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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, back when MOSPEADA was called Descent Soldier Vector.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, some of them are old, yeah... but there are others that are BRAND SPANKING NEW. The uRRG successor site? That's new. Like, made in the last year or two and currently being updated with more "borrowed" stuff new. The point being that that particular bad habit has been endemic to the Robotech fandom for a long time with no signs of dying out, and seems to be encouraged by Harmony Gold's unconcealed contempt for the original creators and their work.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    On that score, am I the only one who finds it slightly odd that almost none of the Stand users in Morioh have found any kind of a mundane utility for their newfound psychic powers? The closest we've really seen is Okuyasu using The Hand to put out a fire in someone's hair by vanishing the burning hair.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I'm pretty sure that, if it comes to that, it'd mean I'd been abducted by the Japanese porn industry... not aliens. Come to that, I've never understood why UFO believers are so convinced that an advanced alien species from another star system would come all this way to make contact by jamming a metal rod up some random yokel's backside. Either they think humans have the most beautiful colons in the universe or they're into some seriously weird sh*t. As with all those other categories, the fantastical explanation should only ever be taken seriously when all logical and scientific paths of inquiry have been completely and thoroughly exhausted. There's a reason the explanation for virtually all of these fantastical sightings turns out to be mundane, and often hopelessly boring. The overwhelming majority of "UFO" sightings belong to the same category of credibility as "I saw Jesus on my cheese sandwich" and related phenomena have all proven to have thoroughly non-exotic explanations like cattle "mutilations". I do have to admit it's rather convenient for the military that folks would rather believe the things they're seeing are space aliens instead of confidential military programs under test, like the Roswell incident. An object that shows up on radar and moves at high speed can be a LOT of things besides an alien spacecraft... and, remember, these various UFO reports don't actually put any real stock in the notion of alien visitations. This has always been all about figuring out if a foreign adversary got the drop on us technologically.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    There was that famous prank by, IIRC, @areaseven, that tricked a great many Robotech fans into thinking Harmony Gold had licensed Astro Plan.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Plagiarizing Macross is a freaking hobby for the Robotech fandom. Most of the sites have mercifully gone thanks to the collapse of Geocities and AltaVista free web hosting services, but it was damn near impossible to find a Robotech RPG supplement site that didn't steal from at least one Macross show or a dozen other anime properties. RobotechResearch is one of the surviving examples, and it has a pretty substantial section that borrows from early Macross concept art, the FamilySoft Macross games, Macross: Do You Remember Love?, Macross: Flash Back 2012, Advanced Valkyrie, and the Macross Model Hobby Handbook... and it's one of the more subdued examples. Robotech's fanmade "reference" sites are no better. The Unofficial Robotech Reference Guide has a fair amount of stuff borrowed from Macross that doesn't appear in Robotech, and its nominal successor site is even worse in that regard and was even straight-up stealing art and entire articles from the Macross Mecha Manual.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, many of the soldiers who are involved - however peripherally - in reports of alleged UFO activity are highly trained and disciplined personnel with their heads screwed on straight. No amount of sheer straightlaced-ness makes the human eye any less of an unreliable tool or makes the brain on the backend run a less unreliable compression codec to stabilize the picture. The very same kind of highly trained, highly disciplined personnel are responsible for goofs like launching nuclear bomb-equipped bombers from an airbase and very nearly starting World War III because they mistook a black bear on the periphery of an airbase for a human intruder or forgot to swap a training tape out of a NORAD defense computer and almost convinced the Strategic Air Command that World War III had begun. Mr. Halt saw something... but given that the Halt memo was never classified, the supporting documentation indicates only the most cursory follow-up investigation was made, and a host of eyewitness statements not only failed to corroborate his account but outright refuted it with a thoroughly mundane explanation, it seems unlikely that he saw anything that was of extraterrestrial or even unusual origin. The general consensus among eyewitnesses and the locals is that Mr. Halt saw the Orfordness lighthouse beacon distorted by prevailing conditions. It's only natural that he wouldn't be punished for an honest mistake, since he acted in the name of preserving the security of the base to which he was assigned. Like so many of these incidents, the lack of evidence to support claims of a coverup of UFO activity is itself taken as evidence of the efficacy of said coverup... which implies a belief that our governments are far, FAR more capable than they can be demonstrated to be when it comes to keeping secrets. Unless we've got a real world verison of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged out there trolling rednecks for fun, odds are any visiting extraterrestrials (if they do in fact visit us at all) are substantially more discreet than the kind of nonsense that makes up the typical UFO report. The mundane explanation is pretty much invariably the right one. When or if we do finally confirm the existence of extraterrestrials, it'll be because we've found some mundane proof... like Glorg'nax locking himself out of the saucer and politely trying to explain his predicament to parking enforcement in the hopes of not getting a ticket. This garish nonsense with every alleged alien spacecraft being covered in more flashing lights than the average Star Trek prop and shining like a spotlight is only explainable as alien activity if Earth is somehow a hotspot for showing off riced out starships with the tacky road effects and spinning rims.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    There is, to be fair, at least a modest amount of evidence to indicate that Academy and Antarctic were not giving Robotech their A-game... as it similarly true for Titan Comics.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The whole point of those previous reporting activities was to brief politicians about it. The military would occasionally deny this kind of reporting activity was going on, but usually only if they were covering up for an ongoing secret project that kept getting reported like the Project Mogul, Project Moby Dick, and Project Genetrix high-altitude balloon programs that were used for detecting Soviet nuclear tests or conducting clandestine photography of Soviet territory. (The infamous Roswell "UFO" debris is actually a Project Mogul nuclear test detection balloon's radar reflector.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, at least the wine'll be top-notch. If you go on Memory Beta and search "relaunch novels timeline", you'll get a LONG timeline that shows how they all fit together chronologically... except for the ENT relaunch, which is set like 200 years before all of them. You didn't miss much, it's basically Star Trek Nemesis 2.0... literally the same crap about a macguffin weapon that causes people to rapidly decay on a subatomic level (because quarks totally know if they're part of organic matter, right?) being used by a Federation-hating human xenophobe to destroy Earth. If you like dirtbikes and the Beastie Boys, it might be slightly better than Nemesis. Otherwise, they're both eminently skippable.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The poster the hack is standing in front of is a blown up copy of one of the covers from the aforementioned "From the Stars" miniseries where the VF-X-4 was used. Well, that too... but, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems pretty likely that the rampant copyright infringement and tracing was a significant factor in Harmony Gold revoking Academy Comics's license in 1996 and Antarctic Press's license in 1998. Some of it, in all fairness, could probably be attributed to Harmony Gold not really making it clear what their license was actually covering... since a lot of the infringement was from Macross sequels. Probably the lowest point was the promotional tie-in comic for the vaporware Robotech: Crystal Dreams video game for the Nintendo 64. That black and white comic was about 80% tracing, and almost entirely from DYRL?. Antarctic presided over that fiasco, but almost all of their comics infringed on at least one copyright. Usually more than one. (Amusingly, I had forgotten that Robotech Academy was originally the working title for Robotech: Crystal Dreams... how ironic they BOTH became vaporware.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Between this and Sonic the Hedgehog, 2019 seems to have bought a condo in the Uncanny Valley. This looks as bad, if not worse, than Mike Myers as The Cat in the Hat.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That's not anything new... Robotech's comic licensees have been tracing from Macross artbooks and outright stealing characters, mechanical designs, and entire plots from other anime (incl. Macross sequels) since the late 80's. My personal favorite example is a comic called Robotech: Wings of Gibraltar in which every VF-1 is traced from the Gold Book, the "new" VF featured in the story is basically a badly drawn VF-19F, and the scientist at the top secret facility that created it is literally Brent Spiner's character from Independence Day, traced from stills from that film so he looks completely different from every other character in the comic. (This kind of copyright infringement was so commonplace in Robotech's old comics that Harmony Gold decided to decanonize them all and avoid reprinting or referencing them to avoid legal troubles down the road, and even admitted they'd f'ed up royally by not exercising oversight over what their licensees had been doing.) The VF-X-4... they can't legally use the VF-4. It's one of those things the Robotech fandom has been obsessing over for decades. It only shows up as a model, so naturally they surrounded it with a whirlwind of unfounded speculation until Tommy Yune had it appear in the "From the Stars" miniseries back in ~2001. Not being a mechanical designer, he dodged the question of making it transform by having it encounter mechanical issues during its brief sortie. Robotech didn't finally design its own transformation for the VF-X-4 until a few years ago with the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter, where it was a stretch goal reward.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... but guys look Doomcock wouldn't be funny if they were pleased. The entertainment value comes from them being such massive curmudgeons. As Dr. Bashir would have it: "Nothing makes them happy! They are dedicated to being unhappy and to spreading that unhappiness wherever they go! They are the ambassadors of unhappy!" Well, yeah... there's no way a Star Trek movie was going to kill a main character without setting the stage for a potential Search for Spock-style return in a future film. They just never closed the loop on it because Nemesis ended up being the last TNG movie and the last proper Star Trek film... so it wasn't until Cold Equations (in the novelverse) or STO's B4 Matrix event that Data got brought back to life YEARS after he "died". (Insurrection and Nemesis were kind of a big comedown, going from beating a mad doctor and Klingon renegades and then the Borg Queen herself to beating up a dying man as interpreted by Salvador Dali and then Picard losing a fistfight to his own clone wearing a rainbow-oil pleather onesie. If they'd done another one, it would've been two hours of Picard arguing with a dozy rent-a-cop about validating the parking for his shuttle.)
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