Seto Kaiba
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If one takes Harmony Gold's public statements at face value - which is, I know, usually a bad idea - the plan of record for the live action movie proposal was always for a reimagining from the ground up. They tactfully omitted that it was a legally necessary move, however. Nay, 'tis but the groaning of a corpse long-dead mistaken for signs of vitality by those employed in the savage beating of the late and largely unlamented ex-horse. They seek to draw attention to a particularly noisome swarm of flies in the hopes that it will distract the gentle viewer from the foul smell of the brand's cadaver. ... y'know, I probably would too, 'cept for the fact that we wouldn't have Macross Frontier yet.
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You might want to look up the definition of "forward"... because this project is in exactly the same position it was in ten years ago right after it was first announced. They've got an alleged director who's pursuing other, higher-profile projects instead and a writer who is working on another story treatment to try to work around the legal problems. All we need is for Harmony Gold to re-release Shadow Chronicles on DVD and it'll be just like we've traveled back in time to 2007.
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You really have to admire the effort they're putting into trying to convince people Robotech wasn't just a mediocre and quickly-forgotten unsuccessful attempt to ride Transformers' coattails. I often wonder if the writers penning this trash are on the take, or just too lazy to check any source apart from the hilarious fiction in Harmony Gold's press packet. Ten bucks says this guy is just the latest writer to submit a story treatment because he needed a quick bit of cash. Every alleged sign of progress on the supposed film so far has turned out to be a distortion or an outright lie, and everyone supposedly connected to it has inevitably found something better to do instead of Robotech... so that's just the status quo maintaining itself. Everybody bloody knew It was planned as a duology, so I don't know why anyone thought that the Robotech movie wouldn't be immediately forgotten in the face of It's second half. Even if there was interest, it still wouldn't get made because it's a goddamn legal minefield. No studio wants a piece of that mess, no matter how well-funded their legal team is...
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Say what you will about the Tal Shiar's alleged brilliance in the field of espionage... their "onscreen" performance is somewhere south of terrible, given that they've been infiltrated and beaten at their own game by (in no particular order): United Earth Section 31, the V'Shar, the Vulcan High Command, UFP Section 31, Klingon Intelligence, Starfleet Intelligence, regular goddamn Starfleet, the Vulcan reunification movement, and the Founders. Let it never be forgotten that they wiped themselves out TWICE... once in a botched attempt to do in the Founders, and once by creating that prat Shinzon. There is no recovering your dignity after being beaten by a bad clone of Picard wearing a rainbow-tinted pleather onesie. Their ability to come up with a credible fib is somewhat suspect... though they could have been counting on the shock value of seeing someone who was a dead ringer for one of Picard's dead subordinates to throw him enough that a bad explanation would work. There is a certain irony in the fact that Armus was a black latex bag covered in liquified dietary fiber supplement dyed black with a water-soluble printer's ink. There are so many different scatological jokes I can make about that in that episode that I'm genuinely spoiled for choice. ... did they ever explain Guinan's apparent knowledge of alternate timelines and why Q is afraid of her? The other El-Aurians never displayed any special powers. She was in the Tal Shiar, I'd expect they would have at least general profiles of the key officers who served aboard the Federation flagship... including the deceased ones. It's not like Tasha's death is a state secret, though clearly nobody bothered telling her next-of-kin. I dunno, I think Vendetta gave it the good ol' college try... what with the reveal that the Borg were an ancient race, and that the Preservers had built the Planet Killers to destroy them, and that the one Kirk and co. disabled was a rough prototype that the genuine article made look like a piece of junk. It kind of became a noodle incident for the Pocket Books Star Trek: the Next Generation series, since Delcara took her still-functional Planet Killer to go hunt the Borg in the delta quadrant.
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Unfortunately, if you're looking for Messer's love interests based on his actual expression of interest in their existence in public, Chuck's kid brother Zack has a lock on first place... he's the only one to actually get Messer to make a positive facial expression. In my opinion, it's worse to make your characters bland and uninteresting from the start... but only in the event that they're in the main cast. That's one of Macross Delta's biggest problems, it has a HUGE main cast, and fully two-thirds of it is flat characters who could be tidily summed up in terms of what cliche they're ticking a checkbox for. The only characters who truly get characterization in the series are Hayate, Freyja, Mirage, Keith, Roid, Bogue, and Qasim, though that doesn't save several of them from also being flat characters: Arad: the Big Brother Mentor. Messer: the Broken Ace. Chuck: the Big Guy. Kaname: the Woobie, bordering on the Broken Bird. Makina: the Miss Fanservice, her bio tries to make her a Wrench Wench but the show forgot to. Reina: the Stoic, the show tries to sell her as the a Playful Hacker but she's no good at it. Hermann: the Team Dad. Qasim: the Token Good Teammate. Theo and Xao: purely for Twin Banter, or less wholesome activities by doujinshi authors. Bogue: the designated Fantastic Racist. Grammier: the Well-Intentioned Extremist, initially a reasonable authority figure in the manga. Heinz: the Unwitting Pawn. Berger: the Corrupt Corporate Executive. Wright: the Suicidal Pacifist by way of a Pacifism Backfire with shades of Too Dumb To Live. Valan: the Smug Snake, superficially. More a One Sane Man once you put context to him. Lady M: a one-woman Omniscient Council of Vagueness by proxy, since she never appears. For my money, she'd be a lot less disappointing if her status as the Woobie wasn't her one and only character trait. A lot of these characters had potential, but there were just too many characters and not nearly enough show to develop them properly. The only ones who really aren't save-able are Makina and Reina, since they're there purely for the fanservice and to fill out the list of standard fetishes for the doujinshi authors. The gaiden manga already did a lot to salvage the members of the Aerial Knights and King Grammier. Ouch.
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Toynami's not making one... they've gone on the record to say they have no interest in Southern Cross because they don't think there's enough interest to guarantee a decent return on investment.
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Oh yeah, the military never does anything like that without an insanely bureaucratic reason and a cheat sheet roughly the length of a CVS receipt. In this case, the cheat sheet's name is MIL-STD-709C MILITARY STANDARD AMMUNITION COLOR CODING. Macross's tech manuals apply a skewed version of it, but don't apply it or a system inspired by it on a consistent basis and the show all but ignores it. For instance, the LPP-14 laser pod has markings for an illumination round, while many others are inexplicably marked up as if they contained armor-piercing incendiary instead of HE. Quite a few of the bombs and missiles found in the VF-1 and VF-0 books are plainly copied from photos of display ordnance, since they carry blue stripes denoting inert practice ammunition. The nosecone color isn't a part of the color code system... I suspect that choice of red or yellow is mainly for "visual pop" in most Macross shows.
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My scanner is a coprolitic clunker from the bad old days of Windows XP, so the res isn't what I'd hoped... but this should be fairly sound color reference if nothing else. Looks like a gloss black nosecone over the seeker head, a reflective white body coat with a red stripe for indicating a live warhead, and a "cool" grey exposed section between the body of the missile and the engine nozzle. VFs have been using holographic technology for three-dimensional on-canopy HUD projection since the VF-1's Block 6 (movie) upgrade and some of the later models of VF used a three-dimensional holographic setup for their in-cockpit monitors as well. It's evident from the manner of her entry that Sharon coopted the existing holographic systems running the HUD to get to Dr. Neumann, and then the main display to get to Isamu.
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I am, for reasons that should be obvious, intensely curious what his voice sounds like... Morn was supposed to be an irrepressable chatterbox, and never once spoke in the series itself. (If they ever did a DS9 movie, I would expect nothing less than an epilogue in the form of a ten minute long piece to camera by Morn himself.)
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Kaname was no less one-dimensional than the rest of Walkure... she got a little more characterization than Makina and Reina, but it was purely based on pity. She got rescued from the Scrappy Heap in-universe after her idol career failed to launch because she had a fold receptor factor, then she lost de facto leadership of Walkure to Mikumo because she was a more powerful fold singer and better performer, and then she lost the one fan she actually had when Messer broke orders and got his one-dimensional self reduced to a stain on the canopy. She's the designated woobie, nothing more... like how Makina exists solely to be Miss Fanservice, Reina is there only as the Quiet Girl, Mikumo spends almost the entire TV series as the Alpha B*tch before some last minute characterization to make her into Mina Forte by way of Sheryl Nome, etc. To the best of our knowledge, it never went anywhere... she had a crush on him, that's all.
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Really? I figured the first episode of Orville would be pretty weak but my hopes for it are still higher than they are for Discovery. Two weeks away, and I'm still more enthusiastic for another godawful Enterprise relaunch novel than I am for it. It's kind of traditional for the first episode of a new Star Trek series to be dreadfully camp and awkward, so I'm taking it as read that the first episode's script wouldn't get a passing mark in a community college creative writing class. (As much as I'm expecting the show to fail miserably, I'm hoping they never stoop as low as TNG's "Code of Honor"...) Ah, I've never played Star Trek Online... I kind of burned out on MMOs back in the bad old days of Phantasy Star Online. I will admit your summary doesn't sound anything like as bad as Sela's characterization in Star Trek: the Next Generation and the novels, where her arrogance and ambition set her up to fall with all the regularity of Wile E. Coyote. From what I've gathered, the Online timeline diverges considerably from the Relaunch novels. Jack Verse mentioned to me there was already an Enterprise-F in that, so what the heck happened to the Enterprise-E? Did Picard wreck another one? If so, he's officially gunning for Chakotay's record as wrecker-in-chief. I've never been able to bring myself to like the character, and felt that she was Denise Crosby's sour grapes attempt to get a piece of Star Trek: the Next Generation after having quit it because she wasn't convinced it'd take off. What book was it where Data wasn't sure about her origins? All the more recent stuff plays her "Yesterday's Enterprise" origin dead straight.
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Yeah, the Star Trek EU has a terrible habit of trying to tie up every loose plot thread and make every minor one-shot character part of some greater scheme. A lot of the seemingly or actually omnipotent entities and energy beings with delusions of godhood get filed under "Q Continuum Shenanigans". Some got their powers from the Q (e.g. Gary Mitchell), some of them were brought into the universe from other planes of existence by Q (e.g. Gorgan, the Beta XII-A entity, "God"), and some were members of the Continuum who didn't bother to identify as such (like Trelane). She was doing pretty well for herself until Double or Nothing and Death in Winter. She always managed to bounce back from her failures and scheme her way back into power just in time to fail again and be sent back to zero. Her skills in sucking up to the People Who Matter got her the top job at the Tal Shiar, by which point the writers appear to have run out of ways to abuse her, so she promptly bungled the op to steal quantum slipstream technology from the Federation. She cocked it up so royally her own people imprisoned her and were preparing to extradite her to the Federation when she committed suicide.
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Yeah, he loooooves to try to settle the whole Kirk/Picard thing in his favor every time he has the chance. If there's a threat Picard faced, you can bet Shatner will write Kirk facing it first and doing a better job. Unfortunately, Star Trek's Expanded Universe authors don't seem to understand that happy little principle... so every plot is of galaxy-shaking import, most become a multi-book saga and the bigger ones become a multi-series crossover, almost all of them are determined to change the way the audience looks at a particular character or a past event from the Star Trek series or films, and the base level for new threats is "a threat to the whole Federation" and it only goes up from there. After a while it starts to feel like the same plot problems from superhero comics... there are so many potentially-apocalyptic catastrophes happening so often that it's flat amazing the Federation/galaxy/quadrant/universe/multiverse lasted long enough for the double handful of protagonists to come along. It's not even in "the Federation never exists if Jonathan Archer dies" territory like in Star Trek: Enterprise... this is so fiddly it's on the order of "the whole galaxy is doomed to be enslaved or destroyed if Jean-Luc Picard's tea goes cold before he can drink it". There are so many dystopian alternate realities where one little thing changed the course of the entire galaxy's history that are encountered by dimension-traveling protagonists that it's amazing the Federation doesn't have planet-sized psych wards for people suffering from apocalyptic tangent reality traumatic stress disorders. ... I have some bad news for you. They didn't write a book about it... it's a trilogy. Q is responsible for bringing a number of different malevolent entities into the universe using the Guardian of Forever, including the Beta XII-A entity from the TOS episode "Day of the Dove", Gorgan from the TOS episode "And the Children Shall Lead", and The One from Star Trek V: the Final Frontier. It at least answered why "god" needed a starship... he'd been deprived of his physical body and imprisoned behind the great barrier by the Q Continuum for his crimes, and needed a physical body to pass through the barrier.
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That ain't part of Macross, friend... Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross is a completely different show that is unrelated to Macross except in that the two shows had the same sponsor and were both at least partly animated by Tatsunoko Production. It was an absolute, unqualified disaster in Japan and was canceled for low ratings a little over half of the way through its planned broadcast run. Oh, it'd have to be fanmade... the Southern Cross series is a forgotten flop in Japan, and for The Show That Must Not Be Named Toynami has said they have no interest in pursuing a license to make Southern Cross toys because the American adaptation is almost as unpopular in the west as the original was in Japan.
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Y'know, for a while there I would have bet cash money that Michael Martin, Peter David, Kirsten Beyer, and David Mack were engaged in a perverse one-upmanship contest over who could write the worst, most cliched Star Trek story. Michael Martin got knocked out of the running by Christopher Bennett taking over the Enterprise Relaunch, but the others hit new and exciting lows for Star Trek with Destiny, The Fall, Typhon Pact, and so on...
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Yes, this is a thing that someone actually wrote and published as a series of novels... Peter David actually wrote the book where Janeway snuffs it, so you can understand why I'm reluctant to believe that the man is capable of writing that isn't garbage. Personally, I'm not so sure... in Star Trek: the Motion Picture V'Ger didn't see organic life as anything more than an infestation of vermin in its creator's universe, so it doesn't quite fit for V'Ger to have created a race of cyborgs based on organic life to be its advanced reconnaissance party. It's less dumb than the idea that V'Ger went off and spawned a race of living ships that roved the galaxy collecting samples of intelligent life as a kind of roving space-zoo. I've yet to read a Borg origin story that WASN'T stupid... but I have to admit the Borg being built on a nested predestination paradox in which the Borg are created by a race of nanotechnological hikkomori accidentally sending themselves and the NX-02 crew they were holding prisoner back in time to become the Borg and then in the future going back and causing the accident that caused them to accidentally create the Borg was a masterpiece of bad writing that managed to singlehandedly ruin almost every aspect of the Borg in one fell swoop. Nah, V'Ger is supposedly the creation of a race of sentient machines who found the probe after it fell through a wormhole and decided to rebuild it and send it home out of the goodness of their hearts. (Of course, in The Next Generation, the writers weren't exactly consistent on whether the Borg wanted to assimilate everyone or evolve past the need for organics.) If memory serves, Shatner tried to riff on that for The Return, where Kirk manages to destroy the Borg collective and its homeworld by destroying the core of the Borg collective which looks suspiciously like V'Ger's system core.
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Vice Admiral Janeway gets assimilated by the Borg and made into a new Borg Queen in Before Dishonor, part of the runup to the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy finishing Captain Janeway's abuse of the Borg in Star Trek: Voyager itself by revealing their origins, dragging them through the mud, then finally making them extinct. She's killed off by the computer virus which Geordi designed to wipe out the Borg way back in Star Trek: the Next Generation's "I, Borg" after her Borg cube developed a weird new ability to absorb stuff ala The Blob instead of assimilating it, which it used to wipe out a fleet of thirty-six Federation starships in 97 seconds and then eat a Doomsday Machine, Pluto, and its moon Charon before Geordi's Project Endgame virus was introduced to the cube and it blew up taking Janeway with it. In short, the Borg briefly turn on Godmode after assimilating Janeway because otherwise there'd be no way to take them that seriously as antagonists anymore after Voyager and First Contact, and Janeway dies when the server turns cheats off.
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Wobuffet! Heh. The various Star Trek Relaunch series suffer from so many different nonsensical kudzu plots that the thing with Ezri doesn't even make the top twenty, and the thing with Trill's government and the thirty conspiracy pileup only barely charts thanks to the multi-train wreck of Star Trek: Destiny, Star Trek: the Fall, Star Trek: Typhon Pact, the post Destiny part of the Voyager relaunch. It's a safe bet the Star Trek: Discovery novels will very swiftly climb that unenviable ranking given that their first author is set to be Kirsten Beyer, the author responsible for making the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch the worst of the relaunch series. If they're tapping an author whose idea of brilliant writing is a Starfleet that's lost over 40% of its strength having USS Voyager restored to factory spec and lead a fleet into the delta quadrant for no goddamn reason, Janeway coming back from the dead to prevent the omega molecules from ending a few billion years early for some reason that isn't properly explained, the Klingon devil being a real thing and ripping off the Andorian reproductive crisis for the Klingons, and Species 8472 coming back for no reason. I don't mean to imply the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch's Project Full Circle arc is only fit for use as emergency toilet paper... I mean to say it quite plainly as an honest fact.
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Hm?
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New Macross TV Series in 20xx (sometime this decade)
Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Movies and TV Series
Maybe, maybe not. Kawamori did say in his Otona Anime #9 interview that a trip from Earth to the most distant emigrant fleets would take ten years. Presumably that's accounting for the navigation problems inherent in traversing regions with either significant fold fault activity or impassible faults. I admit, I think the problems that fold faults cause for interstellar communication and travel make a good set of obstacles for writers to work with. It prevents the writers from falling back on many of sci-fi's lamer cliches for SF war stories... especially the tendency to have the same group of heroes charge to the rescue in EVERY interstellar crisis (I'm lookin' at YOU, Star Wars Expanded Universe). -
It would've been, had it actually been the focus of a story... but it's treated as a mildly interesting background event during the USS Defiant's postwar survey of the gamma quadrant since, like the crew of Riker's USS Titan, the Prime Directive seems to have slipped the minds of Vaughn's whole crew on the USS Defiant. With the crew destabilizing, then meddling in the development of, each and every alien culture they meet, Ezri's personal problems are completely overshadowed by their cause... the Prime Directive violations she's meddling in... and by the problems they cause for her relationship with Bashir. They're then completely forgotten by the time she and Bashir are conveniently on Trill when all of the Trill government's eleventy billion dirty little secrets come out, nearly toppling the government via a popular uprising against the Joined, causing an attempted genocide of the symbionts that is mostly successful, and nearly getting Trill kicked out of the Federation after it's revealed that they were responsible (albeit semi-indirectly) for the parasite crisis from TNG's "Conspiracy" and all of their subsequent shenanigans , as they'd created the damn things in the first place, attempted to exterminate them on Kurl, and tried to keep it covered up by assassinating high-profile infected using stolen Federation personal stealth equipment.
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New Macross TV Series in 20xx (sometime this decade)
Seto Kaiba replied to Tochiro's topic in Movies and TV Series
An increase in the standard of writing is a must... Macross Delta was so weak and scattered on that front that the music was practically all that was propping the series up by the end. Lucky for them it's good music. Nods to earlier mecha, sometimes retroactive, are so standard there's no fear of not getting that... every bloody Macross series and OVA since the original has thrown in at least a few. Some of 'em are admittedly obscure or hidden-in-plain-sight like the nod to the VF-4 in Macross II, since almost nobody remembers that before it was named "Lightning III" it was named "Siren". The 90's did a LOT of "remember the new guy" nods, where they'd introduce a mecha as old, and then go back decades and show what it was like when it was new (e.g. VF-5000, Variable Glaug, VF-14). Ship to ship combat would definitely be nice... that was something that really ought to have been present in Macross Delta but wasn't, presumably because the writers would've had to find ways to get around the fact that Windermere's not actually equipped all that well and is working with what could charitably be called a monstrous numerical disadvantage. Essentially, yes... and as the available fold technology in humanity's possession is implicitly limited to fold jumps of at most a few thousand light years at a time by the exponential increase in the energy required, the New UN Government had to take a decentralized approach to governance and defense because it can take years of fold travel to reach its furthest flung colonies. It took over a decade for the Megaroad-04 fleet to reach Windermere IV from Earth, for instance. -
In my experience, Star Trek's actors usually do a pretty poor job writing... especially ones who are writing books about their own characters. Bill Shatner can't seem to resist trying to use his books as soapboxes to settle the Kirk vs. Picard thing in his favor like in The Return. J.G. Hertzler turned Chancellor/General Martok into a Klingon King Arthur when he wrote a duology for the Deep Space Nine Relaunch. Remember how annoying all those early episodes of Deep Space Nine that harped on the Bajoran religion with all that not-allegory-for-middle-eastern-religious-fundamentalism-honest writing? That's basically Kira's entire story arc until the end of Unity when Sisko comes back and Bajor finally joins the Federation. There was some kind of aggressively-enforced "one character trait per character" limit in the DS9 relaunch prior to Unity, so everybody's lives revolved around one particular trauma or psychological problem. (The first rule is that, if there was any kind of important event in the last 300 years, a Dax was bloody well there for it and critically involved. Even the Enterprise Relaunch isn't safe from the tyranny of Dax.) Ezri Dax's arc is one of the few that actually make a modicum of sense. She never had any kind of training to be Joined, so she doesn't know how to balance all of her past lives with her current existence. Once circumstances force her to start drawing heavily on her past lives for experience and skills, it all starts to run together for her to the point that she starts calling herself by the wrong name and her personality starts to change as her wilting violet self gets overwhelmed by more assertive former hosts like Curzon and Jadzia. Since there isn't a way to separate her from the symbiont without killing her (until the Worlds of DS9 books) she just has to make peace with the changes to her personality.
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Ah, you're right. My bad. Greater field of fire while it's attached to the ordnance container... effectively letting it work like the beam gun turret on the VF-25/TW1 and YF-29. The VF-31 can engage with both railguns AND the beam gunpod simultaneously while it's mounted like that.
