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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    My read of it was "Incompetence made manifest". Three words, I know, but I'm a heavy tipper. When the gun needs both booms to fire, what's the use of a battle configuration that separates the two into separate craft?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, the few people trying to kid themselves that Robotech is successful around the world are some of the more notorious fanatical pro-Robotech zealots out there. I'm personally familiar with a few of them, though it surprises me not at all that Treiz is the one doing most of the talking on that side. Like bankofkev back in the day, he's kind of a sleazy bloke and one of the more desperate and delusional Robotech fans. I've seen him lie in debates in some sort of hilariously stupid roundabout effort to get people to buy Robotech art books. I'm pleasantly surprised by the way the majority are not only ignoring the pro-Harmony Gold shills, but are also taking the most reasonable and mature route open to them. If this were happening on the Robotech.com of five years ago, there would be an assortment of frothy-mouthed fanatics sending e-mailed death threats to every Macross fan they could find. EDIT: And they slipped... now they're back to wishing and theorizing about the Robotech live action movie that Warner Bros isn't making, and whether or not Harmony Gold can authorize the use of the Macross designs for that. If we took away their Macross nostalgia, would there even be any Robotech fans left?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Still too dignified. Pinto mode! Or maybe Corvair mode, if it starts going too quick and then completely loses control. On the production end, that happened back in 1999... they brought some weaksauce CG to the table and the fans booed them over it. Their new distributor doesn't seem to want to put the show out on Hulu, Netflix, or YouTube though, which is lulzy. They finally found someone as primitive as they are. Nah, they've only ever used Plan B... the B is short for Blame someone else! (As far as my sinking ship analogy... it occurred to me that, in terms of his MO, Tommy's an awful lot like our favorite captain, the legendary Zap Brannigan!)
  4. Seto Kaiba
    For Trans-Am mode, of course... honestly, you guys and your silly questions. But that runs into the problems I've alluded to before... nobody wants to join the crew of the Titanic after it's already struck the iceberg. Harmony Gold couldn't draw a decent staff when they were launching their last reboot, and their reputation is FAR worse today than it was back in 2000. Arguably, they haven't been able to draw a decent staff since they fired the decent staff Tatsunoko's side supplied for Robotech II: the Sentinels. The not-so-good ship Robotech ran headlong into that particular iceberg with the late Captain Macek at the helm, and the owners replaced him with Captain Yune in the hopes of keeping her afloat, but it looks like he's managed to make sinking a foregone conclusion instead by running her into a second iceberg. What kind of madman would want to assume captaincy of a ship for which sinking is a already foregone conclusion and no rescue is in sight? All the ship's owners can do is tell the band (Kevin) to keep playing so the passengers don't panic. The way things are now, if they let Tommy Yune, Steve Yun, and Kevin McKeever go, they're not going to be able to draw in a replacement staff that has even their meager level of talent. They've so thoroughly poisoned the well that they can't even beg half a mil for legitimate production expenses from their own bosses, let alone the fans. Anyone willing to sign onto a "new and improved" Robotech staff would be someone with even less credentials and experience than the already questionable skillset Harmony Gold's staff has. You'd end up with some guy who makes high schoolers on DeviantArt look like old pros. I don't think they have the cash or the connections to do an HD remaster... the original remastered edition was something they did while riding high on the sales of the first two box sets and the original Macross-based MPCs.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    They're averaging a little over $1,000 a day, so I think that's a reasonably safe bet... I wouldn't expect them to get much farther than $200,000 though.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    For us, this is light amusement or like reading a newly published Darwin award. The Robotech fans on Robotech.com have to be careful what they say or the Harmony Gold Commissars will execute their forum accounts for heresy and sedition, and the Kickstarter backers are desperately trying to find the silver lining in a mushroom cloud. (You won't really find a silver lining there, plenty of iridium and strontium-90 though!)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Sadly enough, this is actually right... in the sure-thing event that the Robotech Academy Kickstarter fails, expect Harmony Gold to take the worst possible course of action. They'll point fingers and make a lot of noise about how tragic it is that the last project of Carl Macek himself had its infinite potential wasted by the nay-sayers and those evil Macross purists, they'll find someone directly connected to the project to blame for the mess (probably Creavision), and then they'll package those godawful trailers they made as DVD extras in the next Robotech DVD release and pretend it's something the fans outright demanded. Wait five years, and they'll trot out another direct-to-video abortion and have their forum moderators call all the fans who call it a piece of crap evil, baby-eating, puppy-kicking, Commu-Nazi lizardman Macross purists. You'd be surprised how many no-brainers people with no brains fail to pick up on... For whatever insane reason, Harmony Gold seems damnably determined to continue plowing ahead with Robotech even though there's pretty much no business case for keeping it around anymore. Whether that's because there's nobody in management at Harmony Gold paying attention to the Robotech division's timecards, or the inmates running that asylum are presenting a heavily distorted version of the facts to management, nobody can say... except maybe Tom, though things weren't this dire when he was working there. As much as Robotech fans carp about even the most insignificant changes to the "original 85"? Not bloody likely.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's happened once before... so it could theoretically happen again. It's all down to whether or not Frank thinks that the Robotech Academy Kickstarter is as big a failure for Harmony Gold and for Robotech as the Robotech 3000 series concept was. Of course, there is the unpleasant reality of starting over. They'll reboot the continuity again, and with the franchise's reputation even deeper in the toilet than it was in 2000 they aren't exactly going to attract people who are qualified to do the job that needs doing. Anyone they got to replace Tommy and company would probably be even less qualified than the already under-qualified trio of Yune, Yun, and McKeever... though I'll admit I can't conceive of a PR guy WORSE than McKeever, unless they find a guy who's got Tourette's syndrome and a crippling fear of public speaking.* * I'm privately convinced that McKeever is the result of a scientific experiment to materialize a flesh-and-blood version of Wally from the Dilbert comic strip. He exemplifies every negative trait you could imagine in an employee. Exactly what it says on the tin... it was a remastered edition of Robotech with cleaned-up video, audio remixed to 5.1 surround and with new sound effects, and "never-before-seen" footage that was really just the footage that'd been cut from Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA due to 1980s broadcast standards. The Robotech purists hated it... because it dared to mess with "Carl's vision". Quite a few of them said that it wasn't even really Robotech anymore because of the changes. Everybody's least favorite podcaster dougbendo even accused Tommy and all the Robotech fans who bought it of being pedophiles because of the content of the "deleted scenes".
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The hypocrisy goes deeper than you know... because the Robotech fans themselves used to sub-divide their fandom into various camps depending on what version of Robotech they liked. You had the "purists" who thought the animated series was tops, other groups included the "McKinneyists" who thought the novels were the best, the "Spanglerists" who were proponents of one of their various groups of comics, and so on. The funny ironic twist is that it's Robotech's "purist" fans who were largely responsible for a lot of the shrinkage in the fanbase. They drove a lot of the fans of the other versions of the story away by behaving in a fashion not dissimilar from McKeever's antics here. Mind you, those same Robotech purists also took exception to the release of Robotech Remastered, with the footage which had been deleted from the originals to meet broadcast standards reinserted. They also pitched such a bitch-fit over the changes to the "classic" generic sound effects in the remaster, to such an extent that some of these nutters are actually celebrating that the next Robotech DVD release is going to bring back the grainy, cut-up original video and two-channel stereo sound. Madmen... the lot of them. It's the same plane, but Robotech calls it the "YF-4" instead... I'll dig out the picture of the transformation dreamed up for RRT.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The fighter mode is, and that's why they can't use it... the exact origins of the transformation they designed for it have not been disclosed, but are probably Ninja Division's doing, since Tommy tried and failed to come up with one back in '02. I don't think it would be accurate to call it "new", since it's just a very rough and clumsy transformation of an existing design. That kind of airframe shape seems to be something Tommy's really struggled with... the abandoned VF-13 Gamma fighter was similar in shape, and Tommy had a real hard time figuring out how to make it transform. So much so that I suspect that was the as-of-yet unstated reason that it was abandoned in favor of slapping Super Packs on a Legioss. Fascinating... if only I could figure out why my brain appended "And knowing is half the battle!", followed by the old GI Joe theme to this...
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Er... I hope you weren't too attached to that $20, Mommar, because that design's actually from the original Macross series. All they did was come up with a (very) awkward transformation for Macross's VF-X-4... which is why they can't use that design in animation. They can't use Macross designs or derivatives thereof.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, I'm pretty sure they coined it... it's something they came up with as a condemnation of Macross fans, a way to dismiss an argument that's critical of Robotech, because those often came from people who wanted to see more of Macross in its unadapted form. Wanting to see the originals in their unaltered state apparently makes you a purist, and since it's the Macross fans who are most vocal about that, the Robotech fans basically turned "Macross purist" into a dismissal of anyone who speaks critically of how things are done in Robotech. If they didn't have that persecution complex Harmony Gold has worked so hard to foster, they'd realize Harmony Gold was the one screwing them. Pretty much, yes... if you look at the broadcast ratings for Robotech in almost any of its airings, you'll find that there's usually a marked drop in ratings starting at episode 37 as people tune in and go "Who the $%@* are these people? Where are Rick and Lisa and...". Historically, this drop has actually been SO severe that it's managed to get Robotech canceled in several markets, and even prompted a few overseas television stations to drop the Masters Saga entirely. That drop is also what killed the show when it made its great return to American television in the formative days of Toonami... they hit episode 37 and then the bottom fell out of the ratings. The one recurring theme in every attempt to continue Robotech and almost every Robotech fan-wish for a continuation is that they want to recapture the "magic" of the Macross Saga. They want to see Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, and Lynn Minmei again... those other people are all purely collateral damage.* * So much so, in fact, that Harmony Gold has actually canonized the dismissive fan position that the Southern Cross Army was a bunch of incompetent idiots led by a rabid xenophobic micromanaging a-hole. The New Generation cast only got off easy because they're Admiral Hunter's subordinates.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    From the shape, ever since Macross R I've suspected that it's one of the earlier YF-27 prototypes.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    During a conversation I had with Tommy Yune back in '08, he mentioned to me that Harmony Gold had actually made an attempt to "come to terms" with Big West and Studio Nue several years previously. He sort of danced around the actual reason that they were unsuccessful, but what I gathered from his explanation was that Harmony Gold had basically approached Big West and told them that they were perfectly at liberty to distribute Macross in the west... provided that Harmony Gold had absolute veto powers over all licensing and received a share of the profits as royalties for the use of the Macross name and related iconography. In practical terms, it wasn't so much an attempt to mend fences as an extortion attempt. Big West supposedly very politely, but firmly, declined Harmony Gold's offer and thanked them for their time.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    True... but most of them saw "Robotech" and jumped exactly like Harmony Gold was hoping they would, and only later did they sit down and realize "Hey wait, this is REALLY fecking poorly executed". They're the most optimistic fans, who hope and believe that Harmony Gold can change and one day get it right... which, when I put it that way, sounds distressingly like spousal abuse. Yeah, you have to have read Prelude to actually get any information about how the UEEF came into possession of the "Shadow technology", why they blindly armed their entire fleet with it when they knew it didn't work as advertised, and why the Haydonites want to murder the everloving hell out of them. Without those all-important plot points from the comic, the events from RTSC do end up losing some pretty vital context. This is going to be, if anything, an even bigger problem for Robotech Academy in the (profoundly) unlikely event that it ends up being produced. Almost every advertised character and plot point outright REQUIRES that you be familiar with both the original 1985 Robotech series and the failed Robotech II: the Sentinels series. That's one reason among many that no network will pick the thing up if it's made... the simple truth is that, for a proposed new series, Robotech Academy is no ambassador. Unless you happen to be a die-hard Robotech fan, the story of Robotech Academy would be a completely bewildering series of seemingly random events and unexplained motivations.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    As a point of historical relevance, Harmony Gold tried this exact same approach with Robotech 3000. One of the companies that they were reportedly in talks with over merchandising for Robotech 3000 before production began in earnest was Palladium. The version of events that Palladium's fans usually relate is that Harmony Gold tried to "entice" Palladium into purchasing the rights to develop a Robotech 3000 RPG sight-unseen by making obtaining those rights a prerequisite to renewal of their license to publish material for the existing Robotech setting. This is supposedly why Palladium's Robotech license lapsed for a few years after that project sank without a trace. After Robotech's piss-poor ratings performance on Toonami in the 90's, I doubt any network would want a rebooted Robotech. The franchise's track record of coming off a very distant second-best to Transformers or literally anything else big at the time is not something that screams "Success and money shall be yours". EDIT: Pretty sure the guy trolling Robotech.com is Kickstarter backer Rache Bartmoss.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be why they tried, with little success, to Macross-ize the MOSPEADA setting they had to work with in Shadow Chronicles. Legioss/Alpha's with Macross-style FAST packs, Skull squadron under one of Max's kids, and they even originally planned for the colony ship Ark Angel to transform into something that looked a fair piece like the original SDF-1 Macross. Fans largely blasted it for the blatantly crowbarred-in antagonist, the retcons to "Symphony of Light", the blatant sexualized presentation of every female character, the unlikable new cast, the bait-and-switch they pulled with "Rick Hunter", and the way you had to have read the comic they put out beforehand to have a complete grasp of the plot. In short... been there, didn't work. That seems to be why they're trying to move backwards in time towards more Macross-y eras with Robotech Academy. Considering their past behavior and that even this Kickstarter had as a stated reason that Harmony Gold didn't wany anyone else besides them calling the shots for their project, I can't see them willing to NOT force themselves upon a jointly produced sequel to MOSPEADA.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda-sorta? The Robotech fan base has always ranked the "New Generation" saga a distant second-best to the Macross Saga, to such an extent that the toy sales actually slipped 66% once they started trying to roll out New Generation MPCs and other toys. The fans don't have a lot of love for the New Generation, because the Robotech versions of several characters either ended up more annoying (Mint) or lost something in translation and become slightly weird (Jim, Yellow). The Macross Saga is what utterly dominates the fandom's interests, which is why every effort to continue the series except for the ill-fated Robotech 3000 project focused on the Macross connection. They COULD probably do OK with a MOSPEADA sequel if it were sold in Japan... but without the connection to the Macross Saga characters, there would be precious little to hold the attention of the average Robotech fan. They actually tried that in the comics. It... well... to say that it didn't work and the fans hated it would be putting it mildly. Partly because they flanderized the rather old Scott into a General Ripper type, and partly because there was no connection to all of those familiar characters and settings that the fans care about. You have to remember, for all their noise about wanting to move the story forward, the actual requests and polling data from the Robotech.com forums shows that what they're really after is for the story to move forward, but to keep everything and everyone from the Robotech television series exactly as it was... which is stasis, not progress.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... the Kickstarter backers have repeatedly attempted to take Harmony Gold to task over a lack of substantial news, a lack of anything resembling a production plan, pledge tiers whose "rewards" are completely out of proportion to the amount being given, and the utter absence of stretch goals. Thus far, they've gotten nowhere and received only platitudes from McKeever about the supposed "big news" in store, which has been pretty underwhelming. If you're using your Kickstarter updates to announce products completely unrelated to the Kickstarter, like the Robotech comics and art books that Udon is supposedly publishing, then you're doing it wrong. Nah, I doubt they'll continue forward with this after such a negative reception. If they'd gotten say, to $480,000, they might have had an incentive to continue work on it on their own nickel. This is turning into Robotech 3000 Mk.II, a disaster so momentous that killing it with fire will probably be their outcome of choice. (After all, Harmony Gold management was so fond of Robotech 3000 that they'd opted to cancel it TWICE just to be sure.) I don't think there was any ulterior motive behind the Kickstarter, they just saw the frankly embarrassingly huge amount of dosh the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter raked in and said "Man, I gotta get me some'a that!"
  20. Seto Kaiba
    My initial projection for the end total was $286,912 give or take two bucks... it's looking like it won't even get that far. Over on the Kickstarter's comments, they were speculating for a while that SDCC actually damaged the Kickstarter's chances, since the days immediately following the SDCC panel were pretty bad even by the pretty dismal standards of this Kickstarter's performance. It probably won't help matters that there are several backers at unspecified levels who have announced their intention to remove their pledges if things hadn't significantly picked up by today, as a sort of protest over Harmony Gold's handling of it. Wow... SideKick predicts a 0% chance of success.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Truly, the subtlety of their naming is masterful... my favorite one was Arroq. Yes... "A rock". Carl Macek was one hell of a writer. The downward trend has slowed a little, they're only losing about 2% off the top now instead of 3% on a daily basis... with their projected final total now sitting well below $250,000 and the projected low-end at just a hair over $204,000. Still, the odds that they'll reach their goal have always been pretty poor, though I have to admit that this performance is actually WORSE than my more dismal opening-day projections. I'm a pessimist by nature, it's not often I'm surprised like that. You forget, my friend, this project is being peddled exclusively to people who are in it for the nostalgia. Another retcon and they'd be dropping out, not piling in. There are already several people on there talking about withdrawing their pledges in protest due to what they see as Harmony Gold's chronic mismanagement... though they seem to believe that Harmony Gold might actually learn from it, which is rather doubtful considering the low esteem in which they hold their customers. Duke, buddy, speaking as someone who has actually read (and yes, owns paper copies of) the old Sentinels comics... don't go throwing stones at the Protodeviln. Macross 7's story is SERIOUS BUSINESS compared to most of the crap that went to print in those old Robotech comics. Imagine all the corny, high-camp nonsense of the old Star Trek animated series... that's about the level the Sentinels comics were at when they were being subtle. There are points where it got Plan 9 from Outer Space bad... and that's not counting horrifying nonsense like the swimsuit spectacular. Hell, there were parts where it got so awful even the most devoted Robotech fans wouldn't stand for it. (After having to recall that horrorshow, why do we not have an Exorcist-style projectile vomiting smiley?) I can't believe I was able to get through the entire thing... though it just left me feeling like this schmuck was a second Pizza the Hutt. Someone who'd been taken in by the antagonistic moderators on Robotech.com and turned into a trollish sock-puppet for their derpy behavior.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    I know Maverick_LSC got banned for trolling... thought MEMO got banned at around the same time for the same offense. Kevin got canned for racist remarks, IIRC. I don't think either of the Yunes has made an effort to come over here, though Tommy is still a self-professed Macross fan, AFAIK.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's a Robotech fan reciting the Harmony Gold company line about why they've yet to launch any kind of a successful or commercially viable continuation of Robotech. You boil it down, and with the sole exception of Robotech 3000, it comes down to "the stars were not right". Robotech 3000 stands apart, on the grounds that Macek himself actually a took a moment to admit its concept was a terrible idea that showed they were out of touch with the fans in the foreword of the Shadow Chronicles art book. Some would say that Harmony Gold is very trying. Still, I've heard... and been the subject of... crazier Robotech fan conspiracy theories. According to some of them, I have enough pull at Harmony Gold that I can have them arbitrarily kill off fan projects I don't like. According to others, I have no influence at all and manipulate Harmony Gold through falsified legal documents. The fun part is that both of those came from the same guy and were posted within a week of each other. I think he's still in two minds about how evil I am. Kinda reminds you of the sort of "You don't understand me!" generic teenage angst you get from a kid who doesn't fit in... though if he's been to any of a wide variety of anime forums where fans have tried to pitch the Robotech Kickstarters, one can't blame him for feeling a tiny bit persecuted. I've seen a few where they all but started calling to tar and feather the well-meaning but very badly misguided Robotech fan. Macrossworld just seems to be the favorite target for Robotech fans to project their persecution complex upon because it's high visibility, as websites go. 's MEMO, Mav, and banky so far, I think... though those first two are volunteer mods not actual employees.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    There aren't many Robotech fans who were all that fond of the Sentinels aliens... they had very little relevance to the plot in the old Sentinels comics, and their relatively generic-ness didn't endear them to many. The ones that seem to have been the most popular with the fans were the Garudans, wolf-people who were crazy mystics that lived on a planet where the air could get you high or (depending on the version) give you superpowers at the expense of killing you if you ever stopped breathing it. The old Palladium Books Robotech RPG did the most to sell those concepts to the fans. Throwing the reduced number of Sentinels Council ambassadors into Prelude seems to have been enough to satisfy any desire the fans might've had for the return of those hokey aliens though... and they likely would have a reduced role now that Tommy's retconned in a very WH40K-ish "Don't trust the xenos!" mentality for the Expeditionary Forces. I'll go on record and say I like Flaming Guantlet's version of the Children of Zor better.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    That, my friend, is a male Karbarran. Keeping it short and sweet, the Karbarrans were one of several new alien races created by Carl Macek for the failed Robotech II: the Sentinels project in the 80's. Yes, the name IS a pun on the Care Bears. Yes, all of the new alien designs for Sentinels were that awful, and were all pretty generic alien tropes... your rock alien, your planet-of-the-amazons alien, your conehead alien, and the obligatory sentient robot and anthropomorphic aliens (bears and wolves). That particular torrent of foulness is Karbarran ambassador L'ron... who is, yes, named for L. Ron Hubbard (gag choke puke). Tommy Yune redesigned L'ron and the other Sentinels ambassadors for their brief cameo in Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles, so now he just looks like a bear standing erect and with human-like hands. Those Sentinels aliens were all pretty stupid, honestly... so it's no wonder Tommy doesn't seem to want to revisit them if he can get away with it. He salvaged the Haydonites (robot people) to be the antagonists in Shadow Chronicles, probably because they were also your obligatory "secretive alien" bunch and also the least offensively cliche of the lot. Not since 2006, anyway...
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