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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Macross's creators were complaining about it back in '82... it's part of why Tatsunoko ended up involved in production. Big West wasn't confident in Macross's prospects due to it being their first foray in animation sponsorship and gave it a really tiny budget that wasn't even adequate to produce the planned 27 episode run they'd cut it down to (from 49), so they had to get Tatsunoko involved in it and pay them with part of the rights to the show to get it completed. Tomino was complaining about it back in '79 when he had people working monstrous amounts of overtime to get Mobile Suit Gundam done on time, for very little pay, with staff being forced to double or triple up on roles. Tomino himself ended up drawing key animation for at least one episode because of it. I'm sure Matsumoto was grumbling loudly about it in '74 when they were working on Space Battleship Yamato, and many creators before that for as long as anime has been a thing. The very art style comes out of decisions made to keep production costs as low as possible.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Anime News Network has had a number of articles about that particular topic over the years... https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2015-05-15/study-animators-earned-usd28000-on-average-in-japan-in-2013/.87762 The sad reality of the situation is that anime isn't actually a profitable medium to work in. Studios operate on razor thin margins, entirely dependent on the profits from merchandising to have any realistic hope of turning a profit on the shows they produce. It can take studios months or years to break even on the majority shows they produce that don't become hits via reruns, streaming, back catalog home video sales, merchandise, and foreign licensing for all of the above. Many poorly-performing properties never manage to break even. Those studios stay afloat on the profits from the occasional hit series while they wait for the rest of their body of work to start turning a profit (if it ever does). The long hours and low wages for production staff are one of the ways studios try to keep production costs down to avoid pricing themselves out of the market. Outsourcing the more labor-intensive parts of their production process to studios in South Korea is another method. Your typical TV anime's per-episode budget is about on par with an American deep cable show's, despite the MUCH larger manpower and man-hour requirement to produce an episode. That anime is gradually gaining a foothold in markets outside of Japan may start to help the wage situation, but it'll probably be quite a few years yet before it becomes mainstream enough to effect meaningful change in the industry... if ever.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That's the beauty of this kind of epic corporate f*ckup... if the case is solid enough, there are no shortage of lawyers willing to take a case like that on contingency for the possibility of a multi-million dollar payday if they win.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, that behavior is going to come back to bite CBS in the arse when they finally exhaust their attempts at summary dismissal and the case goes to trial. The consequences of not cooperating with a court-ordered discovery process can include heavy fines, their own evidence not being admitted in court, and even summary judgement against them if they get really obstructive... which it sounds like they're doing. Refusing to cooperate with a request for discovery is generally a good way to show the jury and/or the judge (in a bench trial) that you're trying to hide incriminating evidence. It's like pleading the fifth, but unlike pleading the fifth it's actually illegal. (That they've admitted access and copying from Mr. Abdin's work is a pretty clear indication of what they're hiding... that plagiarism really did occur and was widespread.) CBS's lawyers are clearly counting on winning this case by outspending opposing counsel. They seem to be counting on the corporate coffers to tank the fines the court will impose due to their refusal to cooperate with the discovery process, and are hoping to secure a dismissal before the case can go to trial. My guess would be that, should their efforts to get the case dismissed continue failing to bear fruit, CBS will attempt to make the problem go away and preserve Star Trek: Discovery by offering Mr. Abdin a confidential settlement including a significant payout in exchange for an unlimited license to the contested material and dismissal of the case with prejudice. They don't want this case going to trial before a jury or even a bench trial, because they know they've been caught red-handed and the potential consequences of failing to defend a lawsuit like that could leave CBS hundreds of millions of dollars in the red between damages and unamortized costs from a now-un-continuable series. That's a pretty standard legal tactic, actually. You'd think lawyers would be too mature and professional for "NO U"-level shenanigans... but you'd be wrong. Variations on "it's at the frame shop" are also popular legal standbys for not producing documents when ordered. So many of modern legal stratagems these days are breathtaking pettiness thinly disguised by logorrhea. FASA actually tried it in their copyright infringement beef with Harmony Gold USA back in the 90's. They were actually stupid enough to follow through on it, though... and filed a lawsuit against Harmony Gold for using the Macross designs in merchandise when Harmony Gold refused to stop sending them cease-and-desists. It backfired hilariously in court, resulting in the infamous not-so-confidential-anymore confidential settlement that made the designs Unseen and barred their franchise from using non-original designs in FASA's desperation to avoid the now-inevitable ruling against them on charges of serial copyright infringement. (Part of their defense was actually based entirely on the "it's at the frame shop" strategy when they failed to produce their alleged license agreement with TCI, which predictably didn't work.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, though Netflix seems to dispute that particular claim as well as CBS's claim that Netflix should be responsible for sunk costs if the show doesn't last seven seasons...
  6. Seto Kaiba
    The Star Trek franchise's litigious little tantrum over fan productions probably had a lot less to do with protecting the IP than it did with CBS and Paramount feeling threatened by high quality fan productions like Star Trek: Axanar that were better received by fans than official productions like the Star Trek reboot films. The fans were stealing their thunder, so they put a stop to it.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    No chance. They knew, they were just hoping they wouldn't get called on it... same as CBS, who admitted access and copying but want to claim that a bear-sized blue tardigrade that can teleport interstellar distances is too generic for Mr. Abdin to claim it was copied. That would depend very much on which portions of Star Trek: Discovery are found to have been illegally taken from, or based on, Mr. Anas Abdin's game Tardigrades. Mr. Abdin's allegation is that a nontrivial portion of the Star Trek: Discovery season one plot is stolen from his game, as well as much of the cast, and the core mechanics of the "spore drive" that is the USS Discovery's main gimmick. The real sticking point isn't going to be the tardigrade... it's going to be the cast. If the court only finds that CBS plagiarized the bear-sized blue tardigrade that travels instantaneously through time, space, and dimensions, bare minimum they're stuck with a huge payout for damages to Mr. Abdin because the payout would be a percentage of all profits earned from the infringing material (season one). They would also likely lose the ability to distribute season one on home video or stream unless they paid royalties to Mr. Abdin for the use of his intellectual property. The tardigrade isn't coming back, and the spore drive was already being de-emphasized at the end of season one, so the damage would be severe but containable. Should the courts find in Mr. Abdin's favor on the subject of CBS having allegedly plagiarized the cast from Mr. Abdin's game Tardigrades as well... well, that's the end of the Star Trek: Discovery series because they would have to pay damages against profits from the entire run of the show and all related character merchandise, as well as being unable to use those characters anymore unless they got Mr. Abdin's permission and paid royalties to him for their use. In the past, the Star Trek franchise has avoided even minor royalty payouts to the authors who wrote past episodes when they wanted to reuse one-shot characters, so I think having to pay royalties against most of the cast would still be a show-killer. (The previous example character Nick Locarno, Wesley Crusher's squad leader in Star Trek: the Next Generation, who was rewritten into Tom Paris when they decided they wanted to reuse the character but didn't want to pay royalties to the writer of that old episode.) CBS claims to be upside-down on Star Trek: Discovery to the tune of $200 million from development costs planned to be amortized over a seven season run, so any significant monetary damages awarded to Anas Abdin are potential show-killers when they already can't afford to produce Star Trek: Discovery's third season.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Pushing Michael Burnham into traffic would also be acceptable. Really, anything would have been better than what we got. Even a performance of Star Trek music done entirely with dollar store kazoos and autotuned flatulence. (I'm not saying that Discovery was the worst Star Trek title ever made... just that it's the worst Star Trek title made thus far.) It's not really an update, just a reiteration of the progress that's been made up to now... which has mostly been Anas Abdin's lawyer successfully arguing against CBS's motions to dismiss on various grounds that border from unreasonable to ridiculous such as the infamous claim that bear-sized, bright blue tartigrades capable of instantaneous interdimensional teleportation across time, space, and multiple alternate realities are a commonplace thing in science fiction. (Then again, ridiculous motions to dismiss are often par for the course in copyright infringement suits... mostly being attempts to put off the inevitable as long as possible, like the ones FASA filed when they were sued for illegally using Macross designs in theier games.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    But whose bright idea was it to retranslate and redub the series in the first place? I suspect Netflix wanted to put their stamp on Neon Genesis Evangelion rather than just running with the existing translation, and I doubt Studio Khara had the kind of leverage in the licensing agreement to actually force Netflix to have a new translation made to their exacting specifications. My guess is that Netflix obligingly followed Studio Khara's guidance because they thought that they were going to one-up the original with a more authentic version. Nah, there's at least some circumstantial evidence that the ADV Films Macross dub was deliberately sabotaged by Harmony Gold. Netflix's f*ckup was a result of inexperience and, if the theory is true, following Studio Khara's guidance.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Decided to give Ao-chan Can't Study! a go over lunch today... and all in all I'd rate it as eminently skippable. Long story short, Ao-chan Can't Study! is essentially a less interesting and less well-developed version of B Gata H Kei. Ao is more or less the same character as Yamada (a teenage girl with an incredibly filthy mind) but the opposite motivation, and Kijima is the same character as Tsuda but less introverted and intimidated by her. Since it's one of those shows that does 12 minute episodes only, there's no real character development and it's just one dirty joke setup after another. Yamada in B Gata H Kei was just a curious teenager, but Ao in Ao-chan Can't Study! has a REASON for her filthy imagination that is played for laughs in the show but is horrifying if you stop to think about it. Her dirty thoughts come from having been exposed to pornography by her own father (an erotic novelist), and the first thing we see of her home life is him sexually harassing her while someone from his publisher pleads with her to just put up with it so he'll meet his deadline. He even swaps one of her textbooks for pornography at one point. It's supposed to be a comedy, but it's intensely f*cking creepy if you stop to think about it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    For my money, that's actually a point in its favor. Stardust Crusaders jumps straight into the action instead of bogging down in the standard issue shonen anime expository/training arc. We get maybe five minutes of exposition about Stands and their origin that gets spread across two episodes that occurs alongside the action instead of prior to it. The best part, IMO, is how Jotaro receives the news that he's got a psychic superpower because his family's ancestral enemy, an incredibly flamboyant vampire, is on the loose again after a century, bodyjacked his great-grandfather's corpse. He's not shocked, or panicking, or jumping at the call like a regular shonen anime hero. He tells Joseph to his face that this doesn't make sense and almost immediately adopts the view that this crazy bullsh*t is just part of his life now with a weary "yare yare". He just rolls with it and accepts that this is his new normal, so the plot can get underway immediately instead of wasting a dozen or so episodes pissing and moaning about his lot in life like other shonen heroes.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The Ostrich Class races the Vanquish League holds are technically open to GERWALK mode VFs too. SMS's parent company, Bilra Transport, fields a VF-4SL Lightning III that's a popular contender in those races.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Ugh... as long as the Star Trek: Discovery cast is involved, I'd rather just bury it like evidence of the dreadful crime that Discovery is. Bad Robot's whole take on the Star Trek franchise just needs to go away. It'll never be real Star Trek. If they're gonna do a TOS-era Star Trek series, I'd rather they pick something unrelated to the characters we've become familiar with.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    As great as Adson Mount's performance as Christopher Pike was, why would you want to keep him as a doormat for Starfleet's biggest disgrace?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Truly! For who among us could even dream of understanding the advanced sciences and technologies these mighty visitors from beyond the stars bring? We can do naught but tremble before the awesome sophistication of their amazing wooden planks, ropes, tennis shoes, and 7th grade geometry lessons! Let us not speak of their incomprehensible ability to stack cut stones in such a way that they do not easily fall down, lest we quake uncontrollably in fear at the realization of our own insignifiance!
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I finished Jojo's Bizarre Adventure's "Battle Tendency" arc today. So far, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has been one hell of a wild ride, and it's one of the most consistently entertaining shows I've seen in recent years. Joseph Jostar's epic troll behavior throughout Battle Tendency made watching him gradually wind his opponents up makes him an incredbily amusing protagonist to watch, and the whole premise is so outlandish with ancient mesoamerican super-vampire immortal shapeshifters, hammy nazi cyborgs, world-hopping adventure, and the gleeful abandonment of any pretense of taking itself seriously. It's a shonen anime without all the baggage that makes shonen shows a pain in the arse to watch like the constant training arcs, the next villain being 3,000km away when the hero doesn't have change for bus fare, or using the word "nakama" like it's a damn punctuation mark. Jojo just skips straight to the fun parts and rejoices in doing so. I'm having enormous fun with Jojo, and I'm looking forward to what Stardust Crusaders will bring.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I can never look at that Regult in the background without my mind's ear attaching the Zoidberg-running-away noise to it. Whoever decided Regult footraces were a good idea was a genius.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not surprised that the redub of Evangelion got a modest piece in the national newspaper... as loud as Netflix was trumpeting its acquisition of the distribution rights to Neon Genesis Evangelion, I would have been surprised if it didn't make the news in at least a minor capacity. Netflix was acting like getting the license was a major coup rather than just having picked up a license that lapsed when ADV Films went under and reorganized. Eh... doing a thing wrong is not necessarily the same as doing a thing badly. Netflix clearly and undeniably did a bad job producing their re-dub of Neon Genesis Evangelion, but it seems apparent that a big part of why they unintentionally did a bad job re-dubbing Neon Genesis Evangelion was because they were doggedly determined to make the most (literally) correct translation possible. The problem with that idea is that the most literal translation possible often doesn't flow well in the target language, so a good localization team will try to strike a balance between literal accuracy and natural flow so the meaning gets across in a way that feels natural (unless the character is supposed to be speaking in fractured grammar). They're mostly - justifiably - getting sh*t on for doing a bad job not necessarily for being wrong. Indeed, the complaints that Netflix is deliberately removing homoerotic subtext from the series ("queer erasure") is based on Netflix having translated a particular line with more literal accuracy (a declaration of affection that could be platonic or romantic) than ADV Films's version which made that same line into an explicit declaration of love (which, in English, is typically interpreted as romantic).
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure they read forums so much as the small mountain of news pieces published in the hobby press and other media outlets. For better or worse, Netflix's Neon Genesis Evangelion retranslation and redub has garnered a LOT of media attention... much of it negative and highly critical of the changes in the show from the ADV Films translation and dub from over twenty years ago. Most of it is (harsh) criticism of the quality of the translation and the dub itself for reasons already discussed in this thread's previous posts, with a few accusations of Netflix having an anti-LGBT agenda because of changes to Kaworu's dialog in the new translation that rendered 好きってことさ as "I like you" instead of "I love you" mixed in. Netflix probably thought releasing Neon Genesis Evangelion was going to be high profile anime on Easy Mode, and they're getting royally reamed because of it instead.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I'll pass.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    My guess would be that The Rising of the Shield Hero was banking on the popularity of the light novel to sell the series and structured the series around the assumption they'd get their second season green-lit early, but the show's viewership share wasn't quite high enough to get pre-approval. The story arc they're headed into is pretty dull, and Naofumi loses a lot of his distinctiveness as a protagonist now that he's the overpowered one among the Cardinal Heroes.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The Rising of the Shield Hero stumbled to a halt this week. Normally, if you give the final episode the title of the series as a whole, you expect a pretty exciting and bombastic ending. Shield Hero wrapped up the battle against the heroes from another world in the first eight minutes or so and spend the remaining fourteen minutes or so faffing about with bookkeeping like Naofumi getting himself appointed lord of Seyaette, picking up the useless girl, and so on. It's like they wrote the final episode in expectation of getting renewed for a second season right away and then it didn't happen.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It's a step in the right direction... shame it's still a half-marathon between them and "watchable".
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Two episodes into Battle Tendency, and so far this feels like "better". Joseph is a MASSIVE troll protagonist, and it WORKS.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    The Vanquish League holds several different categories of race that cater to different styles of racing and different levels of aircraft performance. Macross the Ride's story mainly revolves around the Ultimate Class races, an anything-goes competition where racers can bring any model of VF they or their sponsors can afford and extensively modify it to improve or refine its performance. It's kind of like late model stock car racing in that respect. There is a modest amount of grumbling from fans of the league that the Ultimate Class allows racers sponsored by megacorporations to spend their way to victory using high-spec 4th Generation VFs that independent racers can't even legally buy, like team Shinsei's custom VF-19A or team SMS's VF-19ACTIVE. The best that most independent pilots can afford are decommissioned VF-11B and VF-11C Thunderbolt that the New UN Forces are selling off, though some have managed to get their hands on other 3rd Generation models like VF-14 Vampires or a VA-3 Invader. There are a few brave or foolhardy racers who race Ultimate Class with late-service upgrade variants of older 1st or 2nd Generation machines like Hakuna Aoba's VF-1X++ Valkyrie Double Plus and ten time champion Nicolas F. Berthier's VF-9E Cutlass. (The latter is essentially the league's rebuttal to the grumbling about pay-to-win.) Some independently wealthy pilots go in on custom jobs, like Magdalena Zielonaska's SV-52y, which started its life as a SV-51 that was retrofitted with VF-17 parts. Other classes of race include Thunderbolt Class, which is more like street stock racing where only VF-11 Thunderbolts are permitted, and Ostrich Class, which is a GERWALK mode (or battlepod) foot race. In the case of Hakuna Aoba's VF-1X++, it's more like the old myth of the man who strapped a JATO bottle to an old Chevrolet Impala. Not only did he upgrade the engines to ones intended for current-gen unmanned fighters (with output similar to a VF-22's), he also strapped rocket boosters to the sides. Nicolas Berthier's VF-9E was a planned production model meant to extend the service life of the VF-9 by updating its engines to the model used on the VF-22, a plan abandoned by General Galaxy after it demonstrated a disquieting tendency to spontaneously explode in midair. To put that in context, thermonuclear reaction burst turbines were a next-gen engine technology developed for the VF-19 and VF-22.
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