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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    My educated guess would be that they're not. Adapting popular anime properties into live-action films in the West has historically been an almost foolproof recipe for an embarrassing box office flop. Even the relatively mainstream anime properties like Dragon Ball Z or Ghost in the Shell either failed to break even or went out as box office bombs. Alita: Battle Angel is the closest anime adaptations have come to a true box office success and even then industry analysts and studio insiders suggest the film was only marginally profitable and may have only just managed to break even. I would assume that studios will still only be looking at anime properties with the best levels of name recognition in the US. Titles like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Gundam, etc. If Macross's do-over debut in 2021 produces some serious public awareness for the brand then they might start considering it for a live action adaptation. I suspect it'll still not happen, since it has some aspects that just don't translate well to live action... like the role of music in the story.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Normally, a studio adapting an existing work wants to have at least some visual connection to the original if at all possible... which just isn't possible with Robotech, and is likely a large part of why nobody's willing to touch it. That and not being able to actually adapt the story of the TV series.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, all that's actually happened with it in over eleven years is that they paid out of pocket for a handful of Hollywood writers to do rough story treatments for a movie so they could misrepresent those writers as actually involved in production (and to have some fake tangible "proof" that it was actually being worked on). Like Warner Bros before them, Sony Pictures has zero inclination to actually make a Robotech movie. They only picked up the rights because it was a contemporary series to the Transformers series that Paramount is still making bank on. Considering virtually none of the IP from the animation is usable for such a film, no studio was ever going to even seriously consider making it.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it was pretty much dead on arrival if we're being honest. Ratings-wise, Robotech was an unremarkable middle-of-the-pack performer in its original broadcast run and its merchandise line was nothing to write home about either. Most companies would probably not have tried for a sequel series or a feature film with that kind of performance, but Harmony Gold did and once both efforts ended in failure they more or less abandoned it until 1999 and their ill-conceived attempt to revive the brand with Robotech 3000. Well, yeah... Carl Macek mistook the borrowed quality of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA for his own cleverness, and spent the rest of his life trying to take credit for the work of the original creators while simultaneously badmouthing them. He didn't have a freaking clue what Robotech's audience wanted or even who they were which, combined with his arrogant belief that he knew better than the industry professionals who created the material he was taking credit for, led him to fly three Robotech sequel projects into the ground. They never had much money for development because Robotech was never all that successful. Quality costs money. They had assistance from several extremely talented people early on, but Macek succeeded in driving them away during the development of Robotech II: the Sentinels. Without Tatsunoko to foot the bill for talent, they were on their own and the budget wouldn't stretch enough to allow them to engage the services of talented creators (not that Macek would've allowed it) or to produce high-quality animation. By the time they finally got rid of Macek and were trying to reinvent Robotech as a mainstream anime title, all of the damage Macek had done was too much for them to get a proper budget so they had to make Shadow Chronicles on a budget of less than $1 million provided by HG itself... which had to stretch REALLY far to cover development and production, especially in light of hiring big-name voice talent for bit parts like Mark Hamill. I know for a fact that Tom Bateman cared about the quality of the work they were doing, and I'm pretty sure Tommy Yune did too. There are limits to what you can do with such a limited budget when you're also splurging on voice actors who demand to be paid SAG rates. Pretty much, but it's the only Hail Mary that's really left open to them after Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles didn't deliver on all the promises Tommy made to his bosses and Robotech Academy became an embarrassing public failure. Yeah, it really was a poorly conceived attempt to make the franchise relevant. Shadow Chronicles was supposed to appeal to anime fans who'd never heard of Robotech, but the only way they could seem to think of to make it appeal was... well... drawing every woman to look like Shay Laren in a neoprene body stocking. Fanservice sells... but it was a rather cynical attempt to make Robotech marketable that didn't really draw anyone's attention. It did attract some hilarious comments when Harmony Gold made it available on Hulu Plus though.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Robotech was stagnating for well upwards of a decade before it ever got to that point. It's been a stagnant property ever since the plans for a sequel series (Robotech II: the Sentinels) and a movie (Robotech: the Untold Story) fell through in '86-87. The old comic books and novels were cheap, lazy, quick-and-dirty attempts to shake a nostalgic fanbase down for a quick buck with nothing like an orchestrating intent or creative direction. (I still maintain that the novels were Luceno and Daley C.S. Goto-ing them by swapping proper nouns out in rejected Star Wars manuscripts.) New material isn't forthcoming because every attempt to create new material is a failure... and it's happened so often that nobody wants to put their money in Robotech anymore. After Robotech 3000 spun in so badly that it bankrupted its principal sponsor and animation studio Netter Digital, nobody outside Harmony Gold was willing to finance a Robotech production. After Shadow Chronicles failed to achieve its promised revival of the franchise's fortunes and attract external sponsorship,, Harmony Gold's own management was no longer willing to finance its new developments. Then came Robotech Academy, where the hilarious mixture of naive incompetence, monumental arrogance, and good old fashioned crap quality combined to ensure that even the fans were unwilling to finance new Robotech development. They are playing a waiting game, but it's not THAT waiting game. They're waiting, and wishing, and hoping, and praying for some Hollywood studio to decide to actually make a Robotech movie, so they can simply sit back and collect royalty checks instead of developing material themselves. That was, by their own admission, the Plan B after Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles met such a negative reception. They wanted to use the movie to attract new sponsors to the animated series, and even that was eventually abandoned. What did ExoSquad do to deserve such a horrible fate? Hiring mechanical designers, talented or otherwise, takes money... at this point NOBODY wants to put money into Robotech. I don't think they'll bother. Virtually all Robotech merchandising is built on Macross. If they can't renew the Macross license, they'll fold rather than trying to continue on in vain because there's only a minimal market for imitation-brand MOSPEADA merchandise and virtually no market for Southern Cross. But Pinhead!McKeever has such sights to show you...
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Some of the Harmony Gold "insider" fanboys seemed to believe that it's damage licensee confidence in the Robotech brand if the true extent of the limitations on Harmony Gold's license and its legal problems became public knowledge. The reasonable among us might have cause to wonder "what licensee confidence?", given that Harmony Gold was already scraping the bottom of the barrel in 2008 and have now moved on to licensing the brand to actual criminals in the form of Southeast Asian toy bootleggers.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    After watching that trailer, the vibe I'm getting is essentially Starship Troopers 3: Marauder by way of Independence Day... just with slightly higher production values than the former.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Harmony Gold's evasiveness is a survival tactic on a couple different levels. On the one hand, they don't want to get into the details of their legal situation because they can get into a lot of trouble if they do start talking about it and say something that they're not allowed to talk about from a sealed settlement or if they misrepresent the state of affairs and another interested party takes exception. (Like what happened when they claimed to have the rights to all of Macross rather than just its original series in 1999-2000 and it not only got them in trouble, it got Tatsunoko in trouble too.) On the other hand, they don't want to appear that they aren't in control of the franchise... and let's be honest, 99% of the fandom who are still holding out hope for Robotech's future are there for the Macross references. If they were to actually admit they can't use Macross stuff in new film works, they'd damage the fandom's confidence in their brand. As far as we know, it all expires together in 2021 based on comments made by Tatsunoko in their arbitration.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, they don't bother working her into plots anymore... she gets dragged out whenever they need/want to throw the odd reference to Macross into a story, because most Robotech fans are closeted Macross fans who couldn't give a crap about the other 2/3 of the "original" Robotech story. Like in their comic book bridge to the Shadow Chronicles OVA, she appeared solely to be captured and put through such grievous torture that she could never appear again because using her is too legally problematic. Or they'll just kill her off again... she doesn't seem anywhere near as important to the story as previous incarnations. We are, if anything, understating it. There hasn't been an honorable employee at Harmony Gold since Tom Bateman was forced out. This "information session" is going to essentially be the same kind of bullsh*t pep talk you see all the time from venture capitalist CEOs imploring shareholders to keep the faith while the stock price plummets and the company posts massive losses. The kind that, in any other context, would sound like a DPRK news brief... "All is fine. No more questions. Our glorious president will lead us to victory." Well, you get what you pay for. Harmony Gold set out to hire an international marketing coordinator for the Robotech franchise but, like all the other newly-created Robotech franchise positions, the advertised salary was more suitable for an entry level office job in a much less expensive-to-live-in area than Los Angeles. McKeever might well have been the only person to apply for the post, as it would only have appealed to a real idiot who would value working on Robotech over not being paid like an intern.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    He's not very effective at it, given that pretty much everyone remotely familiar with the Robotech and Macross franchise knows he's Harmony Gold's liar-in-chief. He's a joke and the only one who doesn't know it is him. (Even the other HG employees don't like him.) Again? They already did it once.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Lemme fix that last sentence... "Join Harmony Gold's coffee boy, Kevin McKeever, as he dispenses lies less believable than a North Korean news broadcast." There is no bloody way that McKeever of all people is going to give a realistic assessment of how totally screwed Robotech is when they lose the rights in 2021. He'll probably deny to the hilt that they're going to be losing the rights.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Alternatively, you can just fire the writers.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Unfortunately, yeah... as long as Bad Robot Productions is calling the creative shots, Star Trek is doomed to fail over and over again. Bad Robot is so enamored of the "action-ized", style-before-substance version of Star Trek they established with the 2009 Star Trek reboot movie that they're determined to make it the norm for Star Trek so they can keep cashing in even though Star Trek fans and licensees hate it.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    It's a quintessentially American story... investing enormous amounts of time, energy, resources, and innovative spirit into disproportionate retribution for a petty insult from a highbrow snob. As a former Ford engineer and lifelong Motor City boy, I definitely have to go see this one.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda my feeling, yeah. It makes sense in an OVA where your individual episodes might be separated by six months to over a year the way Gundam Unicorn was in its original format, but for a weekly TV anime series like Gundam Unicorn Re:0096 it's just a transparent attempt to pad the series by extending that ~3 minutes of reused animation from the OP and ED out to 7 or 8.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's a bit much to ask us to wait until 16 June 2395 isn't it? One thing to say for Alex Kurtzman's tenure at the head of the Star Trek franchise... he's made Doomcock much more entertaining than Star Trek itself, by ensuring that he's never short of stupid decisions and highly visible incompetence to rage and storm about.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    If anything, it's even more convoluted since they've got multiple realities apparently all repeating the same time loop with different variations and at least one of them is invading the others deliberately just to be a dick. It's like a fifty soap opera pileup in terms of the number of lame cliches being thrown out, from evil twins to fake deaths... They've basically just taken it back to how it was before Harmony Gold rebooted Robotech in '01. Back in the late 80's and the 90's, it was a macguffin that could do pretty much anything. Carl Macek's explanation of it was more or less straight-up magic. The energy produced by the "Flowers of Life" was actual life force being drained from the flowers of life and the cancelled Robotech 3000 series would have revealed that the stuff was straight-up self-aware and would rebel against the abuse of its power (the plot of the cancelled series). Using it to power things like mecha made them pseudo-living, which was the explanation given for how they were able to maneuver like living things. The novelization took it even further and made it into, for all intents and purposes, The Force from Star Wars... something that had apparent power over causality itself, granted psychic powers, facilitated time travel, and had an omniscient will of its own. When Harmony Gold rebooted Robotech in 2001 in an attempt to reinvent it as a viable mainstream mecha anime property, it was de-mysticized into nothing more than a highly versatile material that could be used in energy generation (not unlike petroleum).
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Even serious Robotech fans don't like Robotech 3000... that was literally why it was cancelled after just one trailer. Harmony Gold and Netter Digital showed the trailer at a few cons and the fan response was so overwhelmingly, vehemently, unilaterally negative that Harmony Gold cancelled the series and then cancelled the series AGAIN when Carl Macek attempted to revive it as a traditionally-animated property. It was so universally scorned that even Carl "I meant to do that" Macek admitted the series was a mistake in his foreword for the Shadow Chronicles artbook. Its one and only defender was the late khyron_prime, who built a website devoted to an insane conspiracy theory that the series was cancelled because members of the Netter Digital staff sabotaged it during production as part of some internal power struggle rather than because the fans rejected it outright. Yeah, the armor is totally Halo... not the first time this dreadful tome has done that either.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    It's been delayed what, twice already?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    They're referencing Robotech 3000... Stop and appreciate that fact. THEY'RE REFERENCING ROBOTECH 3000. The worst failure in the Robotech franchise's history... prior to Robotech Academy, anyway. An ill-conceived series concept so appallingly bad that even the legendarily low standards of the Robotech fandom couldn't stretch far enough to pretend it wasn't utter garbage. This isn't scraping the bottom of the barrel anymore... they're a couple kilometers down into bedrock and continuing to dig.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Isekai Quartet is still very much a "for fans only" series ten episodes on, but it still manages to be entertaining nevertheless in no small part because of how many terrible people are in the typical isekai anime's story. Like the light novel it's adapting, The Rising of the Shield Hero definitely feels like a much weaker series now that the first major story arc is over. Naofumi feels a lot more generic and uninteresting once his grudge against the Kingdom of Melromarc is settled by the Queen. He still thinks the other cardinal heroes are morons (and he's not wrong), but he is not the same jaded misanthrope who made such an interesting protagonist early in the story. Now he's just a Stalwart Hero of the Land. Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn Re:0096 feels like a critical failure of editing. Every episode starts with a four minute long recap of the unnecessarily convoluted story thus far, which gets pretty redundant after a while when it's recapping all the way back to episode one and events that aren't even directly connected to the episode.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... if the latest round of Star Trek leaks are true, then CBS and Star Trek are having a REALLY terrible year. Reportedly, CBS is rushing the Star Trek: Picard series through production as a green screen extravaganza to keep costs down thanks to receiving a significantly smaller budget from the distribution deal with Amazon. They've apparently got around four episodes of material shot so far, but may be headed back for even more reshoots after a disastrous test screening at which something like 80% of the audience disliked what they were shown. It's also reportedly, as expected, being done in the same J.J. Abrams/Kelvin timeline-esque design aesthetics that were used in Star Trek: Discovery... because apparently they've decided to brazen it out and hope it'll catch on instead of admitting it was a mistake. It'll be interesting to see if the series ever sees the light of day, since they may well end up running out of cash before they ever actually finish the season... Amazon is allegedly suffering buyer's remorse. Star Trek: Discovery is still up sh*t creek without a paddle, as nobody seems willing to step forward and put up the enormous sum necessary to produce the third season of Star Trek: Discovery.
  23. Seto Kaiba

    Macross 30

    Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Games

    No, it's right here on MacrossWorld:
  24. Seto Kaiba

    Macross 30

    Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Games

    YES. My friend @Jack Verse was able to play the game all the way through and quite enjoyed it despite not speaking a word of Japanese, thanks to a very fine translation guide published on these forums as a Google Doc. Mandarake, eBay, Amazon, CDJapan (backordered 5-10 days if you want the Best Edition new), etc.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    At least the title isn't "Haruhiko Mikimoto Forever"... the world can only contain so much irony.
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