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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    You mean the fins on the back of the nacelle, or the ridge along the top? The ridge wasn't present on the original Matt Jeffries design, but the fins were... though they were a lot less pronounced. The ridge showed up on the refit design for the movies. The fins were marked up as intercooler systems for the warp nacelles on the original Roddenberry-blessed USS Enterprise schematics Franz Joseph Designs produced in 1973. That thing that looks like a towel bar on the inboard side of the nacelle near the front is another one. (The fins at the back used to be the same design.) Nope, it was always set up to be styled after Bad Reboot's trilogy of flops. Yeah, that was a concept for a Star Trek animated series where some nutter set off a bunch of omega particle bombs around the galaxy and basically destroyed subspace across a huge swath of the galaxy, splitting the Federation in two, causing the Vulcans and Romulans to reunify, forcing many Klingons to adopt a nomadic lifestyle, and generally turning the Star Trek setting into something more closely resembling Warhammer 40,000 (or the bad future timeline from TNG where the Enterprise-C disappeared at Narendra III leading to endless war with the Klingons). The only time that series concept was referenced after the proposal was rejected was in the Department of Temporal Investigations novels in the relaunch novelverse. The finale of that series revealed that that rejected Star Trek animated series proposal was a bad future created by the intervention of Future Guy (from Enterprise) that was retroactively unmade by agents from the Temporal Integrity Commission and Federation Temporal Agency when they undid his changes to the timeline while seeking to arrest him.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Basically, it's reached the point where it is a literal bad crossover fic... Titan's big finish to this industrial accident at the sewage treatment plant is to throw in a reference to every major incarnation of Robotech over the years, including ones HG lost the rights to or disowned, so they're all parallel universes in one big multiverse. It's like watching a beaten spouse wimper to their abuser that they can change if only the hitting stops.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be my fault, I guess... since many of us were hoping or suspecting that the litigation between Tatsunoko and Harmony Gold was going to be the death of their efforts to renew and keep their dead-end brand going, I just posted the news here. The litigation does appear to have been related to the renewal, though we had it backwards... Tatsunoko held that license renewal hostage until Harmony Gold agreed to drop its lawsuit against them for refusing to pay Harmony Gold's court costs and attorney fees as ordered to during the earlier arbitration and the amount owed itself. That announcement seems unlikely to ever come... remastering is expensive, and there just aren't enough Robotech fans for them to be assured of a decent ROI on the effort. Plus the entire Robotech fanbase still hasn't stopped giving them sh*t for changing the sound effects when they piggybacked on ADV Films's remastering of Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA. (Once bitten, twice shy I suppose.) After twelve years, I doubt even they seriously expect the movie to be made. They're just looking forward to continuing to collect checks until Sony decides it's no longer worth what they're paying, and lets the rights go. Likewise, they still seem to be holding out hope that they can frustrate Big West into licensing their trademarks on Macross's title in order to sell here in the states.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Jean-Luc Picard and his new Number One look like they're headed out to clean up Number One's Number Two.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    The comic's not-a-VF-1 design was, by the admission of the artist Titan stole it from, based directly on Macross's VF-0 Phoenix. In short, it would make a copyright infringement lawsuit from Big West a slam dunk summary judgement against Sony. (Big West seems to have not been aware of that fact, or they'd likely have sued Titan.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno, I think they could've stood to keep Walk Like an Egyptian through the end of Stardust Crusaders.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    They were always off the table, Big West owns the IP of SDF Macross. That's why Harmony Gold had to change the character designs for Robotech II: the Sentinels, and later kill off all the Macross characters they had left save one who got totally redesigned to avoid a lawsuit. I'm not gonna get my hopes up there, but Sunrise is apparently a codevelopment partner in that film so at least it hopefully won't look terrible.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The first episode of the Isekai Cheat Magician anime by Encourage Films is up on Crunchyroll... and it looks like crap. Encourage Films apparently did some production support for Senki Zessho Symphogear back in '12, and that's about the only thing in their filmography I recognize apart from the Lucky Star spinoff net animation. I don't know if they've fallen on hard times or Isekai Cheat Magician was a tough sell to the production committee, but whatever the cause it's unmistakably being made on the cheap even by anime standards. The whole first couple minutes look like the markedly lower-detail off-model animation from Macross Frontier's 8th episode which made up for the budgetary drain caused by the lavish animation of the previous episode's battle scenes and it never really gets much better. TL;DR: Don't encourage Encourage Films, skip Isekai Cheat Magician.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Let's not put that evil on Sony... there is precisely zero evidence that Sony intends to do ANYTHING with the Robotech license they have, like Warner Bros before them. The rest is essentially accurate, but is also one of the strongest arguments that the Robotech movie will never be made. Why would Sony create an all-new, all-original SF/mecha action movie on their own dime and then arbitrarily decide to pay Harmony Gold royalties for contributing nothing but the title of an obscure TV show from the 1980s? They could easily just call the exact same movie something else and keep all the money for themselves.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Well, in the meantime, you'll have plenty of translations to read to tide you over?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    ... given that they were torpedoing fan films before it was cool? Yeah.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Caught episode two of To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts today over lunch, and it's a pretty jarring disconnect from the first episode. After such a strong start in the first episode, the slow build-up in this episode feels like they stopped to do up their shoelaces mid-race... hopefully next week's episode will be a bit less Little House on the Prairie.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I just want this live-action adaptation kick to go long enough to remake Treasure Planet.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Prior to this renewal, they were forced to present it in court an average of once every four years to prove to the courts that they had an exclusive merchandising rights claim on the original Macross series designs and whomever they were suing didn't. Give it a few years, they'll sue Hasbro over another Jetfire toy or the owners of BattleTech and MechWarrior'll make ANOTHER attempt to bring the Unseen back, they'll go after ShapeWays or some other 3D Printing firm for making bootleg SDF Macross stuff, or another fan film group, and we'll have a fresh copy of the latest. Getting them to cough up isn't actually all that hard, since as a licensee they HAVE to present the license in court to prove they have standing to sue if they're filing an infringement suit.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I'm like 3:10 into episode two and the events thus far are already a screaming pile of hot nonsense. The Vers are just too advanced for amount of time that passed between the discovery of the hyperspace gate by Apollo 17 and the present day. There's just no realistic way that the Martian colonists went from nothing to interplanetary empire capable of building dozens of space colony-sized mobile fortresses and mobile weapons capable of taking out whole armies themselves in two and a half decades... unless there's some kind of time travel-related nonsense going on like how the Zor in Southern Cross were humans who'd been sent back in time by a warp drive accident and spent thousands of years advancing their society and technology. This show really doesn't feel very well thought-out, and I expect that's going to get worse rather than better as the story progresses. I'm mostly watching one episode a day at work on my lunch break... partly to relax, and partly as a way to gently discourage certain team leaders from trying to treat my lunch as an open spot on my calendar. (Thanks to my current client's switch to G Suite, I have expanded network access and can get to Crunchyroll using the corporate network.) Given what I've heard, I'm assuming he doesn't get an ace custom or anything like that... which really makes me wonder how he'll manage against such overpowered enemy mecha. I was expected a level of OP around Universal Century levels, this is more like the level of unbalanced combat in New Mobile Report Gundam Wing.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    At the very least, we could've counted on Macross kits popping up in Barnes and Noble, game stores, and so on the way Gunpla do.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    F*ck, my bad mate. I started Aldnoah.Zero today, since Crunchyroll is once again being slow to update. I've heard relatively little about it, save for that it supposedly reverses Gundam's favorite schtick of having a single super-prototype swaggering invincibly through swarms of small fry by giving the nigh-invincible super prototypes to the baddies and having the heroes operate those swarms of cannon fodder that explode if someone farts too loudly. The first episode's pretty insubstantial, what with [...]
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That's one of the things being worked on for my new site. Really, I doubt it. The backstory didn't really change all that much, and the redesigns for Macross the First are minor cosmetic details at best and not NEARLY enough to get around any kind of legal issues WRT the designs.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That would depend on what else Big West successfully trademarks there. The UKIPO shows that Harmony Gold's trademark filings in the European Union are currently being challenged by Big West as well... not just the ones on the Macross name, but what appears to be practically every related mark that Harmony Gold uses to stop Macross licensing in the west. If memory serves, EU trademark law preferences the owner of the material over the first user. Should Big West successfully win those challenges, they would have the power to effectively lock Robotech out of the entire European Union by forbidding them to use the name and logo of Macross, the UN Spacy and Zentradi emblems, the term "UN Spacy", and the key art of the main characters and mecha.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, he's basically there for The Worf Effect anytime he actually fights but there are One Episode Wonder villains who go out with more fanfare than he did. Even his own fake death got more attention. Kakyoin went out with way more dignity and he was even less effective than Avdol, with his only wins being against a baby and an insect.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I was talking more about the line of pool cleaners, but the sex toy was just too good to not throw in there given how often I've said the Robotech creative team's business plan is "just jerking off". I'll never stop, until someone founds the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Metaphors.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that answers a question I had. I was a bit confused when I set up my first new gaming rig in years and every peripheral that I'd bought for it treated me to a technicolor light show on startup. (They're all Logitech G w/ Lightsync hardware.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I've finished Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part III: Stardust Crusaders. I'm kinda disappointed in the ending, TBH. 48 episodes and DIO only really shows up in the last four or so, and the Jotaro realizing that his Stand had more powers than just "punch all the things" felt weirdly late to the party. Vanilla Ice got more buildup than DIO did and he was the entire objective of the plot. I went in largely spoiler free, so I was kinda surprised at who all survived the end of the story. Polnareff was the most developed of the supporting characters so I figured he was a cert to die as the dead best friend who motivates the hero's roaring rampage of revenge, like the Zeppeli family was. Avdol's death came out of freaking nowhere, it was really shockingly unceremonious. Iggy got more of a dignified exit than he did. Even DIO's demise felt kind of rushed. He only gets hurt a few times, and he just explodes like he'd been eating a box of live grenades when his Stand is broken. The second D'Arby brother's fight was drawn out way too freaking long, but the ending was pretty satisfying at least. Iggy's fight with Pet Shop was just tedious.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's the point. If Sony decides to make the film, they'll basically have to create an all-new, all-original SF mecha action film from scratch. What does Sony have to gain by surrendering partial ownership of their creation to a LA-based rental property firm and paying royalties to them for the use of a name that's far more readily associated with a brand of pool cleaning machines or a dangerous-looking mechanized male masturbation aid from Japan? That'd be like creating an all-original superhero movie on the company's own dime, then unnecessarily paying royalties to Proctor & Gamble because they just couldn't live without calling him Mr. Clean. OR... if Sony decides to make the movie but NOT call it Robotech and NOT use the handful of key terms that are all that come with the license in their essentially all-original film, they can do all of that AND keep all the money for themselves! Y'see, there's a reason the movie hasn't been made... and it makes good (dollars and) sense. They have literally no incentive to make a Robotech movie because the Robotech license is basically worthless. The only reason it got picked up in the first place was because Paramount was making bank on Transformers and it just happened to be a giant robot show that was on the air around the same time back in the 80's. When a title makes it big, studios buy up rights to similar stories just to deny them to each other in the event that that genre becomes the next big thing. Good man.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Probably for the best. I mean, an eagle's not that uncommon a sight... whereas I doubt anyone in the Chinese Empire's army would care much that she was a woman once they noticed she brought an actual goddamn dragon with her. That's one step short of having a permission slip signed and sealed by the Jade Emperor himself.
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