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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, I can't honestly say that I could lay 100% of the blame for the Vengeance at Jar-Jar Abrams's door. Section 31 was responsible for its design and construction, and they were a hilariously unsubtle pack of drama queens with a complexity addiction even when they were first introduced in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Doing something like secretly constructing an enormous state-of-the-art warship for a clandestine preemptive strike on one of the Federation's enemies and making it incredibly conspicuous by forgetting to not design it like a Federation starship, designing a giant Starfleet delta into the hull, and then lazily painting it black and not applying markings is 100% in-character for them. (It's not much worse than what the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar did in Deep Space Nine, really... they just skipped the coat of black paint in favor of a cloaking device and building more than one.) After all, Section 31 are the guys who think "inconspicuous" means going everywhere in a black pleather two-piece suit like some kind of business gimp. Nah, I'd have to say Snoke's big flying wing mothership was way better looking than the Vengeance... even after Vice Admiral Bad-at-her-Job turned it into a wreck and a line of ultra-velocity shrapnel. So that's why he keeps a model of the USS Vengeance on his desk in his office where anyone can see it! It must have come with a lovely card that read "To the filthy mammal Admiral Marcus with love, from the Gorn Hegemony".
  2. Seto Kaiba
    FWIW, I'm not so sure this applies to Southern Cross fans... the ones I know, at least, are an incredibly stubborn lot for whom the absence of any real Southern Cross collectibles1 something of a sore spot.2 I would bet cash money that many of them would wait as long as it took to get enough interest for a proper Southern Cross collectible of ANY stripe. The problem is whether there are actually enough of them to get a group of 30 together to fund something like one of your kits. Southern Cross being an almost totally forgotten bit of mid-80's anime esoterica in Japan and its Robotech adaptation being a fan Un-Favorite means fans of it are pretty thin on the ground. Getting them here to preorder would be another problem, since the most vocal Southern Cross fans rather actively resent Macross and Macross fans... in no small part because Robotech's merchandising and new material development favors Macross so heavily and ignores Southern Cross entirely except for one or two moments in the comics that play on the majority fanbase's dislike of it.3 1. The Southern Cross fans I've spent the most time interacting with generally reject the minimal Robotech-branded merchandise based on Southern Cross... partly because of its iffy quality, but mostly because the few prominent pieces are character goods that all suffer from Tommy Yune's rather polarizing art style and to say they dislike Mr. Yune would be putting it mildly. ("Yuneface" has become a dismissive/derogatory term for the faces in Tommy Yune's art, which tend to all look exactly the same.) 2. Enough so that some of them spent a fair amount of time on elaborate, poorly-researched, outright fact-defying theories about why the Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross series was canceled back in '84, and equally elaborate conspiracy theories about why Harmony Gold's licensees aren't producing Southern Cross goods that normally revolve around "Macross purists". 3. Most notably, the Robotech reboot's flagship limited comic series From the Stars. Robotech's version of Southern Cross's Claude Leon (Supreme Commander Eli Anatole Leonard) puts in a brief appearance in which he is revealed to be a highly-placed spy and traitor working to sabotage the development of VFs and Destroids on behalf of the Robotech equivalent of Macross's Anti-Unification Alliance. The comic depicts him as having orchestrated the hijacking of an ARMD-class ship, a nuclear strike that destroyed the military's #2 command center in Antarctica, and attempting to do the same to "Macross Island". The Palladium Books Robotech RPG (2nd Ed.) takes this one up a notch by also making him into an incompetent military dictator who rules over a puppet civilian government and equips his forces with substandard equipment because the deep space forces took all the best people and he's too butthurt about being left behind himself that he refuses to use the same gear.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, that term's old... back when Macross Delta started airing, it quickly became shorthand for the fans voicing the less-than-legitimate criticisms of Macross Delta over aspects of the series that'd been part of the Macross setting for years if not decades. It certainly trips off the tongue better than my dubbing them The Ambassadors of Unhappy. (That isn't to say there wasn't a lot of entirely legitimate criticism of the show going on, mind you...)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Well, Admiral Marcus wanted to make sure that there was no way anybody could trace the ship back to the Federation after its planned preemptive strike on the Klingon Empire... so he made it look like Starfleet's most iconic ship class scaled up and carved a giant Starfleet delta into the saucer section.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    @captain america would be the one to decide if he's actually going to develop a Southern Cross kit, obviously... but he did seem willing before, contingent upon us being able to rustle up the required 30 preorders. We'd have to ask him to be sure if he's still game. It all hinges on getting 12+ more backers for either design.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Not necessarily a deal-breaker since Grand Cannon systems were meant to be weapons of the last resort... but then, they were originally intended to be used in conjunction with an orbital fleet that filled the same role as the defense satellites.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The two big questions there being "Which Spock?" and whether Peck's negligible acting talents will prove to be an asset while playing a character whose most iconic trait is a refusal to emote. On the former score, I sincerely hope the Spock we get is in line with Leonard Nimoy's dignified and reserved Spock rather than Zachary Quinto's paradoxically emotional snobby Spock.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    This is the latest in a series of borderline unintelligible machine-translated appeals for people to sign a change.org petition addressed to Shoji Kawamori appealing for a direct sequel to Super Dimension Fortress Macross that will continue the story of Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay. Topics about this crop up every now and then before major Macross live events, as Mari-ja seems to want to present a signed copy of the petition to Shoji Kawamori at that event. That the latest incarnation of this petition has been going on change.org for a year or more and still hasn't reached 200 signatures says all that needs to be said about it, really. EDIT: The link to the actual petition is, somewhat counterintuitively, the picture itself rather than a separate visible link.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Char had a custom Dijeh in The Return of Johnny Ridden, and Mobile Suit Moon Gundam had a Rick Dijeh... but that's about it for legitimate variants. The rest is all MSV.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Man, what'd we do to make you want to punish us with this stuff month after month? So everyone else gets a pilot suit made out of actual fabric, but Lisa's still rocking the body paint? Also, did they forget to draw the temples on Max's glasses... or has this depressing dystopian spacefuture invented birth control pince-nez?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Is Shinichi Watanabe an acceptable substitute for Shinichiro? (It's a safe bet Kawamori-san will be in his usual "overall director" supervisory role, while the regular unit direction will be done by other directors.) Still, it's rather telling that that felt jarring and out of place and it was the only incident of its kind... well, unless you count Luca's earlier imagine spot involving dominatrix Sheryl and slave Alto. There wasn't really any fanservice going on there, though... that was played for pure comedy and a bit of fan disservice with her homicidal expression in that EX-Gear.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I'll take your word for it. As I said, I didn't really pay attention to the MPC line until the big to-do over not doing Southern Cross came out because it wasn't all that impressive, and I've never been much of a toy collector. None of the store pages I've seen, archived or current, mention separate production runs for them... just a flat limited edition cap. (I suppose it could be as simple as what I heard from IIRC Tom Bateman at one point about them usually expecting to sell about 1/2 of the limited edition's production cap... if they had orders for more than half they would have had to reorder even if the cap was always set to 15,000.) Yeah, I mentioned and linked to that a few posts back... the thread started out as an attempt to rustle up interest in an Auroran kit, and sort of expanded into a simultaneous interest check in a Spartas kit as well. Unfortunately, we were only able to secure 18 of the required 30 preorders for either design so it all ended as a non-starter.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not. Of the five Grand Cannons that were planned, only Alaska's Grand Cannon I is known to have been completed and brought online. Grand Cannon I was, as we all know, badly damaged in the orbital bombardment by the Boddole Zer main fleet and only managed to fire once. Grand Cannon II's construction site in Australia was destroyed in an Anti-Unification Alliance attack shortly after the Tsiolkovsky incident in 2005. It was never completed. The incomplete Grand Cannon III in Africa and Grand Cannon V in South America served as shelters during the Boddole Zer main fleet's attack, but they were incomplete at the time and probably were damaged further (possibly beyond repair) in the bombardment. Grand Cannon IV in the Lunar north pole region is the only real candidate for a postwar completion, though the resources to finish it probably wouldn't have been available when rebuilding Earth was a top priority. The nearby Apollo Base in the Mare Tranquillitatis survived the war basically intact and its adjoining colony is still inhabited, so it may have been finished at least for its command center.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Again, none of these corporations are the least bit interested in what their customers want or think unless it affects their bottom line. They're in business to make money. They are not going to sink time and effort into producing a product that they don't think will sell well enough to justify those efforts no matter how badly fans want it. Quality suffers when a company proceeds with a project that's not in sufficient demand, and opts to cut corners in order to maximize their profits from the lower expected sales volume instead of (or on top of) raising prices. You're mistaking their pragmatic interest in producing products that will sell well for some kind of personal interest in your satisfaction. This is all business. They've been saying it for well upwards of a decade, and people keep buying their sh*t despite the hilariously poor quality... so there would appear to be a problem with your hypothesis.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC it's just the Combo Pack versions of the movies.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    You may be overstating it a bit. The Galaxy Executives and the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army's cyber-soldiers were cyborgs with almost totally artificial bodies, but the available information points to the adoption level of implant tech being pretty low among the fleet's civilian population (mostly just network-enabling their brains). Curiously, this is hinted to be something of a cruel mercy, due to the Macross Galaxy fleet being a rather unpleasant place to live and that being trapped in an illusory paradise is preferable to its real nature. Sort of. A big part of the problem with the Ghost X-9 was that its AI core was built around technology from Sharon Apple's system, and that technology proved to be pretty unstable even before it was "completed" with a bio-neural processor. It was able to behave like a real human brain because that's what the system was set up to emulate. Later iterations of the design rolled the AI tech back to a more traditional hardware that wasn't capable of fuzzy logic or unpredictable behavior and curtailed the AI's autonomous air combat program. Even though Luca's Ghosts were running the same basic software, they weren't capable of the unpredictable AI behavior of the prototype. Galaxy's AIF-9V Ghosts were almost certainly running under the same conditions. The novelization of Frontier does, IIRC, make mention of true AIs (one of which is implied to be built on the digitized personalty of Manfred Brando), and those AIs do serve the Galaxy Executives. As far as we know, yeah... they lost Battle Galaxy and a bunch of escorts but the main fleet is still out there somewhere. Mind you, theres no hard guarantee that all or even most of the Galaxy executives were on Battle Galaxy or Mainland... being the fold network cyborgs they are, they did a lot of their conferring over zero time fold communications links. They could be pretty much anywhere in the galaxy. Galaxy's bigshots have gone full Ghost in the Shell, being brains in artificial bodies. Grace is no exception, and most of what we see of her is apparently bodies that she is operating remotely over a zero time fold communications link. (Cybernetics don't seem to be quite advanced enough to permit straight-up body surfing yet.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Huh. Well... that's a thing that is happening. I'll admit I'm surprised CBS went for a relative unknown for an important role like Spock. I expected them to go all-in on someone with more experience and a serious reputation. His filmography is a genuinely depressing read. Most of the films he's been in were box office flops or at least critically panned, with the high water mark apparently being either an Olsen Twins direct-to-video movie in '99 or a Mariah Carey vanity project. The only TV role he's had that wasn't a bit part was in the 10 Things I Hate About You series that bombed and was canceled by ABC after just one season. Either this is Mr. Peck's big break, or Star Trek: Discovery has gone full Springtime for Hitler and he's their L.S.D. EDIT: Or maybe someone is just being terribly savvy by hiring someone who can't act to play an emotionless character... Admiral Marcus was, at least, nicer about it than Kelbor-Hal... he didn't blow up the dock and kill all the construction workers to keep it secret. Still, the "top secret super-powerful ship constructed without anyone knowing" schtick is pretty bad writing IMO... unless you've got a galactic-scale civilization where something the size of a city could legitimately fall through the cracks, someone is going to notice either the small mountain of money that's gone walkabout or the enormous number of material requisitions being delivered to a space P.O. box and start asking questions. Proper prototypes like the Excelsior or the Crossfield-class strain suspension of disbelief way less.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Much like the USS Vengeance in Star Trek: Into Darkness, a completely over-the-top warship built in secret and meant to go toe-to-toe with entire fleets on a mission of approximate genocide.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully they'll tell us who's writing the new series at some point in the next few months so we can calibrate our expectations appropriately.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It may have something to do with the users who would've provided that information being banned a while back... I'm working on a project that'll get heavy into the contents of various Macross publications, but we're not planning to branch out beyond that one franchise. There's just too much stuff coming out for every show that airs that I doubt any one blog or site could stay on top of it all. You'd run out of places to store the books you reviewed in a year or two at most.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It wouldn't be the first time Peter Weller played a "dead" man in a metal mask out for revenge... It's a popular trope... it was also used in Warhammer 40,000's Horus Heresy series, except the secret shipyard was built into the (very real) Jupiter-orbiting asteroid 279 Thule.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, Toynami's manufacturing orders were done in the form "enough to fill existing preorders + a few hundred extras to sell on and get us to a nice round number to maximize our bulk discount". I don't recall them ever revising the advertised size of a limited edition run after it was announced... but I confess I didn't pay much attention to the MPC line until the whole "Why we don't make toys for Southern Cross thing first reared its ugly head" around ten or eleven years ago. But we're dealing with the opposite situation to what you're describing. The manufacturer needs to make and sell X many statues in order to keep the price of the statue at a reasonable level to avoid pricing themselves out of the market and to ensure enough of a profit from the endeavor to make it a viable business proposition. If they can't be assured of receiving AT LEAST X many orders, it's a waste of their time. Making fewer means making the individual statues will cost more, requiring the sale price increase to preserve the profit margin and cover manufacturing costs... which means fewer people will be able or willing to buy it, resulting in further scaling back and more cost increases, 30 GOTO 10. They're making very little money on the Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA portions of the license. That said, there's nothing preventing Tatsunoko from attempting to sell Harmony Gold a renewal for Southern Cross and MOSPEADA only and making a separate deal with Big West over Macross... at least, from Tatsunoko's side. (That said, they don't seem to be at all happy with Harmony Gold trying to claim, in defiance of copyright law, that they own the designs of either show and can continue using them even after their license expires.) Since Robotech's merchandising depends almost exclusively on Macross, they're not at all likely to be interested in a renewal that includes only Southern Cross and MOSPEADA. Robotech will likely fold if they can't renew the Macross license, leaving Southern Cross and MOSPEADA in limbo. I don't mean to be rude, but this is surprisingly naive. None of these companies give a flip about the product they're producing or the fans buying it. This isn't a fan-run operation, these are corporations that are responsible to their creditors, shareholders, etc. Like Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, [They're] Only in It for the Money. They aren't going to carry on with product lines that aren't turning a profit, and they aren't going to gamble by making products they have every reason to expect won't sell. That Harmony Gold has not one single f*ck to give was firmly and definitively established a very long time ago. Their own VP of Marketing has, on many occasions, publicly admitted that management is only interested in the bottom line. I personally had a shockingly candid conversation with him about updating their website back in '07, in which he told me point-blank that TPTB considered everything that wasn't directly relating to selling merchandise a waste of time and money. Again, not wishing to be rude, but Southern Cross fans are such a small minority in the Robotech fan community (and borderline nonexistent outside it) that pissing them off is a comically unimpressive prospect. Doubly so when you consider the Robotech fandom's most vocal Southern Cross fans are best known for frequent temper tantrums. There'd be little discernible difference from business as usual. You'd find very VERY few licensees willing to shell out for a license like that. No company wants to be railroaded into making unsellable products. Sentinels is held in EXTREMELY high regard by the Robotech fandom... with demands to revisit and/or finish the series being the #1 fan demand from Harmony Gold and a constant source of frustration in the fandom. Shadow Chronicles was arguably exactly that, since its comic book tie-in picked up right where the Sentinels comics left off (to the extent of literally redrawing whole panels from the comic's final issue) and the "movie" (read: canceled OVA's first episode) concludes its story arc by having the final battle with the Invid from the Expeditionary Forces' viewpoint and the aftermath. (Curiously the revists of the Sentinels invariably purge the Southern Cross designs from the story in favor of MOSPEADA ones.) For the record, Toynami made two Masterpiece Collection entries for Sentinels (a red TLEAD and a green TLEAD) that were both advertised as "seen only in Sentinels" and one from Shadow Chronicles (Maia's VF/A-6ZX) that was the subject of a rather embarrassing recall campaign. Robotech 3000 is... well... a fiasco. It never made it past the first teaser trailer due to the fan backlash against its idiot premise and CG animation, and when it went down it took the animation studio with it. It's not a Kickstarter, it was a thread right here on this forum. And fewer still make products they know they'll lose money on... unless there's a pressing ulterior motive for doing so, like Harmony Gold's money laundering or automakers selling EVs at a loss to ensure they meet EPA and CARB requirements for average fuel economy.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, the Scott Bernard MPC was made between the two reductions Toynami made to the Robotech MPC limited edition run sizes. After the cut from 15,000 to 10,000 but before the run size was further reduced to 5,000. (Then again, I've also heard it said that the MPC line's average performance was about 1/2 of the limited edition run in actual sales.) It makes perfect sense from a business perspective. These companies are not fans, they're buying these licenses because they want to make a profit selling merchandise. They start with Super Dimension Fortress Macross because that's far and away the most popular of Robotech's component shows, and therefore offers the best return on investment. Then they move on to Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, which was something of a distant second in popularity and for which demand is not as strong, and the return on investment is lower. From there, there's the option to move on to Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross... but its very small following among the Robotech fandom, being in fourth or fifth place in overall popularity, means there's no guarantee of a decent return on investment. It's a risk, and since profit margins on these limited edition collectibles aren't huge to begin with the manufacturers are inclined to be risk averse. (It sounds cynical, and it absolutely is, but that's just how this kind of merchandise speculation works.) I mean, look at what happened when we tried to crowdfund Moscato Southern Cross kits for the Spartas and Auroran. Despite a concerted effort to rustle up interest on Facebook and several other forums, we only managed to get about half of the minimum number of pledges (30) to get either design made, and that was with many backers pledging for both. What Southern Cross needs is for some brave or reckless licensee to actually take a stab at it and, by success or failure, test out the validity of the officially-held view of Southern Cross merchandising. If what previous Harmony Gold licensees have said about their contracts is any indication, Harmony Gold usually makes licensees buy the rights to the whole of Robotech in whatever field of merchandise they want to make and then basically leaves deciding the actual product line to them. That was actually the cause of Palladium Books's first loss of the Robotech license, when HG made it a requirement for renewal that they license Robotech 3000 sight-unseen in addition to the three main sagas and Sentinels. I'm not idly speculating, I'm pretty much reiterating what we've heard on the matter from current and former HG staff. Licensees aren't delving into Southern Cross on the American/Robotech side because they don't think there's enough interest for a decent return on investment. That's the reason that was given for Toynami not doing any Southern Cross toys. In Japan, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross is pretty obscure... more a piece of obscure trivia than a well-remembered piece of 80's pop culture. As it was put to me, Tatsunoko barely remembers that they own Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and would likely have forgotten it altogether if not for Robotech. Press coverage of the show has been basically nonexistant since its cancellation. (The only time I've seen it mentioned since was a Macross 10th anniversary feature in B-Club magazine that talked about various shows that were inspired by Macross.) The Southern Cross trinkets on the Robotech store are CafePress-type stuff... print on demand, and never more than a petty cash loss if it doesn't sell. It doesn't require anything like the input of cash and effort or the level of risk involved in something like the transformable toys or collectible statues. Strange Machine Games might delve into Southern Cross if they carry their board game license ahead further, since they're only doing inexpensive cardstock stuff instead of resin/plastic miniatures. They're also doing a new Robotech RPG, so there'll be a Masters Saga sourcebook covering the adapted form of Southern Cross from them as well. (At least until HG's license runs out.) I think our best bet for a Southern Cross collectible is probably Evolution Toy, for the aforementioned reason that they seem to love betting on dark horses and underdogs.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That, I'll admit, is the one bright spot among Star Trek: Discovery's designs... the show's rendition of the pre-refit Constitution-class USS Enterprise is absolutely gorgeous. So much so that it makes the new classes of ship in the series (Crossfield, Walker, Hoover, Malachowski, Cardenas, Nimitz, Engle, Magee, and Shephard) look even uglier by comparison. It feels a bit like being cheated, really. They've been able to produce gorgeous material all along... but for the actual series they insisted on using ugly, blocky stuff that in more than one case was an actual reject from a prior Star Trek show? If the JJ-Enterprise is any indication, it'd look like a spacegoing Edsel. It hits a few of the same notes, but mostly no. The USS Vengeance never gets treated as a buttmonkey the way Excelsior did in The Search for Spock, and it doesn't seem likely to be a next-generation Starfleet multi-mission explorer when it was set up almost exclusively for Admiral Robocop's preemptive war with the Klingons. A more charitable reaction than mine. My take was "What is this enormous nonsense?" It's just so... fanfiction-y. It's an enormous, super-powerful Starfleet ship somehow developed and built entirely in secret by the Federation's most clandestine intelligence service, more advanced in every way than Starfleet's best production starships, three times faster, so heavily armed it may as well be unstoppable, able to run with a one-man crew, and it's painted all in black because that's super edgy. (Plus the whole thing was kind of silly as a covert project... if you're building a starship to secretly go wreck an enemy's sh*t with plausible deniability, building it to a configuration associated exclusively with your own government and recognizable as such at a glance seems like a really terrible idea.) The Crossfield-class hits a lot of the same fanfiction-y notes with its super-powerful experimental stardrive, secret experimental operations profile, stock of planet-cracking weapons, and its edgy, amoral crew.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Nice. Is there any known event on their respective calendars around the end of September? If they truly are following the same production schedule as the last two times, that'd be around the time we'd expect them to unveil the title of the new series... with a trailer to follow around Halloween.
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