn't altogether surprising that Harmony Gold and its licensees can't pull it off when they don't have the budget to hire mechanical designers. Tommy Yune did make one attempt to develop an original VF for Robotech as part of the development of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, but it never made it past the rough draft phase. It was called the VF-13 Gamma Fighter and it looked like a more advanced, transformable version of MOSPEADA's AF-03.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    If Vader were really there, there wouldn't have been a fight... Darth Daddyissues would've been licking Vader's boots without needing to be asked.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Ja... as I said, you can only get it through Amazon's service directly without paying extra outside of the US. You have to be a CBS All Access subscriber, one way or another, to watch the show in the US... which is not worth it, IMO, given how bad the service is.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK it's only available on Amazon Prime outside the US... CBS wants to keep it exclusive to their CBS All Access service in the US for the time being, though once it comes out on home video it hits the usual suspects.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    https://xkcd.com/1189/ Yeah, but they keep changing the definition of "interstellar space" so the Voyager probes have left the solar system surprisingly often given that they're on a fixed course. "Travel" implies that a person is going... apart from our handful of trips to the moon and the semi-regular flights to and from our one functioning space station, we're not doing any space travel. What we're doing is space exploration using remote probes that transmit data back to nice comfy planetside control stations because our engine technology is comically inefficient for anything more than the shortest possible flights and we can't go anywhere farther than the moon because our bodies start f*cking up in long-term zero-g living thanks to most of our anatomy being designed to work in a 1g environment. When it comes to space travel, we're like a dog chained to its doghouse. The best we can do is run to the end of our chain and bark.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, back when MOSPEADA was called Descent Soldier Vector.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I'm not sure it's even that complex. Yeah, there are some Robotech fans who are dead-set against the idea that a love song could end a space war and are only into it for the setting, the mecha, and the pro-military parts of the story. They're a relatively small group in the remaining fanbase, though... one with a LOT of overlap with the Southern Cross/Masters Saga fans, which is kind of ironic given that "saga" had the worst mecha, a blatantly incompetent military, and a rather pissingly small space war. I've found that most Robotech fans don't seem to have any real objection to Macross's more upbeat take on ending a space war with a love song. Most Robotech fans who actually give it a fair try end up liking Macross more than Robotech, it's just that they've been subjected to decades of Carl Macek (and later Tommy Yune) telling them on no uncertain terms NOT to give Macross a try. They've been told that Macross is this flawed, inferior series that really wasn't popular in Japan, that the Japanese creators feel Carl Macek's version of the series was far superior to their own, and that all Macross sequels are just imitating Robotech anyway (no, really... these are things Macek was saying well into the 2000s). That's been so ingrained into the Robotech fandom's mentality by connecting it to same hokum about Robotech's supposed genre- and industry-defining influence that keeps Robotech fans hanging around in hopes that they'll one day get something good from the franchise.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, I wouldn't bet on that if I were you. When Harmony Gold compiled that featurette on the Robotech fandom for the special edition of the Shadow Chronicles DVD back in '06, the average Robotech fan was in their mid-to-late 30's. The fans who were writing these websites were teenagers when the TV series first started its broadcast run in 1985. When these sites started popping up in 1995, the authors were fans in their mid-20s. By the time these sites started to catch on c.1999-2001 the authors were turning 30. The ones that are still plodding away or have recently popped up are being written by the less distinguished members of that same group of fans... who are now on the cusp of being elligibile for an AARP membership.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek: Discovery's quality aside, CBS All Access on its merits as a service just isn't worth what they're asking per month for the subscription. I can't speak to the iOS side, but the CBS All Access app for Android and my Smart TV are amateur hour nonsense. The playback quality's pretty good when it wants to work, but it's really bare-bones. Autoplay can't be turned off, for instance, so when you hit the end of whatever you were watching it starts playing the first episode of a random show. Updates were bricking the Smart TV app on a pretty regular basis too. If they had a catalog of shows worth watching it'd be just frustrating, but if you're only in it for the one show it's just not worth the pain. Throw Discovery's pretty terrible first season and initially promising but ultimately even worse second season into the mix and it's like paying to be waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay. Yeah, I'm going to be taking the wait-and-see approach myself. Though in my case it's going to be because I've seen CBS use this same exact strategy before to promote Star Trek: Discovery's second season. Star Trek: Discovery promoted season two on the return of a familiar captain from a classic Star Trek show (TOS) and other major returning characters were heavily promoted (Spock, Number One). It looked like a really promising return to form for two or three episodes and then the bottom fell out. The returning captain was a toothless caricature of the original depiction and was treated like dirt by the show's original characters (the disrespect was real and shocking from Starfleet), and the others were more or less advertised extras until just before the end. The plot went from feeling like real classic Star Trek to a disjointed mess like the first season that had a season-breaking plot hole that somehow went unnoticed by the writers to the completely literally-unnecessary conclusion. So I'm kind of taking the "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" route with Picard. Seems to be a thing that's happening all over lately.
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